The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical report concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. He says those conclusions are “seriously flawed”.
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The North Central Correctional Complex in Marion is operated by Management & Training Corporation of Centerville, Utah.
The company has scheduled a conference call Friday to reassure investors.
The policy shift has no bearing on the private operation of immigrant detention facilities. The Clinton campaign has said it no longer accepts contributions from private prison interests, and if it receives such a contribution, it will donate that money to charity.
“In recent years, disturbances in several federal contract prisons resulted in extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a correctional officer”, said the report.
According to the Justice Department memo, private prisons housed nearly 30,000 inmates in 2013 or roughly 15 percent of the total prisoners in the U.S.
The decision will affect 13 privately run prisons housing just over 22,000 people, or about 11 percent of the federal prison population.
The directive, however, only applies to federal prisons, not state ones.
The Obama administration says the declining federal prison population justifies the decision to eventually close privately run prisons.
Issa Arnita, a spokesman for Management and Training Corporation, also questioned the government’s rationale, saying, “If the DOJ’s decision to end the use of contract prisons were based exclusively on declining inmate populations, there may be some justification, but to base this decision on cost, safety and security, and programming is wrong”, he said in a statement. Shares of the two publicly-traded prison operators plunged in midday trading. Since 2013, that number has dropped by 25,000 people to 195,000 total. That’s a small portion of America’s 2.2 million incarcerated adult prisoners.
U.S. Justice Department officials plan to phase out their use of private prisons to house federal inmates, reasoning that the contract facilities offer few benefits for public safety or taxpayers. Its Education & Training division still has contracts with Job Corps centers in 16 states. The report, which followed years of pressure by advocacy groups, highlighted a series of riots at these facilities in recent years, often sparked by substandard food and medical care and generally poor conditions.
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Private prison systems not only incentivize mass incarceration, but they victimize the most vulnerable groups by allowing structural racism to persist through policies that maximize rates of sentencing. “We hope OH officials follow the lead of the Department of Justice”. The DOJ memo notes that it has no bearing on halfway houses run by these companies for men and women leaving federal prisons.
