How many people will this affect? That’s less than half of the almost 30,000 federal inmates who were held in private prisons at the peak in 2013.
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“It’s counterintuitive that private prisons, and especially a coompany like Serco which is all about making money, would ever want to reduce the prison population”. New Mexico is the highest at 43.8 percent, followed by Montana (38.7 percent), Oklahoma (26.3 percent), Hawaii (24.3 percent), MS (21.9 percent), Vermont (21.8 percent) and North Dakota (21.6 percent). The Bureau of Prisons, by contrast, runs more than 100 prisons. The company would learn by the end of the year if the contract is renewed, he said.
Such detainees come under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice. Former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, who campaigned for such a policy change, spoke for many liberal politicians when he praised the move as a major step toward reducing mass incarceration: “It is an global embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on earth”.
An inspector general’s report released last week found “more safety and security incidents per capita” at the corporate-run prisons, compared with those run by the Bureau of Prisons.
We recall the riots, inmate abuse, poor medical care and other issues which plagued those proprietary facilities before Kentucky pulled out in 2013.
Yates said the government is “beginning the process of reducing – and ultimately ending – our use of privately operated prisons” by not renewing contracts for 14 such facilities, most of which are in Texas or elsewhere across the South. If their performance is unsuitable for federal prisoners under the Bureau of Prisons’ jurisdiction, what makes them suitable for prisoners under other jurisdictions?
Where will these inmates go? The federal prison population surged nearly 800 percent from 1980 to 2013.
These inmates in Texas are housed at five facilities four in West Texas and one in Central Texas that are run by three companies.
What will these companies do in response? The stock prices of the two leading private prison companies – the Corrections Corporation of America and the Geo Group – cratered on the news.
In addition to working against locking people up in for-profit prisons, we must work against locking up so many people altogether. The DOJ memo notes that it has no bearing on halfway houses run by these companies for men and women leaving federal prisons.
“It really makes it a unsafe situation for people that are going inside a private prison system, particularly people with chronic illnesses and serious mental health issues”, she said. “It seems to work a lot better”.
BOP now uses private prisons “primarily to confine low security, criminal alien, adult males”, according to the inspector general’s office. An ICE spokesperson told Intercept reporter Alice Speri that the agency has 46 privately-run immigrant detention centers. Her political ties to the industry remain, however.
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Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., called Thursday’s announcement “an important first step in addressing this unacceptable situation, but it is not enough”. In 2002, he joined the board of the Corrections Corporation of America, where he remains.
