While experts said the directive is significant, privately run federal prisons house only a small fraction of the overall population of inmates.
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Privately operated prisons became popular in the late 1990’s as the federal inmate population expanded rapidly.
That could change if the U.S. Marshals Service, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or departments at the state and local levels fall in line with the Justice Department’s effort.
The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) system now contracts with private companies to operate 13 facilities.
The federal prison population increased by nearly 800% between 1980 and 2013, at a rate the Bureau of Prisons couldn’t accommodate in their own facilities.
She wrote that the bureau should refuse to renew or should “substantially reduce” the scope of contracts with private prison companies as they expire.
Almost a third of the market value of what has been a growing subsector of the US economy in the past two decades was wiped away on fears that other federal and state departments would also curtail the use of for-profit prisons. Yates’ memo also notes that the 13 private prisons under the BOP’s watch are not as safe as those run by the feds. “This is the right step forward”.
“I’ve never believed private prisons saved any money”, McFadyen said Thursday. The OIG performed a review of how the Federal Bureau of Prisons monitors contracted, or private, prisons. The report identified three corporations as running the private prisons used by the government: Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.
The United States’ big government is about to get bigger. From then on, they began contracts with private correctional institutions.
BOP now uses private prisons “primarily to confine low security, criminal alien, adult males”, according to the inspector general’s office.
That leaves the Bent County Correctional Facility (1,466 beds) and the Crowley County Correctional Facility (1,890 beds) as the only two major private prisons in the state.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says the US should move away from using private facilities to house inmates.
A recently published, four-month-long investigation by Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer gave a harrowing account of the violence and poor health conditions inside one private prison, where he worked undercover as a corrections officer.
“This is an important and groundbreaking decision”, David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, said in a statement.
The fundamental problem with private prisons is that you can’t provide humane, effective corrections programs when the bottom line is the dominant business concern. These prisons are located in Texas, as well as 12 other states.
After that year, the prison population began to decline.
“Lives have been lost to this broken system”. The number dropped to about 22,660 inmates, by December 2015.
The Color of Change, an online racial justice organization, also welcomed the news.
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Yet the private prison industry may represent only the most visible part of a growing trend to sell services and goods to prisons and jails. He said that the policy change isn’t created to reduce the ranks of incarcerated people, which has surged more than four-fold since 1980. “The companies running them monetize our criminal justice system to maximize their profits and have spent millions of dollars on campaign contributions and lobbying to criminalize Black communities”.
