-
Tips for becoming a good boxer - November 6, 2020
-
7 expert tips for making your hens night a memorable one - November 6, 2020
-
5 reasons to host your Christmas party on a cruise boat - November 6, 2020
-
What to do when you’re charged with a crime - November 6, 2020
-
Should you get one or multiple dogs? Here’s all you need to know - November 3, 2020
-
A Guide: How to Build Your Very Own Magic Mirror - February 14, 2019
-
Our Top Inspirational Baseball Stars - November 24, 2018
-
Five Tech Tools That Will Help You Turn Your Blog into a Business - November 24, 2018
-
How to Indulge on Vacation without Expanding Your Waist - November 9, 2018
-
5 Strategies for Businesses to Appeal to Today’s Increasingly Mobile-Crazed Customers - November 9, 2018
State employees’ group calls for end of private prisons
It was not clear on Friday how the Obama administration’s decision to phase out its use of some private prisons will affect five such facilities now operating in Texas as well as the communities where they are located.
Advertisement
“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources; they do not save substantially on costs, and … they do not maintain the same level of safety and security”, she said. “This is the first step in the process of reducing-and ultimately ending-our use of privately operated prisons”.
Unquestionably, that’s a noble and important goal.
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. The Federal Bureau of Prisons spent $639 million on private prisons in 2014. The argument for the facilities has always been that when run like a business, prisons can be safer, more efficient and -of course- profitable.
These corporations exploit, and sometimes encourage, mass incarceration and overcriminalization in order to boost their profits.
“Hundreds of thousands of human beings are held in American cages every night exclusively because they are too poor to make a payment”, noted Karakatsanis, co-founder of Equal Justice Under Law, in a statement to The Huffington Post Thursday. Donald Trump has said, “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons”.
The Justice Department began contracting with private prisons in the late 1990s to help accommodate a growing inmate population. This means the federal Bureau of Prisons can begin shifting prisoners from private prisons to those run by the bureau itself.
Part of what made the new scrutiny possible was an overall decline in the federal prison population, which dropped from 220,000 prisoners in 2013, according to the memo, to 195,000 today.
In other words, while private prison stocks have taken a nose dive following the DOJ announcement, the entrenched power and profit-making of these companies should not be under-estimated. But there are around 130 private prisons across the country in total.
Such detainees come under the purview of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Justice. But the department is only trying to phase out, not immediately end, its use of private prisons, which held nearly 23,000 federal inmates as of December 2015.
The other federal private prisons in the report house non-citizens in Criminal Alien Requirement facilities. Bernie Sanders, in particular, was vocal about his opposition to private prisons from the start of his campaign, and today he applauded the Justice Department’s announcement. But mass incarceration and overcriminalization are much bigger problems. The Latinx power organization Presente.org recently declared, “unless we push President Obama to do more, it won’t make a difference for thousands of immigrants locked up in for-profit dungeons”.
Advertisement
Mac McCann is an editorial board intern with the Dallas Morning News.