Up North Progressive
Politics and commentary for Northern MichiganBill Schuette Job Security: Aramark Edition
Thursday , 3, December 2015 Aramark, Bill Schuette, Nerd Problems 6 Comments
Aramark may be long gone, but thanks to the Nerd’s failure at privatizing the state prison food service, the Michigan taxpayers are stuck with the bill of cleaning up Snyder’s mess. Today Bill “I wanna be the next governor” Schuette announced a conviction on one of the former employees of Aramark who tried to pay an inmate in cigarettes to assault another inmate at Kinross Correctional Facility in the Upper Peninsula.
27 year old Michael Robert Young was a supervisor for Aramark when he approached the inmate and offered him tobacco products in exchange for arranging the attack on another inmate housed in a different prison, serving time for murdering a relative of Young’s. The inmate instead reported Young and he was arrested following an investigation by the Michigan State Police and Michigan Department of Corrections.
While Schuette pats himself on the back for Young’s conviction, the real crime is that Aramark received the contract to provide food for Michigan Department of Corrections inmates at all. Since their short time serving up maggots, spoiled food, garbage, sex, drugs and plenty of other specialty items – like contract hits – Aramark built up their reputation as a basement bargain service provider that Snyder touted would save the state millions of dollars, but instead cost taxpayers more as the company violated state regulations and prison policies repeatedly. It took less than two years for the Nerd to kick Aramark to the curb, but instead of being a decent human and admitting he made a mistake, he hired another contractor than have the MDC take control of the food services for Michigan’s prisons again.
Micheal Robert Young faces up to five years in prison, but the person who really needs to answer for his crimes against the taxpayers of Michigan is Rick Snyder. He is the reason the Aramark fiasco happened, he needs to answer for it, as well as an ever growing list of failures since Michigan had the misfortune of electing him governor – twice.
Pamela D says: Corrections staff and officers since the beginning have attempted to tell the Governor and MDOC that this is a dangerous decision. We have continously referred them to the 1981 riot report and told them how this is one of the major control mechanism put in place to keep control. The heads in Lansing stated that Aramark was the lowest bid but in fact it was the State Food Service. So the Governor/MDOC decided to recalculate the bids and surprise Aramark was the lowest bid. This privatization was a joke. The privatized companies were supposed to have their own security in the kitchen, warehouse their own products, haul their own products, pay the inmates, provide inmates with kitchen whites, train their employees, use lease their equipment and have it maintained, use their own office equipment, etc. NONE of this happened. REALITY, the apple to apple comparison was false bid and the state continued to cover up the contractual violations. When the Governor and MDOC got slapped in the public due to all the bad press, the governor puts it under his wing to silence the news from getting the information. MDOC disciplines officers over it. Budget driven decisions, homeboy favoritism and no transparency has given this Governor blatant disregard for safety and security of State correctional facilities. He has endangered all of the staff, officers, inmates and you the public with his agenda.
L. Carol says: Funny, with the increase in contact costs with Trinity, they overall total for their services brings them to roughly the same amount of cost as it was to maintain the state employees. Add in the security issues and drugs being found as well as crap food, and other costs for the taxpayer to now shell out for medical expenses and the company is costing us MORE than it did before they privatized.
Bad policies and politics going on here..
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Up North Progressive says:
Chartering schools, privatizing public school busing and food service, contracting out food service for prisons, none of this was ever designed to save the state money. This is what people are told so they vote for it, because who doesn’t want to save money? The truth is, all of these private contractors cost the state more money, and that is not a mistake. Our tax dollars become their profits, and that is the only purpose for privatizing state services.
Ronald Taylor says: The new company, Trinity, which they hired rather than putting state workers back in the kitchens isn’t any better. So far,33 Trinity workers have been fired or walked off the job. They have been fired for reasons ranging from incompetence to drugs and smuggling, sex and horseplay with inmates, insubordination, being drunk on the job, being abusive to inmates and other staff, to name a few. More trouble is sure to come, because the new workers are only being paid a little more than nine dollars an hour. All of this information comes from correction officers, who are keeping track of these shennanigans. They are doing this because the department of corrections is in coverup mode like they were with Aramark. Also, they are doing it because serving bad food to inmates and providing them with contraband usually lead to assaultive incidents and even full blown riots.
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We need to hear more about this in the media.
The cooks working at the for-profit GEO Group prison in Baldwin are former Aramark employees.
