Not only does the state of Michigan have rising crime rates to worry about, but also increasing problems within its prison kitchens. According to a new University of Michigan report, gangs taking control of the kitchen, staff disregarding sanitation regulations, and detrimental cost cost-cutting measures are only a fraction of the allegations against the state’s privatized prison food system.
Although Michigan’s Department of Corrections replaced Aramark, the state’s food contractor, last year after staffing issues and maggots being found in food, Roland Zullo, a University of Michigan researcher, highlights that the report’s findings “point to an ‘underlying weakness’ in the the state’s practice of hiring private firms to provide some prison services.”
“From a statewide perspective, (prison food service privatization) was a failure, and it was a failure from the get-go.”
Aramark’s workers, desperately under-qualified, would confide in inmates working in the kitchen, and would in turn be manipulated. According to Zullo’s report, many of Aramark’s employees were penalized for inappropriate affinity with inmates, while some were cited for drug trafficking and other crimes.
“The amount of responsibility needed to go in and to do this work wasn’t worth the $11 an hour or $12 an hour that the private contractor was paying. You needed to have jobs of professional status that allowed people to treat the job as a career and not just as a temporary position.”
While supervisors would oversee the prison kitchen’s functions, the inmates were the primary operators. Because the supervisors were inexperienced, gangs crowded the system.
Not only that, but after portion sizes were reduced, inmate’s kitchen jobs gained notoriety within the prisons. The workers would steal food and share it with their friends.
To conclude his report, Zullo urged for Michigan to return to a state-run prison food system in order to increase efficiency and minimize problems in the kitchen.
“The Michigan Department of corrections spends anywhere from $35 to $38 million annually on food and supplies. We lost that revenue that could have gone to local businesses and farms.”
Featured image by Gary Bembridge, available under a Creative Commons 2.0 license.
