“We are thrilled that the Department of Justice announced an end to the use of private prisons, and applaud the DOJ for their instruction to the Bureau of Prisons to decline or drastically reduce the use of contract incarceration as a means to an end”.
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In December of 2015, the inspector general’s report revealed that some 22,660 federal inmates were being housed in privately run prisons, although the Bureau of Prisons website lists a slightly smaller number.
Following the decision he said it was “an worldwide embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on Earth… due in large part to private prisons”.
Private prisons have been a political talking point for years, and in this elections the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that the country should change the private prison policies, moving to a more governmentally control system.
“Private prisons served an important role during a hard period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities”, Yates wrote in a memo to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The prison population peaked in 2013.
The Obama administration said Thursday it will phase out its contracts with private prisons, affecting thousands of federal inmates.
Private prison operators’ stocks dropped after the news was announced, with Corrections Corporation of America seeing a dramatic 50 per cent plunge. Government-run prisons are often funded by and use phone, transportation, commissary, and medical services from private companies.
The Inspector General’s report referred to in the memorandum found that private prisons saw higher rates of violent incidents and rule infractions in comparison with government-run institutions.
The federal government started to rely on private prisons in the late 1990s due to overcrowding.
The abandonment of those companies, like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, by the DOJ has been praised by for-profit detention opponents. The company, in deciding not to renew, cited the excessive costs to run the units, especially McPherson, which at the time housed all the state’s female inmates.
Less than two years after the prisons returned to state control, a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the prisons declared conditions there “unconstitutional”.
The department does not have a “specific prohibition against using private bids in-state”, said Solomon Graves, the department’s spokesman.
Critics of for-profit prisons say those corporations have played a heavy hand in American immigration policy.
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Information for this article was contributed by Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post and by John Moritz of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
