The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
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“Private prisons served an important role during a hard period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities”, Ms. Yates wrote.
A week after the Office of the Inspector General released a report detailing the shortcomings of federal prisons operated by private corporations, Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have announced that it is working toward “reducing-and ultimately ending-our use of privately operated prisons”.
In the memo, Yates said that by May 2017, the bureau is expected to house just 14,200 inmates in private prisons – a small percentage of the approximate 195,000 federal inmates now in the US. But the federal prisoner population has begun to decline, thanks in part to “several significant efforts to recalibrate federal sentencing policy”, and private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources” as government-run institutions, Yates said in her memo.
The Department of Justice says it will phase out its use of private contractors to run federal prisons.
The memo comes as the government sees declining numbers in the federal prison population. Corrections Corporation of America dropped by almost 50% by the afternoon, while GEO Group managed to bounce back a bit to settle down 39.58%.
Last month, the federal government declined to renew a contract for approximately 1,200 beds. More to the point, the OIG said the for-profit contract prisons had a lower quality of service, and more violence, and disciplinary problems, noting the high turnover rate of employees as raising security concerns because of inexperience.
The private prisons are operated by three private companies – Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group Inc., and Management and Training Corp. Numerous federal prison inmates held in private facilities are foreign nationals who are being held on immigration offenses, the audit said.
The directive from the Department of Justice only applies to federally contracted private prisons.
A spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s biggest operator of private prisons, tells the BBC that report was flawed.
It was not clear on Friday how the Obama administration’s decision to phase out its use of some private prisons will affect five such facilities now operating in Texas as well as the communities where they are located.
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he supports the use of private prisons.
Among federal prisoners, only about 30,000 – 15% of the total – are now housed in private facilities.
The DoJ report also found that on average, eight times as many contraband cellphones were confiscated from private prisons each year compared to federal-run jails.
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Mr Hanson said both companies would need to update their financial outlooks after the Justice Department news.
