Rats, Insects and Mold: How Bad Food Leaves Prisoners Hungry and Sick

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The food on the trays doesn’t even look like food. In photos smuggled out of Georgia’s prisons, what passes for a meal is either grossly inadequate for a grown man, unrecognizable sludge, or both.

“There's no possible way you could survive off what they feed you,” said Bailey, who is currently incarcerated in Georgia and asked The Marshall Project to withhold his full name for fear of retaliation from staff. He and other people behind bars in the state recount seeing rats in the kitchen and insects in the food, and being served meals on trays caked with mold. “The level of malnourished people back here would have you torn between sick and disgusted.”

The Georgia state prison system is awash in stabbings, beatings and death, with “near-constant, life-threatening violence functioning as the norm,” the Department of Justice wrote in 2024. Locks don’t work. Staffing is “grossly inadequate.” But one underlying cause of the extreme danger, say advocates, prisoners and their families, is the food.

“Being hungry all the time, and being fed slop — you’ve gotta believe people get frustrated, especially over years and years of this. That frustration leads to violence,” said Bernard Christian of the grassroots advocacy group Georgia Prisoners Speak.

The problem is getting worse, according to a recent analysis by the group. They found that funding for food in the state’s corrections budget is roughly flat year over year, even as prison populations rise and inflation means the same budget buys less food. Per person, Georgia spent about $1.69 a day in 2024, and has proposed to spend $1.60 a day in their 2027 budget — less than 60 cents per meal. By contrast, the Food and Drug Administration’s “thrifty plan” estimates that feeding an adult man “a nutritious, practical, cost-effective diet” costs about $10 per day.

Travis, currently serving time in a Georgia state prison, says that people are so hungry that they steal food from the kitchen, leaving those on the chow line with even smaller portions. “You can feel the tension in the air when stuff like this happens,” said Travis, who also asked us to use his nickname because he fears retaliation by Georgia corrections officials. Travis said he was recently diagnosed with gum disease, which his health care providers attributed to malnutrition.

Georgia spends about 14 times more on medical care than on food for the people in its prisons, a $432 million bill that Georgia Prisoners Speak describes as “what the State pays to treat the disease that underfeeding produces.” Certainly, one cause of sky-high medical costs is the rampant violence — hospitalizations from stabbings and beatings are costly — but poor diets can also result in high rates of chronic illness. Nationwide, people in prison have higher rates of most illnesses, but maladies like high blood pressure and diabetes can be caused — and worsened — by poor diet.

The Georgia corrections department’s food system is state-run, but for-profit prison food contractors comprise a profitable and growing industry. The biggest player, by far, is Aramark, which feeds hundreds of thousands of prisoners in seventeen states, according to a new report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The company also services stadiums, universities and hospitals, but their correctional contracts alone were worth $1.78 billion in revenue in 2024, according to a market analysis. The report found that Aramark’s contracts are plagued with similar problems in many of the places the company operates: unappetizing meals, inadequate portion sizes, spoiled and contaminated food. Several states have cancelled contracts with Aramark because of accusations of “serving rotten and spoiled meals” and unsanitary conditions, leading to outbreaks of foodborne illness. Even in those circumstances, the researchers found, states are paying Aramark between $3 and $7 per person per day — six to 14 times more than Georgia is spending to feed the people in its prisons.

To date, the largest prison system to have privatized its food services is the Florida Department of Corrections, which incarcerates more than 80,000 people. But it may soon lose that title.

Late last Friday night, hours after government offices had closed for the weekend, the federal Bureau of Prisons posted a request for information on the federal contracting site SAM.gov. The request read, “seeking information from qualified vendors capable of providing enterprise-wide food service operations across all Bureau of Prisons-managed institutions nationwide.” Federal prisons hold more than 140,000 people in more than 122 facilities, from Honolulu to rural New Hampshire and everywhere in between. There has never been a prison food contract that big. “Nothing even close,” said Dan Rosen, of the Carceral Nutrition Project, a nonprofit that co-authored the recent report with The Center for Science in the Public Interest and aims to increase the quality of food in U.S. prisons and jails. “It would be a massive effort for any of these companies.”

To supplement meager meals, prisoners in Georgia and in other prison systems rely on the commissary, where money received from loved ones, or earned a few pennies at a time in prison jobs, can buy ramen, chips, and other overpriced, ultraprocessed food. And if the Bureau of Prisons follows through, those purchases will also add to some corporate bottom line: federal prison officials are looking into privatizing the commissary, too.