Paying the Price for Privatization: Prison Food in the Era of Mass Incarceration

This essay discusses the development of the prison food industrial complex (PFIC) within the US carceral state. The PFIC is made up of politically connected food services companies and commissary companies (correctional food vendors) contracted by local and state governments to provision correctional facilities; private equity firms also increasingly have a stake in prison food companies. The PFIC developed in the 1980s, when local and state governments increasingly looked to privatizing prison services as solutions to budget crises and the management of unprecedentedly large numbers of people cycling through jails and prisons amid “tough on crime” policies of the late twentieth century. As this essay argues, the emergence of the PFIC has exacted costs on a host of groups, including smaller food producers, unionized public-sector workers, and incarcerated people and their loved ones, while also constituting an overlooked dimension of the ways the US food system disproportionately harms communities of color. In drawing attention to the consequences of the PFIC, this essay seeks to provide new insight into neoliberal reforms of the US carceral state during the mass incarceration era.