H.R. 9903, the Stop Prison Price Gouging Act of 2026, would cap federal prison commissary prices at fair market value and ban kickback contracts — a direct challenge to a billion-dollar private industry that profits from a legally captive customer base.
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What It Does
H.R. 9903 amends federal law governing the Bureau of Prisons to impose four main requirements on the BOP Director. First, it caps commissary prices at no more than the fair market value of each item in the state where the facility is located — defining fair market value explicitly to exclude prices at correctional institutions or other captive-market settings, so vendors cannot use other prisons' inflated prices as the benchmark. Second, it mandates that the BOP conduct monthly reviews of commissary prices across its facilities to ensure ongoing compliance with the cap. Third, it requires the BOP to use competitive bidding when awarding commissary contracts — eliminating sole-source deals — and prohibits any contract that includes a revenue-sharing or commission arrangement (the mechanism by which vendors currently pay kickbacks to facilities in exchange for exclusive access). Fourth, the bill creates a transparency regime: the BOP must submit an annual report to Congress detailing every product available at each facility, its price, and the terms of the commissary contracts in place; and the Government Accountability Office must conduct an annual audit of BOP compliance with the bill's pricing requirements. The bill does not specify a transition timeline for existing contracts or a phase-in period for the fair market value methodology.
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The Real Story
The core conflict is not about prison conditions in the abstract — it is about who profits from a legally captive market. Incarcerated people cannot shop elsewhere; they must buy from the single approved commissary or go without. Companies like Keefe Group (owned by the private equity firm HIG Capital) and ARAMARK (whose subsidiary Union Supply Group handles commissary operations) have built business models around that captivity — charging inflated prices, then paying kickbacks to the correctional institutions that awarded them the exclusive contracts. The reformers — Foushee, the Brennan Center, FAMM, Prison Policy Initiative, and the Vera Institute of Justice — argue this is price gouging made possible by government monopoly. The industry's implicit counter-argument is that correctional commissaries are niche logistics operations with real overhead, and that the kickbacks (framed as "commissions") help fund prison operations and reduce taxpayer costs. Congress has not yet formally heard the other side on this bill because it is brand new, but the industry's opposition would likely echo that framing.
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Who Benefits
- Incarcerated people in federal prisons — the roughly 155,000 people in BOP custody would pay prices tied to actual market rates rather than captive-market markups. For people earning pennies per hour in prison labor, even modest price reductions on food staples and hygiene items represent meaningful purchasing power.
- Families of incarcerated people — commissary purchases are heavily funded by outside family members who deposit money into accounts. Low-income families, disproportionately Black and Latino, shoulder the majority of this cost; research shows the burden falls hardest on those least able to pay.
- Criminal justice reform organizations — Brennan Center for Justice, FAMM, Prison Policy Initiative, and Vera Institute of Justice gain a legislative vehicle to elevate the commissary pricing issue and pressure BOP regardless of whether the bill passes.
- GAO and Congressional oversight capacity — the mandatory annual audit requirement, if enacted, would generate public data on BOP commissary contracts that currently exists only in scattered, hard-to-compare form.
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Who Gets Hurt
- Keefe Group (HIG Capital) — the dominant prison commissary vendor nationally, with revenues tied to markups and kickback arrangements with correctional systems. A fair-market-value cap and ban on revenue-sharing contracts would directly compress its margin on any future federal contract.
- ARAMARK / Union Supply Group — ARAMARK holds 35 percent of the U.S. correctional food services market and feeds approximately 405,000 people daily in 17 states; Union Supply Group is its commissary subsidiary and a likely bidder for the BOP commissary privatization contract. The bill's pricing requirements and competitive bidding mandate would reduce the profitability of the federal contract it is positioning to win.
- BOP inmate welfare funds and programming — facilities that currently rely on commissary "commission" revenue to fund inmate recreation, education materials, or welfare activities would lose that revenue stream without a replacement source.
- Prison systems with revenue-sharing contracts (indirect) — while this bill only covers federal facilities, its passage would create pressure on state departments of corrections running similar kickback arrangements to justify them publicly.
