Where Georgia’s prison food money really goes
The state’s “food budget” is one small, honest number. The real economy around feeding Georgia’s prisoners runs through four other channels — most of them built on unpaid incarcerated labor and margins the state refuses to disclose.
…per meal. Georgia’s appropriated “Food and Farm Operations” line is about $31 million a year — roughly $0.54 a meal, about 15% of the American Correctional Association’s ~$3.66 recommendation, and down ~60% in real terms since 2015. That’s the part the state shows you. Source: Georgia Governor’s Budget Reports / Open Georgia appropriations; ACA meal-cost benchmark.
What that number hides
Behind the $31M food line sit four much larger flows of money and labor. Three of the four run on incarcerated workers paid little or nothing — and the most profitable one is run by the state itself.
The food the state grows — with unpaid labor
$325.7Mto GCI from GDC, FY18–25 (Open Georgia)Georgia Correctional Industries (GCI) is a state-owned, self-funded corporation — total revenue about $83M/year (state ACFR) — that grows, cans, and processes much of the food served inside, across five food-processing units and six farms. Georgia pays its incarcerated industries workers $0 — unusual even among prison-labor states.
Roughly half of GCI’s sales to GDC are food (an estimate — the state reports GCI as a single undifferentiated line and is exempt from breaking it out). And GCI is a mandatory, no-bid “preferred source”: state agencies are required by law to buy from it.
Sources: Open Georgia state payments; Georgia ACFR (GCI internal-service fund); GCI fact sheet; ACLU Captive Labor (2022); O.C.G.A. § 42-10 / DOAS Tier-Three mandatory sources.
The family-package monopoly
$14.5MGDC→Aramark, FY2025 — up ~5× since FY22Georgia ended the practice of letting families mail food and clothing to their incarcerated loved ones and funneled them to a single approved vendor — Access Securepak, then Union Supply (a vendor Aramark bought in 2022). Families may now send one food package per quarter (capped at 15 lbs or $100) and one clothing/property package per month — at captive-market prices.
The ~5× jump to $14.5M in GDC’s payments to Aramark since 2022 tracks this program — GDC buys the goods in bulk, and they’re packaged by incarcerated women at Lee Arrendale State Prison. The cost is in the structure: families are locked to a single vendor and buy basics one unit at a time at marked-up prices — a single T-shirt for $4.55–$9.25, socks $1.35 a pair — plus shipping and sales tax, on goods they were once allowed to mail in for free.
Sources: GDC vendor-transition notice (Union Supply replaced Access Securepak 1/1/2017); GDC SOP 206.01; GCI fact sheet (Lee Arrendale fulfillment); Open Georgia; archived Georgia Union Supply package catalog. Note: pay status of the Arrendale packaging work is disputed (GCI cites a federal PIE “prevailing wage”; advocacy data shows $0) and the exact GDC commission is not public.
The commissary — where the state is the profiteer
~$47Mextracted from families, 2024The in-prison store is inmate-funded — the state contract with the vendor (Georgia Commissary Suppliers / Stewart’s) has a face value of $1.00. The money is the markup: GDC itself sets prices 54–323% over wholesale — 132% on candy, up to 833% on a shower cap — generating about $19.8M/year in markup (a ~73% gross margin), and remits 30.5% of store sales to its Central Office.
GDC is the one marking up basics — for people it pays nothing — and keeping the difference. Read our commissary investigation →
Sources: GDC statewide commissary contract (eff. 11/01/25) — COMPENSATION terms; GDC SOP 407.02 (30.5% remittance); GPS analysis of the 519-item GDC commissary price file (FY2024).
The kitchens — already privatized at six prisons
~$7Ma year — the Aramark food-service contract, per renewalGeorgia’s annual reports claim its prison kitchens are run in-house by GCI with no outside food vendor. Its own payments say otherwise. The executed food-service contract — obtained by open-records request — has Aramark running kitchens at six facilities (Hays, Phillips, Valdosta, Coastal, and Arrendale state prisons, plus Metro Reentry), renewed repeatedly since December 2021 — most recently documented at its ninth renewal — without a competitive re-bid, and worth about $7.0 million a year at current rates.
Inside the contract: a per-inmate, per-day rate that has climbed $3.108 → $3.963 (about $1.32 a meal, all-in); an amendment that cut fruit and vegetables “to yield savings”; and a sliding scale written for the contractor — when the prison population falls, the per-prisoner rate rises — so Aramark’s revenue is insulated from Georgia’s shrinking headcount. The risk sits with the taxpayer.
Meanwhile the FY2025 budget quietly lists “privatizing food services at four facilities,” amid a correctional-officer vacancy rate of 47–55% — the state is paying a contractor to run kitchens it can no longer staff, then reporting the kitchens as in-house.
Sources: executed Aramark Correctional Services food-service contract + amendments, via GDC GovQA ORR R030073-070126 (rates, sliding scale, Amendment 4 produce cut, facility list); Open Georgia vendor payments; GDC Annual Fiscal Reports (staffing); FY2025 Governor’s Budget Report.
The same system, across our data
Every number below comes from GPS’s own databases and evidence — click through to the underlying data.
The numbers we can’t see — and why
Three of the most important figures here are undisclosed by design, and the Department fee-loads open-records requests that would pry them loose:
- GCI’s food share — reported as one lump “Sales and Services” line; the state is formally exempt from breaking it out. Our ~half is an estimate.
- The family-package commission — what GDC earns from the Union Supply program isn’t in any public contract (it runs through a prison-labor program, not a competitive bid).
- The pay for package-fulfillment labor at Lee Arrendale — disputed between a federal “prevailing wage” claim and $0.
- What’s actually in the food — GPS has open-records requests in flight for GCI’s product and ingredient sheets and for the statewide Master Menu. The Department’s first response was a fee estimate, not the records.
We publish the verified figures and label the estimates as estimates. How we verify →
This is your tax money — and your family’s.
Georgia feeds people at 54 cents a meal while marking up the food and goods their families are forced to buy. Tell the people who can change it.
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