Privately owned federal prisons will soon be a thing of the past said the Justice Department on Thursday. “With its announcement today, the Justice Department has made clear that the end of the Bureau of Prisons’ two-decade experiment with private prisons is finally in sight”.
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Following the decision he said it was “an global embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on Earth… due in large part to private prisons”. The Nation magazine also recently reported about deaths under questionable circumstances in privately operated facilities.
And Hawaii is locked in with the new contract with CCA for three years – or up to five years, if the state exercises its option to extend it twice on one-year increments.
“Today, concurrent with the release of this memo, the Bureau is amending an existing contract solicitation to reduce an upcoming contract award from a maximum of 10,800 beds to a maximum of 3,600”.
“Private prisons served an important role during a hard period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities”, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote in a memo to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
“This is an important and groundbreaking decision”, David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said in a statement.
It is hoped that the federal initiative will be repeated by individual states and local authorities.
Private prisons hold about 22,100 of these inmates.
In recent seasons, the popular Netflix drama “Orange is the New Black”, has painted an unflattering portrait of a fictional private prison company that aims to increase profits at the expense of prisoners’ conditions and human rights.
“In most key areas, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions, and that the BOP needs to improve how it monitors contract prisons in several areas”, the report found.
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Damon Hininger, CEO of Corrections Corp. of America, also expressed confidence in the renewal of a contract to continue running a prison with more than 1,300 inmates in the Central Texas city of Eden. The federal prison population – now at 193,299 – has been dropping due to changes in federal sentencing policies over the past three years.
