“Taken together, these steps will reduce the private prison population by more than half from its peak in 2013 and puts the Department of Justice on a path to ensure that all federal inmates are ultimately housed at bureau facilities”, the deputy attorney general concluded. Yates instructed federal officials to significantly reduce reliance on private prisons. The announcement follows a recent Justice Department audit that found that the private facilities have more safety and security problems than government-run ones.
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“It does not impact state contracts, ICE contracts or US Marshall contracts”, Meliker said in the note, which pointed out that GEO has 11 percent exposure to the federally contracted private prisons and CXW has 9 percent exposure. In an effort to manage the rising prison population, about a decade ago, the Bureau began contracting with privately operated correctional institutions to confine some federal inmates. One company, Corrections Corp of America, saw its stock plummet by 50%.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says the US should move away from using private facilities to house inmates. It reorganized into a real estate investment trust in 2013 and has prisons in 20 US states and the District of Columbia, according to its website.
The Department of Justice says it will stop using private prisons, saying that the facilities are less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than government-run prisons, the Washington Post reports.
In its report released last week, the DOJ inspector general’s office also showed higher per person rates of “contraband finds, assaults, uses of force, lockdowns, guilty findings on inmate discipline charges, and selected categories of grievances”, a press release said. Others noted that there are only 13 private prisons run by companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, and that state, immigration, and other contracts won’t be affected.
Still, advocates for prison reform believe this could be the beginning of the end for private prisons.
A statement from the branch of DHS that runs detention facilities for migrants said it used various models for immigration detention but made no mention of a move to close privately run migrant detention facilities.
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Together, the unaffected federal agencies do approximately double the business with private prison companies as does the Bureau of Prisons. Now, three years since the Department of Justice announced its Smart on Crime initiative, our efforts to address the pressures facing the Bureau are seeing real and positive results. But they did not represent fiscal or security improvements for the government as expenditures rose from $562 million in 2011 to $639 million in 2014.
