COLUMBUS, Ohio: A private vendor in line to begin feeding roughly 100,000 prison inmates in Ohio and Michigan has a track record of billing for food it doesn’t serve, using substandard ingredients and riling prisoners with its meal offerings, past audits in several states show.
But some states say Philadelphia-based Aramark Correctional Services has performed well.
The audits in Ohio, Florida and Kentucky found Aramark charged states for meals not served, changed recipes to substitute cheaper ingredients and sometimes skimped on portions.
A 2001 audit by then-Ohio Auditor Jim Petro found a verbal amendment to Aramark’s two-year contract led the state prisons department to pay Aramark for serving almost 4.5 million meals rather than the 2.8 million meals it actually served. That added $2.1m to the contract cost.
An internal audit by Florida’s prisons department in 2007 concluded Aramark’s practice of charging the state per inmate rather than per meal created “a windfall for the vendor” after a large number of inmates stopped showing up for meals, reducing company costs by $4.9m a year.
The review found the company was paid for some 6,000 meals a day that it didn’t serve. Aramark stopped serving Florida’s prison meals in 2009.
Kentucky’s state auditor launched a review of Aramark in response to the 2009 prison riot at Northpoint Training Center sparked over food issues. Auditor Crit Luallen’s 2010 report found Aramark overbilled the state by as much as $130,000 a year, charging for the meals of as many as 3,300 inmates that were shown through head counts not to be incarcerated.
Besides payments for unserved meals, the audits found Aramark sometimes substituted cheaper ingredients — receiving inmate-grown food against contract terms or substituting less expensive meat products, for example — without passing savings on to taxpayers. AP
