Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in a statement, “I am directing that, as each contract reaches the end of its term, the Bureau should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope in a manner consistent with the law and the overall decline of the Bureau’s inmate population”. The speed of the transfers from private to federal prisons will depend on the decline of the federal prison’s population.
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Private companies will lose their contracts to operate five federal prisons in Texas under a U.S. Department of Justice plan announced Thursday to phase out private management of federal lockups nationwide.
In the memo to Bureau of Prisons, Yates also cited relatively poor performance of privately operated prisons as reasons to ultimately end the use of these prisons.
In its most recent two seasons, the popular Netflix drama “Orange is the New Black”, which dramatizes the lives of female federal inmates, painted a harsh portrait of a fictional private company that seeks to maximize profits at the expense of prisoners’ human rights.
The magazine Mother Jones in June published the results of an undercover investigation during which a reporter worked at a CCA-run prison in Louisiana.
Regarding contraband cellphones, private prisons have eight times more cases than in prisons run by the Bureau of Prisons system.
The incident occurred in May 2012 in a private prison in MS marked a precedent in how risky is to ignore that private facilities are not as safe as they must be.
Last year, America held 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, but accounted only for 5 percent of the global population, the White House said.
“The disturbance involved approximately 250 inmates who, according to contemporaneous media reports, were angry about low-quality food and medical care, as well as about Correctional Officers the inmates believed were disrespectful”, the report states.
“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 a memo to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
“The very same issues that the DOJ has named in ending its contracts – the awful health care available, the dangers to people incarcerated in private prisons – those are endemic to the private-prison contracts with DHS as well”, she said.
The report mentions many other examples and states that private prisons are not fit to contain inmates because they are not capable of protecting the lives of the inmates nor the lives of their personnel.
Three companies run the prisons in question: Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.
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“In most key areas, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions”. “It is not because contract prisons are not as safe and secure, it is because a homogeneous inmate population has a greater inherent risk for problems”. GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump has said he supports the use of private prisons.
