“Private prisons served an important role during a hard period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities”, she said.
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A recent Department of Justice inspector general report found that private facilities do not maintain the same level of safety and security that government run facilities provide.
The U.S. Department of Justice plans to stop using private prisons, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
The announcement came via a memo released by Deputy Attorney Sally Yates today (August 18).
In a move hailed by civil rights groups and longstanding critics of for-profit prisons, the department said it planned a gradual phase-out by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the USA prison population.
A 2015 report from the Center for American Progress found that previous year, 62 percent of all beds in DHS facilities are under the control of private companies.
“Many of the facilities that involve private prison corporations are actually contracted through local governments, who then subcontract for services through private companies”, she said.
Private prison operators’ stocks dropped after the news was announced, with Corrections Corporation of America seeing a dramatic 50 per cent plunge.
We hope that this announcement will inspire Congress to provide the Bureau of Prisons sufficient resources to house and rehabilitate inmates in federal institutions, and work on meaningful reforms to decrease the overcrowding in our nation’s prisons.
Private prisons investors got some bad news Thursday when the Department of Justice announced it would begin to phase out their services. “Florida can carry on it’s course with private prisons as we have been and this is not going to have any influence on what happens here”. The private prisons are reputed to spend millions on lobbying each year, so they may be hard to sever-and we are, after all, facing a change of administration, so will this resolution stick?
“Well we do think it’s going to harm the private prison industry, but that’s actually the point here”, said Rashad Robinson, executive director of the online community action group Color of Change.
The report also says the prisons who have contracts with the Federal BOP are operated by 3 private corporations- one being Corrections Corporation of America– which has a facility in Central Georgia. It earned 17 percent of its overall income from the Marshals, 13 percent from the Bureau of Prisons and 13 percent from immigration detentions.
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“This is the first step in the process of reducing-and ultimately ending-our use of privately operated prisons”. Between then and 1980, the federal prison population had increased by 800 percent, exceeding the BOP’s ability to manage it.
