The decision, for example, does not apply to people held in Department of Homeland Security detention centers for immigration violations, which tally at about 34,000 on any given day, and about 400,000 over the course of a year.
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At their peak, contract prisons housed approximately 30,000 federal inmates.
The federal prison population increased by nearly 800% between 1980 and 2013, at a rate the Bureau of Prisons couldn’t accommodate in their own facilities.
Yates instructed the Bureau of Prisons to either decline to renew or significantly reduce the scope of private prison contracts as these reach the ends of their terms. “With the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something”.
Before Thursday, the Bureau of Prisons had been working toward the goal of phasing out private prison contracts when, three weeks ago, it did not renew a contract for 1,200 beds, Yates said.
“While this development is a step in the right direction for the United States’ broken criminal justice system, it is by no means a panacea”.
The Obama administration’s announcement that it will phase out its contracts with private prison companies has sent the stocks of two publicly traded prison companies plummeting. The Nation magazine also recently reported about deaths under questionable circumstances in privately operated facilities. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he supports the use of private prisons.
But some of the private prison companies that operate these facilities said they are hopeful the federal government contracts up for renewal in the next few months will be approved and allow them to continue running several of the prisons.
The abandonment of those companies, like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, by the DOJ has been praised by for-profit detention opponents.
In 2015, both companies received roughly half of their revenue from federal contracts. In a statement Thursday, Jonathan Burns, a spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America, criticized the Office of the Inspector General report, saying it had “significant flaws”.
“The individuals held at Crossroads are federal prisoners who are pending trial, or those who are post-sentencing and pending assignment by the Bureau of Prisons to a federal facility”, Cotter says.
2,187 federal offenders are now in the Taft facility, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Yates said private prisons, long seen as a growth industry in a country where the prison population has quadrupled since 1980, had also failed to provide any substantial cost savings. Some states, such as Kentucky, already have. It’s important to note that today’s announcement relates only to BOP correctional facilities, which make up seven percent of our business. “Lives have been lost to this broken system. It is historic and groundbreaking”, said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project.
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Pueblo County Commissioner Liane “Buffie” McFadyen was perhaps the loudest opponent of private prisons when she served in the General Assembly from 2003 to 2011.