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Red Flags
- No explicit penalty for non-compliance. The bill imposes duties on the BOP Director but the available text does not describe what happens if the agency sets prices above fair market value or fails to submit annual reports to Congress. Without enforcement teeth, the requirement could become aspirational.
- "Fair market value" definition is the critical battleground. The bill explicitly excludes correctional institution prices from the definition — which is the right instinct — but determining fair market value for the state where each facility is located is methodologically complex. BOP operates facilities in rural areas where local retail prices may themselves be elevated; the bill does not specify which price benchmark (online retail? local retail? wholesale?) sets the standard, leaving that determination to the same agency being regulated.
- The timing problem with privatization. The BOP's May 1, 2026 outsourcing solicitation is still active. If a multi-year commissary contract is awarded to ARAMARK or Keefe before this bill passes, the government would be legally constrained from unilaterally repricing an active contract — and reforming prices would require renegotiating with, or terminating, the vendor.
- Scope limited to federal prisons only. The bill applies exclusively to the roughly 155,000 people in BOP custody. The roughly 1.2 million people in state prisons — where some of the worst markups have been documented — are entirely outside this bill's reach.
- Banning revenue-sharing contracts is good for incarcerated people, bad for BOP's unofficial budget. Many BOP facilities currently use commissary revenue to fund programming, recreation equipment, and inmate welfare funds. Eliminating kickbacks removes that funding stream without replacing it, potentially creating pressure to cut programs unless Congress appropriates a substitute.
- Zero cosponsors, introduced by a Democratic minority member. In the current House, a bill with no Republican support and no committee assignment faces a nearly vertical hill. It is more likely a pressure document and a messaging vehicle than near-term legislation.
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Hidden Riders
- De facto competitive bidding reform beyond commissary pricing. The competitive bidding requirement is written broadly enough that it would apply not just to pricing practices but to how BOP awards commissary contracts overall — potentially disrupting long-standing vendor relationships and forcing BOP to restructure procurement processes across all 122 institutions, a substantial administrative undertaking that goes well beyond price transparency.
- GAO audit authority expansion. By giving GAO a standing annual audit mandate over commissary contracts specifically, the bill quietly creates an institutional oversight role for GAO in BOP procurement that could be used as precedent to extend GAO audit authority to other BOP contracting areas (food service, health care, telecommunications) in future legislation.
- None identified beyond the above.
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Current Status
H.R. 9903 was introduced in the House of Representatives on July 23, 2026 by Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC-4) as an introduced bill ("IH" designation), meaning it has been formally filed but not yet assigned to a committee, scheduled for a hearing, or voted on. It has zero cosponsors as of its introduction. In House procedure, the next step would be referral to a relevant committee — likely the House Judiciary Committee's Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee, which oversees the BOP — where it would need to be scheduled for markup before any floor vote could occur. Given that it was introduced by a minority Democrat without bipartisan support in a Republican-controlled House, the realistic near-term path is committee consideration for the record and advocacy pressure, not passage in the 119th Congress. It may be reintroduced or advanced as a rider to criminal justice or appropriations legislation in a future Congress.
