The U.S. Justice Department plans to phase out its use of privately-operated prisons, which it called less safe and less effective than government-run facilities, according to a memo released publicly by the department on Thursday.
Advertisement
“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 the memo.
According to the OIG report, privately-run prisons had more safety and security incidents than those managed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), including higher rates of assaults and contraband. Most prisoners in the USA are held in state-run facilities, with only about 12 percent of the US inmate population held in private, for-profit prisons.
The total population of federal inmates housed at privately run facilities will drop to 14,200 by May of next year, Yates said.
But with the decline, she said, the government “can better allocate our resources to ensure that inmates are in the safest facilities and receiving the best rehabilitative services – services that increase their chances of becoming contributing members of their communities when they return from prison”. Corrections Corporation of America dropped by almost 50% by the afternoon, while GEO Group managed to bounce back a bit to settle down 39.58%. 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.
The U.S. government began to use private prisons in the late 1990s because of an explosion in the prison population that began the previous decade.
“We have got to end the private prison racket in America as quickly as possible”.
Yates said private prisons, long seen as a growth industry in a country where the prison population has quadrupled since 1980, had also failed to provide any substantial cost savings. Unlike most states, the federal government puts its law enforcement agents, criminal prosecutors, and correctional officers all in a single department.
In a public announcement of the decision, Yates noted that the USA prison population has declined since 2013, when the number of federal inmates in private prisons peaked.
Yates is unsure as to when federal use of private prisons will be completely eliminated. The prison population peaked in 2013. When the women’s prison where the show is set became privately operated, the profit motive led to overcrowding and understaffing. Yates’ memo does not apply to any of those prisons.
Yates explained that contracts with 13 private prisons will be reviewed and allowed to expire over the next five years, the BBC reported.
Advertisement
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.
