County Officials Change Jail Food Provider

Milwaukee County Jail. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Over the next six months, the meal and commissary provider in Milwaukee County’s detention facilities, Aramark, will be replaced with a new company.

County officials have selected Florida-based Trinity Services Group, Inc. as the new meal and commissary contractor for the Milwaukee County Jail, the Community Reintegration Center (CRC) and the Vel R. Phillips Juvenile Justice Center. The county board is reviewing the contract, which could run from two years up to five years if extensions are granted.

The value of the contract comes to approximately $6.2 million a year with increases over time for a total of $34.5 million over five years.

Aramark Correctional Services, a subsidiary of Aramark Corporation, has been criticized by community members and elected officials for the quality of food it serves in the county’s correctional facilities. Aramark and the county were even sued in 2013 over the food. The board has regularly discussed the county’s contract and reviewed policy proposals related to ending Aramark’s monopoly on food services, the price charged for commissary products and a high-level study for public control of commissary services. This spring, Aramark negotiated an 8% price hike to its contract with the county, citing rising food costs.

In June, the county began looking for food and commissary contractors for a new contract. Two vendors submitted proposals: Trinity and Aramark.

Trinity had the lowest per-meal bid on the contract and will offer service improvements. The proposed contract also includes a new program for the provision of religious meals, said Tony MacLellan, the contracts manager for the county who oversaw procurement for the new vendor. The contract will also provide for third-party monitoring and quality control who report to Trinity.

“We are paying closer attention to temperature; we’re paying closer attention to palatability; we’re paying closer attention to making sure the nutritional analysis is complete” for food served, MacLellan told the board’s Committee on Finance Thursday.

Trinity will also provide a full-time, on-site dietician for the county, MacLellan said, adding “We’re one of the first institutions to have that in the country.”

The Trinity contract does represent a per-meal cost increase at $2.38 a meal compared to the previous $1.27 a meal. This increase is largely driven by rising food prices, MacLellan said. Aramark submitted a proposed per-meal cost of more than $3 a meal.

Trinity is also taking over commissary services, which allows people incarcerated by the county to purchase extra food items and toiletries. Sup. Ryan Clancy has pushed back against allowing a single company to provide both meals and the commissary, arguing that it constitutes a monopoly on food within the facility and provides no incentive to serve nutritious or palatable food for the daily meals.

Aramark’s contract ends on Dec. 31 for both the commissary and meal service. The county board is also considering a six-month extension of the contract to give Trinity time to transition into the facilities and take these services over. Trinity has requested a 90-day transition period and county officials added an extra three months to that request, said Chantell Jewell, superintendent of the Community Reintegration Center. There will be no overlap in payment to the two companies, Jewell said.

The county board will vote on the new contract on Dec. 21.

While county officials stated that the contract with Trinity will represent an improvement in food quality, service delivery and even corporate oversight, the company, like most private contractors that do business in prisons and jails, does not have an unblemished record.

In 2017, the company was fined more than $2 million for staffing and sanitation violations in the State of Michigan’s prison system. A year later, Michigan moved away from private prison food and put public food preparation and service back in the hands of public employees.

In the past, the financial pressure from the county’s annual budget deficits has limited efforts to move away from privatization — on more than just correctional food. In April this year, at the request of the board, officials from the CRC and the jail developed a high-level analysis of ending private commissary services in county correctional facilities. The report was delivered two months before officials started looking for a new contractor. The board has not taken further action on the policy.

Update: A previous version of this story said county officials studied bringing both correctional food service and commissary under public control. The study focused on bringing commissary services in-house.