By Paul Egan
Detroit Free Press
LANSING — The director of the Michigan Department of Corrections is hoping for less turmoil in the prison chow halls starting today as Trinity Services Group replaces Aramark Correctional Services as the meal supplier for about 43,000 state inmates.
The state says disagreements over billing led to a mutual agreement with Aramark to end the Philadelphia-based company’s three-year, $145-million contract when it had more than a year still to go. The state didn’t cite a history of problems with Aramark, which included food shortages, maggots in the kitchen, smuggling of drugs and other contraband by Aramark employees, and Aramark workers engaging in sex acts with inmates.
But Heidi Washington, a former warden who was an outspoken critic of Aramark’s food service before she became director of the Department of Corrections on July 1, said she believes Trinity has an approach that’s better suited to correctional facilities, and she expects “my custody staff will be performing their normal custody functions within the kitchens, and leaving the kitchen operations to Trinity.”
That hasn’t always been the case since Aramark took over in December of 2013, replacing about 370 state kitchen workers, based on projected cost savings of more than $14 million a year. Due to uneven staffing levels and uneven security training among Aramark staff, corrections officers have at times had a greater role in supervising the line to watch for theft of food and patting prisoners down.
Washington said Trinity, which unlike Aramark only serves food in prisons and county jails, is more security-oriented. Although the company has taken on large numbers of former Aramark workers, it has retrained them all in Trinity methods, she said.
“So far, everything is going well,” she said. “They have more supervision, and it is present on site.”
Andy Potter, chief of staff and executive vice president of the Michigan Corrections Organization, the union representing corrections officers at the 33 facilities where Trinity will be serving meals, said he’s hoping for an improvement but has seen no signs of that yet.
“Our overall impression of Trinity is they just rehired Aramark employees and gave them Trinity shirts to wear,” Potter said Friday.
He cited an Aug. 26 incident at Central Michigan Correctional Facility in St. Louis, where he said Trinity workers fed inmates lettuce that had been thrown in the garbage.
“It doesn’t seem to be very encouraging when you hear something like that, and it’s so similar to what we just dealt with,” Potter said.
Chris Gautz, a spokesman for the Corrections Department, said one Trinity employee thought a bag of lettuce had aged too much and threw it in the trash. Another Trinity employee disagreed and ordered the bag of lettuce to be removed from the trash can, opened and served, Gautz said.
“There were no complaints and no one got sick,” Gautz said.”There was a discussion among those two employees and members of our staff and the rest of it was thrown away.”
Trinity’s contract, at $158.8 million for three years, has a higher estimated cost than Aramark’s contract and sweeter terms such as clauses that protect the vendor from inflationary increases or increases in the minimum wage.
Trinity spokesman Mark Dennis said last week: “the transition is going well and we are still in the midst of getting all the units transitioned from Aramark to Trinity.” Dennis said Trinity has “retained many of the Aramark employees that have met our hiring requirements.”