Georgia budgets 11× more for prison health care than for feeding the people in its prisons.
66 cents a meal, or $1.98 a day: that's what Georgia's own budget sets aside to feed one person in its newest prison units. Health care runs $8,077 per person a year. And the same budget adds money for food “due to rising food costs.”
Two crises, one cause.
Georgia's prison food system is broken in two directions at once. The state spends almost nothing on the trays it serves — and then takes back tens of millions a year from incarcerated people and their families through a captive commissary market that sells junk food at convenience-store prices.
Crisis #1 — The trays don't feed adults.
Georgia's budget has no single line for feeding the people in its prisons. The $31 million “Food and Farm Operations” line that's often quoted as the food budget pays for GDC's farms and food supply. The kitchens are paid for inside the State Prisons budget, and Aramark runs the kitchens at six facilities (Hays, Phillips, Valdosta, Coastal and Arrendale state prisons, plus Metro Reentry) under contract.
In its FY 2027 budget, the State priced food per person for four new 126-bed modular units: $364,749 a year to feed 504 beds. That's $723.71 per person a year, $1.98 a day, or 66 cents a meal. It's below the USDA “Thrifty Plan” minimum of $10/day for an adult man and a fraction of the $3.66 the National School Lunch Program spends per meal for a child.
Meanwhile prison medical spending has grown 33%, or $107 million, in four years: from $325M actual in FY2024 to $432M proposed in FY2027. Per person, that's $8,077 a year on medical care against $724 on food, about 11 to 1.
Sources: Georgia General Appropriations Act FY 2027 (HB 974), item 1445; Amended FY 2025 (HB 67), item 968; Governor's Budget Report, Amended FY 2026 and FY 2027; GPS Research Library, Food Safety Inspections in Georgia State Prisons.
Crisis #2 — The commissary fills the gap by exploiting it.
When the meal isn't enough, families pay. Georgia's prison commissary is a $47 million annual market that GPS analysis found sells “convenience store rejects at premium prices” — ramen, sodium-laden snacks, and processed foods marked up well above retail.
The commissary doesn't fix the nutrition crisis. It monetizes it. People with diabetes and hypertension caused by inadequate prison meals end up buying chips and noodles because the alternative is hunger. Their families pay. The contractor profits. The state collects.
Source: GPS analysis of GDC commissary master list and pricing data.
Today's tray, according to GDC.
This is what GDC's own 28-day menu says every man should get today in the state prisons whose kitchens GDC runs. Compare it with the trays below.
Calories are GPS's count from GDC's own recipe cards. Portions are GDC's.
Was your tray different? Tell us what you got →You can send photos. We don't ask for your name.
What's on the tray.
These are real meals served on real days at Georgia state prisons. We're not selecting outliers. These are typical trays photographed inside multiple GDC facilities. Empty compartments where food should be. Sealed condiment packets standing in for vegetables. Bologna circles served as the protein for a grown man.
Click any image to view full size. Photos contributed by people inside Georgia prisons and verified through multiple sources. The calorie & protein estimates are conservative GPS estimates from image analysis plus GCI’s own product spec sheets — they account for the thin, water-stretched, and chopped-down portions actually served, food that often covers only the bottom of a compartment, millimeters deep. Note what never appears on any tray: fresh fruit, and — apart from a wedge of undressed raw cabbage — fresh vegetables. Everything else is canned, processed, or starch.
What the recipe says, and what was served.
The recipe
GDC’s Master Menu serves a chicken leg quarter at Wednesday supper twice in each four-week cycle. On the “Oven Fried Chicken” night, GDC’s own recipe card calls for one leg quarter per person, dipped in oil, coated in breadcrumbs and baked, with 2 ounces of chicken gravy. The card buys 100 pounds of leg quarters for 100 servings: a pound of raw chicken, bone-in, for each person. GCI sells them as 12 to 15 ounce leg quarters.
What was served
A small, plain leg quarter with no breading. We estimate it at 4 to 5 ounces as served, bone included. Nobody weighed it, so that’s our estimate from the photo, against the slice of bread.
What a pound of chicken looks like
We bought a leg quarter the size the recipe card calls for and put it on a scale: 1 pound and ⅜ of an ounce, raw. We baked it plain, with no breading, and it weighed 13¾ ounces with the bone. It is shown on a slice of ordinary sandwich bread, beside the Dooly serving.
What Georgia budgets to feed one person.
Georgia's budget doesn't have a single food line for its prisons. But when the State opened four new modular units, it priced their food on a line of its own. Here's how that works out.
| Line | Amount | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Food for four modular correctional units, FY 2027 | $364,749 | HB 974, item 1445 |
| Beds in those units | 504 | Four 126-bed units, HB 67 (Amended FY 2025), item 968 |
| Per person per year | $723.71 | $364,749 ÷ 504 |
| Per person per day | $1.98 | ÷ 365 |
| Per meal | $0.66 | Three meals a day |
Source: Georgia General Appropriations Acts, FY 2027 (HB 974) and Amended FY 2025 (HB 67). The Amended FY 2026 budget (HB 973, item 109.2) paid for the same line for part of a year: the Governor asked for $182,375, exactly half of $364,749, and the legislature enacted $88,240.
Why not the $31 million line? The “Food and Farm Operations” program (about $31 million a year) is the money for GDC's farms and food supply. In the State's own words, it's there to “manage timber, raise crops and livestock, and produce dairy items used in preparing meals for offenders.” It doesn't pay for the kitchens, which sit inside the State Prisons budget, and it doesn't cover the six facilities where Aramark runs the kitchens. Dividing it by the whole prison population gives a number that looks precise but isn't the cost of a meal.
