Fresh food was easy to come by when Teri Castle began serving time in the West Virginia Department of Corrections.

Women incarcerated at the Lakin Correctional Center had unlimited access to a salad bar at lunch and dinner. Many of the ingredients came from a prisoner-run garden.

That all changed when Aramark, a private food service company that operates in thousands of arenas, hospitals, schools and correctional facilities nationwide, took over in the early 2010s. Food from the garden no longer made it to the kitchen. She said the company started serving highly processed meals and charging prisoners for fresh fruits and vegetables as an add-on service called FreshFavorites.

“Whenever you can’t get those vitamins and minerals that you need, everything declines,” Castle said. “I ended up in the hospital because my iron level fell so low that I ended up in a seizure.”

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The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is planning a similar transition from in-house to privatized food service. A pending request for proposal, set to close February 21, seeks a food service provider capable of feeding nearly 20,000 state prisoners daily. The agency plans to have the outside food vendor assume food service operations by late summer.

Corrections officials have pitched food service privatization as a solution to reduce waste and increase food quality, arguing that larger companies have proven their ability to serve better meals at a lower price. Critics question companies’ profit motive and point to examples of states where privatization went poorly, including West Virginia, Michigan and Missouri.

Rising food costs and inefficiencies across facilities have plagued the agency for years. A 2022 report from the Office of Fiscal Transparency found that food costs varied by more than 40 percent across prisons despite all facilities utilizing a master menu. Ashlee Clemons, the agency’s chief financial officer, told lawmakers its food costs have increased 30 percent since 2020.

“That’s a driver to get this privatized,” Executive Director Stephen Harpe said during a January 21 Senate Public Safety Committee budget hearing. “They have a lot more leverage around pricing and logistics than we do, which should drive that [food costs] down.”

The request for proposal calls for bidders to have at least a decade of large-scale correctional food service experience. Once awarded, the vendor and corrections department would develop a master menu that meets minimum nutritional requirements.

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The agency is also bidding out its commissary service to a private vendor. One of the largest commissary vendors in the U.S., the Union Supply Group, is owned by Aramark, sparking concern among prisoner advocates that vendors might intentionally serve bland food to drive up sales of higher-margin snack foods. Kay Thompson, a spokesperson for the Department of Corrections, said the agency will cap price increases as the vendor assumes operations.

Prison officials also said they would assign monitoring personnel to oversee the outside vendor’s operations and regularly survey the inmate population on food preferences and quality via state-issued tablets. The vendor would be required to submit a corrective action plan if the scores fall too low.

Prison food experts interviewed by Oklahoma Watch said the inmate survey is a positive addition but they remain skeptical that the change will improve health.

“I have never seen an instance of a state switching from in-house to contracted food service where I’ve heard something positive about the results,” said Leslie Soble, the senior manager of the Food in Prison Project at Impact Justice.

Michigan fined Aramark hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2014 and 2015 as issues ranging from maggots in food to workers smuggling in drugs accumulated. Similar problems persisted when the state switched to Trinity Food Services in 2016. The state returned to in-house food service in 2018, with one high-ranking state lawmaker calling the contract a nightmare.

Missouri prisoners complained of eating bologna for several days after Aramark took over food service operations in 2023. The company responded to the allegations by stating it worked with prison officials to develop nutritional guidelines and aims to resolve issues quickly.

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Daniel Rosen leads the Coalition for Carceral Nutrition, a nonprofit that aims to improve food quality in prisons and jails. He said prison officials are drawn to outsource food services because it’s expensive and time-consuming to maintain kitchen equipment, source food and recruit and retain food service employees.

Accountability can be tricky when the agreement doesn’t go to plan, Rosen said. States that opt to return to in-house food service face the logistical headache of re-hiring employees who left for the private vendor.

“They’ll kind of point fingers at each other and say it’s not their fault,” he said. “I do put a lot of blame for that stuff on government officials who write the contract without specific enough requirements. The less specific corrections agencies are about contract requirements, the more latitude these companies have to feed people whatever they want.”

The agency’s bid calls for menus to contain a minimum of 2,800 calories and less than 3.5 grams of sodium, but does not specify a minimum amount of fresh fruit or vegetables to be served. The proposal also requires vendors to purchase some food from the agency’s Agri-Services division but does not specify an amount.

Castle, who was released from prison in 2021 and co-wrote a research paper on West Virginia’s poor prison food quality, said prison officials can adopt several accountability measures to keep private vendors in check. These include creating a food oversight committee at every facility, requiring vendors to take a photo of every meal served and requiring regular unannounced sight checks.

Oklahoma’s proposal states that corrections personnel and state or county health department personnel may conduct unannounced inspections, but does not specify how often those inspections must occur.

“It can turn into a disaster,” Castle said of states with lax food service oversight. “You’re going to see a lot more mental health issues, a lot more violence. It’s not going to be good if people can’t get what they need to survive.”

Emily Barnes, the founder of the Oklahoma prisoner advocacy group Hooked on Justice, said prisoners have been reporting poor food quality and small portions in recent months. But she fears a food provider with a profit motive could make things worse.

“I can’t see them switching to something to save money and the food gets better,” she said. “When you cut corners and the stuff is cheaper, I don’t believe there’s going to be an increase in quality.”

Harpe maintained that a change would benefit taxpayers and prisoners during a January 24 House Appropriations and Budget Public Safety subcommittee hearing, citing poor survey results from the prisoner population.

“The problem is there’s a lot of waste and the food isn’t very good,” Harpe told lawmakers. “We’re not trying to create Disneyland, but the more we’re able to humanize those in our care, the less violence we’re going to have.”

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. It is available to be republished.

Oklahoma Voice is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.