The US Justice Department has said it’s phasing out its relationships with private prisons after a recent audit found the private facilities have more safety and security problems than ones run by the government.
Advertisement
Last month, the DOJ declined to renew a contract for 1,200 prison beds in a private facility. The contract prisons are operated by three private corporations, according to the inspector general’s report: Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.
When the U.S. Bureau of Prisons nonrenewed its contract to house some 1,400 inmates at NEOCC as of May 31, 2015, that left only about 580 U.S. Marshals Service inmates there and resulted in the layoff of 103 NEOCC employees.
According to the Washington Post, a memo from Yates instructs officials to either decline to renew private prison contracts upon their expiration, or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope.
Thirteen of the federal government’s 146 prisons are privately run. Together, those 13 housed 22,600 inmates as of December 2015, down from about 40,000 in 2014. Donald Trump has said he is supporting the use of private prisons.
Yates wrote that private prisons “served an important role during a hard time period”, but they had proven less effective than facilities run by the government. At the federal level, our facilities have a proven track record of providing cost-effective, high quality services for those entrusted to our care.
The Department of Justice announced Thursday it will phase out its use of private prisons.
The decision will affect only a small share of the detainee population within the United States, which represents one in four prisoners held around the world.
The Management and Training Corporation and Corrections Corporation of American issued statements saying they were disappointed with the decision. Both companies get about half their revenue from the federal government.
A study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison also found that inmates in private prisons spend an average of two to three more months behind bars. Special centers that were supposed to specifically cater to holding immigrant families have been accused of holding children in prison-like conditions.
In an interview, Yates said there are 13 privately run privately run facilities in the Bureau of Prisons system, and they will not close overnight.
The nation’s immigration detention centers, which are run by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency under the DHS, detain almost 400,000 immigrants a year, compared to the roughly 200,000 that are held at any given time by the BOP.
The Obama administration says the declining federal prison population justifies the decision to eventually close privately run prisons.
The use of privately operated correctional institutes for federal prisoners began about a decade ago, as the inmate population boomed.
“This puts the DHS in a very unusual position if it’s going to insist on keeping the services of these companies, because the memo was put out by [Yates], a very high ranking official in the DOJ”, Carl Takei, a staff attorney at the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, told Fusion. In a research note, he called the department’s goal of ending private prison contracting “more aspirational than attainable”, however.
Advertisement
“Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons”, Marquardt wrote.