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Sources:
- [Rep. Foushee Introduces Bill to End Price Gouging in Federal Prison Commissaries](https://foushee.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-foushee-introduces-bill-to-end-price-gouging-in-federal-prison-commissaries)
- [US HB9903 | 2025-2026 | 119th Congress | LegiScan](https://legiscan.com/US/bill/HB9903/2025?guid=7m0sTVvuQRoEZqcLITqCze)
- [Quiver Quantitative: Foushee Introduces Bill to Limit Federal Prison Commissary Prices](https://www.quiverquant.com/news/Press+Release:+Valerie+Foushee+Introduces+Bill+to+Limit+Federal+Prison+Commissary+Prices)
- ["Locked In, Priced Out": Markups and Kickbacks in Prison Commissaries | Prison Legal News](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2025/jan/15/locked-priced-out-markups-and-kickbacks-prison-commissaries/)
- [Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated | The Appeal](https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/)
- [Locked In, Priced Out — Fines and Fees Justice Center](https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/research-tools/locked-in-priced-out-how-prison-commissary-price-gouging-preys-on-the-incarcerated/)
- [Groups urge Bureau of Prisons not to privatize food service | CSPI](https://www.cspi.org/press-release/groups-urge-bureau-prisons-not-privatize-food-service)
- [Report: HIG Capital's Prison Food and Commissary Store Racket | PESP](https://pestakeholder.org/reports/report-hig-capitals-prison-food-and-commissary-store-racket/)
- [Prisoners Sue Aramark, Contractor for Both Kitchen Service and Commissary | Filter](https://filtermag.org/aramark-lawsuit-prison-food-commissary/)
- [Keefe Commissary Prices Surge Up to 88% | Prison Journalism Project](https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2025/09/02/prison-commissary-prices-surge/)
- [FCC Prison Phone Rate Caps 2026 | InmateAid](https://www.inmateaid.com/blog/fcc-prison-phone-rate-caps-2026-what-changed-and-what-it-means-for-your-family)
- [Pay-for-Play Tablets: The Costly New Prison Paradigm | Prison Legal News](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2025/mar/1/pay-play-tablets-costly-new-prison-paradigm/)
H.R. 9903, the Stop Prison Price Gouging Act of 2026, would cap federal prison commissary prices at fair market value and ban kickback contracts — a direct challenge to a billion-dollar private industry that profits from a legally captive customer base.
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Why now
Three things converged in 2026. First, a nine-month investigation by The Appeal and the Fines and Fees Justice Center, published in early 2025, produced the first national database of prison commissary prices and documented markups as high as 600 percent — giving advocates hard evidence and media traction. Second, on May 1, 2026, the Bureau of Prisons published a formal request for information about outsourcing food service, commissary operations, and health care across all 122 of its institutions — raising the alarm that the same private companies accused of price-gouging could soon lock in long-term federal contracts before any reform takes hold. Third, the recent reversal of FCC prison phone rate caps (October 2025) — which reversed a 2024 ruling and allowed rates to rise by as much as 83 percent — reinforced the pattern of regulatory rollbacks benefiting industry over incarcerated people, making a legislative fix feel more urgent to advocates.
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The real story
The core conflict is not about prison conditions in the abstract — it is about who profits from a legally captive market. Incarcerated people cannot shop elsewhere; they must buy from the single approved commissary or go without. Companies like Keefe Group (owned by the private equity firm HIG Capital) and ARAMARK (whose subsidiary Union Supply Group handles commissary operations) have built business models around that captivity — charging inflated prices, then paying kickbacks to the correctional institutions that awarded them the exclusive contracts. The reformers — Foushee, the Brennan Center, FAMM, Prison Policy Initiative, and the Vera Institute of Justice — argue this is price gouging made possible by government monopoly. The industry's implicit counter-argument is that correctional commissaries are niche logistics operations with real overhead, and that the kickbacks (framed as "commissions") help fund prison operations and reduce taxpayer costs. Congress has not yet formally heard the other side on this bill because it is brand new, but the industry's opposition would likely echo that framing.
---
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Red flags
▸ No explicit penalty for non-compliance. The bill imposes duties on the BOP Director but the available text does not describe what happens if the agency sets prices above fair market value or fails to submit annual reports to Congress. Without enforcement teeth, the requirement could become aspirational.
▸ "Fair market value" definition is the critical battleground. The bill explicitly excludes correctional institution prices from the definition — which is the right instinct — but determining fair market value for the state where each facility is located is methodologically complex. BOP operates facilities in rural areas where local retail prices may themselves be elevated; the bill does not specify which price benchmark (online retail? local retail? wholesale?) sets the standard, leaving that determination to the same agency being regulated.
▸ The timing problem with privatization. The BOP's May 1, 2026 outsourcing solicitation is still active. If a multi-year commissary contract is awarded to ARAMARK or Keefe before this bill passes, the government would be legally constrained from unilaterally repricing an active contract — and reforming prices would require renegotiating with, or terminating, the vendor.