What we're waiting for. GDC's food-service rules (SOP 409.04.15) require a Monthly Food Service Cost/Usage Report that records the average daily food cost per person at every prison GDC feeds itself. GPS has asked GDC for those reports and for its budgeted food cost per person. When they arrive, this page will show GDC's own figure for each of those prisons.
The State's own budget says food is getting more expensive.
The FY 2027 budget adds $500,000 “for food services across state facilities contracted with Georgia Correctional Industries due to rising food costs.” That's the State acknowledging that the same money buys less food. How much less reaches each tray is what GDC's own cost reports will show, and what GPS's tray photos are measuring.
Source: Georgia General Appropriations Act FY 2027 (HB 974), item 1446.
How we know what's on the tray.
Georgia's own number, set against two federal benchmarks.
| Source | Per prisoner per day | Per meal | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Georgia's budget for four new modular units ($364,749 ÷ 504 beds) | $1.98 | $0.66 | FY 2027, HB 974 item 1445 |
| National School Lunch Program (USDA) | ~$11.00 | $3.66 | Federal reimbursement, free lunch tier |
| USDA "Thrifty Plan" adult-male minimum | ~$10.00 | ~$3.33 | Federal definition of minimum adequate diet |
GPS Research Library, Food Safety Inspections in Georgia State Prisons (Collection 95, datapoints 5014, 5844, 5845). For reference, Aramark runs the kitchens at six facilities (Hays, Phillips, Valdosta, Coastal and Arrendale state prisons, plus Metro Reentry). Its executed contract, obtained by open-records request, pays $3.963 per person per day (up from $3.108), and that rate covers staff as well as food.
Georgia budgets about a fifth of what the federal government considers the minimum adequate diet for an adult, and less than a fifth of what the National School Lunch Program spends per meal for a child.
What the State will tell you, and what's actually true.
A few facts from GPS Research Library that don't appear in the State's own communications:
Two meals on weekends.
Board of Corrections rule expressly permits only two meals per day on Saturdays and Sundays. Friday lunch was eliminated entirely in 2009 as a "cost-cutting measure" and has never been restored. In 2024 the legislature appropriated $1.2M specifically for "additional meals on weekends" — an explicit acknowledgment that current allocations don't cover three meals a day.
40% of food is grown by unpaid prison labor.
Georgia Correctional Industries (GCI) farms 13,000+ acres and produces over 40% of the food served inside GDC. The labor is entirely uncompensated. The remaining ~60% is purchased and prepared in-house at most facilities. Aramark runs the kitchens at six facilities (Hays, Phillips, Valdosta, Coastal and Arrendale state prisons, plus Metro Reentry) under contract.
The trays drive the violence.
Ware State Prison erupted in a 2020 riot during which a prisoner-shot video showed a single cheese sandwich as the cause — weeks of cheese-and-peanut-butter only meals. Gumm v. Ford documented a Georgia Diagnostic SMU prisoner who lost 40 pounds on inadequate food. DOJ found "repeated instances of food deprivation by cellmates" across 17 GDC prisons.
Crisis #2: The $47 million commissary extortion.
When meals don't sustain a body, you turn to the commissary. In Georgia, that means paying premium prices for the worst food on the market — sold by a contractor with a captive customer base of 53,000 people who can't shop anywhere else.
Annual commissary revenue
Captive market. No competition. No price negotiation by the people paying.
Markup over retail
Items GPS analysis found sold at multiples of equivalent grocery-store prices. The people paying have no Walmart option.
Ultra-processed
Ramen, instant noodles, chips, candy, sodas. Foods that worsen the diabetes, hypertension, and chronic disease the meals already cause.
Nutrition standard
No state requirement that commissary items meet any nutritional adequacy threshold. The contract is built around margin, not health.
Read the GPS investigations.
GPS reporting that documents this crisis from multiple angles — starting with what GDC tells legislators, through the meals, the medical consequences, the commissary economy, and the families who pay — plus the outside research and primary sources behind it.
The 2,900-Calorie Menu That 53 Cents Can’t Buy
The CrisisStarved and Silenced: The Hidden Crisis Inside Georgia Prisons
The ViolenceNutrition Neglect: How Georgia's Prison Food Is Fueling Violence
The StandardFederal Nutrition Guidelines vs. Georgia Prison Food Reality
The TraysDunked, Stacked, and Served: Why Georgia Prison Trays Are Making People Sick
A DecadeSurviving on Scraps: Ten Years of Prison Food in Georgia
The CommissaryGeorgia's Prison Commissary Extortion: Convenience Store Rejects Sold at Premium Prices for $47 Million
The FamiliesThe Price of Love: How Georgia's Prisons Bleed Families Dry
The FamiliesThe Price of Staying Close: Families Pay the Cost of a Broken System
External research & primary sources
- GPS — The 2,900-Calorie Menu That 53 Cents Can’t Buy — the GDC food claim relayed to a Georgia legislator, measured against the State’s own budget.
- Cook, Lee, White & Gropper (2015), The Diet of Inmates: An Analysis of a 28-Day Cycle Menu Used in a Large County Jail in the State of Georgia — peer-reviewed (Journal of Correctional Health Care); a Georgia correctional 28-day menu found high in saturated fat and sodium and low in vegetables, fruit, dairy, and key vitamins.
- Nutritional Characteristics of Menus in State Prisons — Journal of Correctional Health Care (2024).
- Georgia Correctional Industries — product catalog & spec sheets — GCI’s own ingredient lists and nutrition facts for the meat products it serves (archived by GPS).
Help end Georgia's prison food crisis.
Share this page. Contact your state legislator. If you've worked inside a GDC kitchen or have photographs and documents, we want to hear from you.