Aramark, private equity, and gross prison sludge.

One night last June, I was filming some cops in Tennessee while they conducted what looked like a questionable arrest. Even though I stood behind the police tape, the cops got mad and handcuffed me. Despite my very “convincing-to-cops” argument of, “I’m a journalist! And I have rights!” they carted me off to jail.

Citing my constitutional rights didn’t resonate with the jail guards either. In fact, I annoyed them so much that they put me in isolation. It was a tiny cell with harsh lighting and a hard, tiny bench, which made sleep impossible. What also made sleep impossible is that I hadn’t eaten in like 8 hours. I am not a person who can go 8 hours without eating. “If you ever go on a cleanse I’m force-feeding you,” my best friend once said, noting how irritable I am when hungry.

So when a guard finally brought in a tray of food I was psyched. And then the stench of rotten eggs wafted across the small cell and I dry-heaved five times and shoved it as far away as possible. Hours later, lunch came. Lunch was unidentifiable sludge—and didn't come with any utensils, to boot. I didn’t have a bite of food for 14 hours. Due to my absurd privilege I was able to get out the afternoon after the night I was arrested, at which point I fucking ran to the nearest diner and inhaled the best burger of my life (I try to be a vegetarian but I figure I get a pass here).

Looks like Aramark provides food services for Jail East, where I spent that day and a half. Aramark is one of the most notorious private companies sucking up taxpayer money to serve near-poison to incarcerated people.

Not if you ask them! Oh look, the company has provided a thorough accounting of how they maintain food quality in the facility. In June, Aramark rated the quality of food in Jail East 100 out of 100. They also published the “observations” that led them to the conclusion that their food service is literal perfection. A few examples:

“Toxic substances properly identified, stored, used.” WHAT?

“No discharge from eyes, nose, and mouth.” In compliance. Whew. Wait, what? The bar to clear here is that no one in the kitchen was observed shooting their snot into the food?

In September, the Nevada Current published an investigation about how Aramark either withholds food in Nevada correctional facilities or serves disgusting food no one can eat. “Families of the incarcerated warned corrections officials that the lack of food in prisons has gotten to the point that those incarcerated “eat toilet paper” to dull hunger.”

“One of our incarcerated members at Ely State Prison said, ‘I have eaten toothpaste and tums antacids or even salt for hunger pains. It helps for a little bit,’” said Pamela Browning, one of the members of the group. “Another said, ‘I eat toilet paper and hot water.’ Please tell me how this is humane?”

Along with lacking food, the group brought up story after story of people having to choose between not eating enough or eating contaminated food that makes them sick. 

“I have heard many times that the food was rotten and moldy,” Browning said. “An incarcerated member said they have gotten sick from eating meat that was either undercooked or bad.” 

In addition to the incentive to skirt humanity in order to make money, as a for-profit company, Aramark has had shares bought up by multiple private equity companies in the past decade and more. From the website of Warburg Pincus:

In 2007, Warburg Pincus invested in Aramark, a leading professional services company. Aramark provides food services, facilities management, and uniform and career apparel to healthcare institutions, universities and school districts, stadiums and arenas, and businesses around the world. Aramark benefitted from a highly stable business model, leading positions in growing and increasingly outsourced markets, and an experienced management team. With Warburg Pincus’ assistance Aramark made progress on its publicly announced multiyear framework of improving topline growth through corporate cost streamlining. In December 2013 Aramark completed an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Warburg Pincus exited Aramark in 2015.

Ah, the financial wizardry of private equity firms. “With Warburg Pincus’ assistance Aramark made progress” in torturing incarcerated people.

Aramark has been trying to grow its business in the face of increasing competition and tight labor markets. It has had private equity ownership twice before, the last time in 2006 in an $8.3 billion buyout by then-Chairman Joseph Neubauer with the help of a consortium that included Goldman Sachs Capital Partners, CCMP, JPMorgan Partners, Thomas H. Lee Partners and Warburg Pincus.

At this point I should probably stop pretending to know what private equity is and how it works, so I’ll cite the work of my good friend and economics expert Lynn Parramore, who has written about the industry here. Lynn tells me private equity divisions of companies make a profit by starving an organization with cuts in order to enrich stakeholders short-term. And that means poorer service in a wide range of industries, from nursing homes to restaurants (to jails, obviously).

Lynn:

One of my favorite NYC restaurants had become understaffed and dirty – a shadow of its former self. I learned an interesting fact: a couple of years ago, a private equity firm had bought the local chain. The same type of firm that had already ruined my beloved neighborhood grocer. The kind that was rapidly taking over vet clinics, dental offices, and gyms on every block – though you wouldn’t know it unless you did some sleuthing.

Price hikes, deteriorating conditions, and poor service — along with a certain slickness of marketing — could be signs that ownership of a business you count on has transferred to one or more firms in a rapidly-expanding Wall Street industry. Names like KKR, Carlyle, and Blackstone tend to fly under the radar, but they’re everywhere, making more money, gaining more influence, and some would argue, wreaking more havoc than anything else on Wall Street.

….

Financier William Simon got the idea for private equity back in the seventies. Simon, a Nixon administration official and right-winger whose heart’s desire was to free finance and corporations from regulation, left Washington to execute the first “leveraged buyout.” He and a partner bought an old greeting card company on mostly borrowed funds, extracted huge fees, and then sold it for enormous profit in a rising market. People like “junk bond king” Michael Milken took notice and started following the model. In the go-go eighties, the Washington Post noted that “greed and debt” had combined to “create the hottest game on Wall Street today.”

Until things went bust. The leveraged buyout industry got a nasty reputation as the “robber barons of the eighties” and retreated.

But there was just too much money to be made. The industry went on to rebrand itself as “private equity” and expanded following the 2008 financial crisis into many of the less regulated corners of finance – some previously occupied by the great investment banks. After yet another run of bad press – you might recall when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was denounced as a profiteering predator in the 2012 election — the industry started to rebrand itself once again. Today some of the big firms call themselves “global investment businesses” or “alternative asset management businesses.”

Basically, it’s the job Richard Gere has in Pretty Woman, that’s meant to symbolize that he’s dead inside.