▸ Scope limited to federal prisons only. The bill applies exclusively to the roughly 155,000 people in BOP custody. The roughly 1.2 million people in state prisons — where some of the worst markups have been documented — are entirely outside this bill's reach.
▸ Banning revenue-sharing contracts is good for incarcerated people, bad for BOP's unofficial budget. Many BOP facilities currently use commissary revenue to fund programming, recreation equipment, and inmate welfare funds. Eliminating kickbacks removes that funding stream without replacing it, potentially creating pressure to cut programs unless Congress appropriates a substitute.
▸ Zero cosponsors, introduced by a Democratic minority member. In the current House, a bill with no Republican support and no committee assignment faces a nearly vertical hill. It is more likely a pressure document and a messaging vehicle than near-term legislation.
▸ --
Who benefits
• Incarcerated people in federal prisons — the roughly 155,000 people in BOP custody would pay prices tied to actual market rates rather than captive-market markups. For people earning pennies per hour in prison labor, even modest price reductions on food staples and hygiene items represent meaningful purchasing power.
• Families of incarcerated people — commissary purchases are heavily funded by outside family members who deposit money into accounts. Low-income families, disproportionately Black and Latino, shoulder the majority of this cost; research shows the burden falls hardest on those least able to pay.
• Criminal justice reform organizations — Brennan Center for Justice, FAMM, Prison Policy Initiative, and Vera Institute of Justice gain a legislative vehicle to elevate the commissary pricing issue and pressure BOP regardless of whether the bill passes.
• GAO and Congressional oversight capacity — the mandatory annual audit requirement, if enacted, would generate public data on BOP commissary contracts that currently exists only in scattered, hard-to-compare form.
• --
Who gets hurt
• Keefe Group (HIG Capital) — the dominant prison commissary vendor nationally, with revenues tied to markups and kickback arrangements with correctional systems. A fair-market-value cap and ban on revenue-sharing contracts would directly compress its margin on any future federal contract.
• ARAMARK / Union Supply Group — ARAMARK holds 35 percent of the U.S. correctional food services market and feeds approximately 405,000 people daily in 17 states; Union Supply Group is its commissary subsidiary and a likely bidder for the BOP commissary privatization contract. The bill's pricing requirements and competitive bidding mandate would reduce the profitability of the federal contract it is positioning to win.
• BOP inmate welfare funds and programming — facilities that currently rely on commissary "commission" revenue to fund inmate recreation, education materials, or welfare activities would lose that revenue stream without a replacement source.
• Prison systems with revenue-sharing contracts (indirect) — while this bill only covers federal facilities, its passage would create pressure on state departments of corrections running similar kickback arrangements to justify them publicly.
• --
What it does
H.R. 9903 amends federal law governing the Bureau of Prisons to impose four main requirements on the BOP Director. First, it caps commissary prices at no more than the fair market value of each item in the state where the facility is located — defining fair market value explicitly to exclude prices at correctional institutions or other captive-market settings, so vendors cannot use other prisons' inflated prices as the benchmark. Second, it mandates that the BOP conduct monthly reviews of commissary prices across its facilities to ensure ongoing compliance with the cap. Third, it requires the BOP to use competitive bidding when awarding commissary contracts — eliminating sole-source deals — and prohibits any contract that includes a revenue-sharing or commission arrangement (the mechanism by which vendors currently pay kickbacks to facilities in exchange for exclusive access). Fourth, the bill creates a transparency regime: the BOP must submit an annual report to Congress detailing every product available at each facility, its price, and the terms of the commissary contracts in place; and the Government Accountability Office must conduct an annual audit of BOP compliance with the bill's pricing requirements. The bill does not specify a transition timeline for existing contracts or a phase-in period for the fair market value methodology.
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Precedent
California enacted the BASIC Act, which caps prison commissary markups at 35 percent through 2028 — among the first state-level mandatory markup caps in the country. Michigan took a different approach, eliminating markups entirely on hygiene items and reducing food item markups to 14 percent. Both are too recent for full outcome data, but neither triggered the vendor exodus that industry critics warned about. The more instructive cautionary tale is the FCC's 2024 order dramatically reducing prison phone rates — a rule that reform advocates called a watershed — which was partially reversed by the FCC itself in October 2025, with rates allowed to rise by as much as 83 percent under the new framework, demonstrating that regulatory wins in this space are fragile without statutory backing. H.R. 9903 attempts to use statute rather than regulation precisely to avoid that reversal risk.
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Current status
H.R. 9903 was introduced in the House of Representatives on July 23, 2026 by Rep. Valerie Foushee (D-NC-4) as an introduced bill ("IH" designation), meaning it has been formally filed but not yet assigned to a committee, scheduled for a hearing, or voted on. It has zero cosponsors as of its introduction. In House procedure, the next step would be referral to a relevant committee — likely the House Judiciary Committee's Crime and Federal Government Surveillance Subcommittee, which oversees the BOP — where it would need to be scheduled for markup before any floor vote could occur. Given that it was introduced by a minority Democrat without bipartisan support in a Republican-controlled House, the realistic near-term path is committee consideration for the record and advocacy pressure, not passage in the 119th Congress. It may be reintroduced or advanced as a rider to criminal justice or appropriations legislation in a future Congress.
---
Sources:
- [Rep. Foushee Introduces Bill to End Price Gouging in Federal Prison Commissaries](https://foushee.house.gov/media/press-releases/rep-foushee-introduces-bill-to-end-price-gouging-in-federal-prison-commissaries)
- [US HB9903 | 2025-2026 | 119th Congress | LegiScan](https://legiscan.com/US/bill/HB9903/2025?guid=7m0sTVvuQRoEZqcLITqCze)
- [Quiver Quantitative: Foushee Introduces Bill to Limit Federal Prison Commissary Prices](https://www.quiverquant.com/news/Press+Release:+Valerie+Foushee+Introduces+Bill+to+Limit+Federal+Prison+Commissary+Prices)
- ["Locked In, Priced Out": Markups and Kickbacks in Prison Commissaries | Prison Legal News](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2025/jan/15/locked-priced-out-markups-and-kickbacks-prison-commissaries/)
- [Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated | The Appeal](https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/)
- [Locked In, Priced Out — Fines and Fees Justice Center](https://finesandfeesjusticecenter.org/research-tools/locked-in-priced-out-how-prison-commissary-price-gouging-preys-on-the-incarcerated/)
- [Groups urge Bureau of Prisons not to privatize food service | CSPI](https://www.cspi.org/press-release/groups-urge-bureau-prisons-not-privatize-food-service)
- [Report: HIG Capital's Prison Food and Commissary Store Racket | PESP](https://pestakeholder.org/reports/report-hig-capitals-prison-food-and-commissary-store-racket/)
- [Prisoners Sue Aramark, Contractor for Both Kitchen Service and Commissary | Filter](https://filtermag.org/aramark-lawsuit-prison-food-commissary/)
- [Keefe Commissary Prices Surge Up to 88% | Prison Journalism Project](https://prisonjournalismproject.org/2025/09/02/prison-commissary-prices-surge/)
- [FCC Prison Phone Rate Caps 2026 | InmateAid](https://www.inmateaid.com/blog/fcc-prison-phone-rate-caps-2026-what-changed-and-what-it-means-for-your-family)
- [Pay-for-Play Tablets: The Costly New Prison Paradigm | Prison Legal News](https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2025/mar/1/pay-play-tablets-costly-new-prison-paradigm/)
What to watch
The most consequential near-term development is not in Congress — it is the BOP's active privatization solicitation for commissary and food service contracts. If that contract is awarded to ARAMARK/Union Supply Group or Keefe before this bill advances, the pricing reform becomes far harder to implement under an active multi-year deal. Watch also for whether any Republican member joins as a cosponsor, which would be the clearest signal of bipartisan appetite; without it, the bill is unlikely to receive a committee hearing in the current House majority. Citizens who want to act can contact their House representative to request committee consideration, or comment on the BOP's open solicitation process before it closes.
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