The DOJ has instructed the Federal BOP to decline to renew contracts with these private facilities as they reach the end of their terms or reduce the contract in a manner consistent with the law.
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Deputy Attorney General Yates also wrote, “Private prisons served an important role during a hard period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities”.
Yates cited the rapidly increasing prison population from 1980 as the reason the US turned to private prisons to house roughly 15% of inmates, but said that the Bureau of Prisons is able to better accommodate the declining number of prisoners in America now. As of Thursday afternoon, the stock price of Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group had dropped more than 35 percent from the previous day’s close.
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington.
The private prison industry is worth about $5 billion today, with 130 private prisons throughout the country housing almost 20 percent of the federal prison population and 7 percent of state prisoners, Mother Jones reports.
The directive from the Department of Justice only applies to federally contracted private prisons. The federal prison population – now at 193,299 – has been dropping due to changes in federal sentencing policies over the past three years. But it turns out those corporations still have a friend in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
A spokesman for Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s biggest operator of private prisons, tells the BBC that report was flawed.
The ACLU is the principal organization behind the Obama Justice Department’s no-more-private-prisons decision.
In a move hailed by civil rights groups and longstanding critics of for-profit prisons, the department said it planned a gradual phase-out by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the USA prison population.
State facilities house many more people than federal prisons – not counting inmates in local jails, around 1.3 million – but the percentage of inmates in a private facility is lower.
Yates also noted that there is no substantial cost savings for taxpayers and argues education and rehabilitation programs are better served by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The announcement follows a recent Justice Department audit that found that the private facilities have more safety and security problems than government-run ones.
Together, the unaffected federal agencies do approximately double the business with private prison companies as does the Bureau of Prisons.
“The DOJ plan notes that there are 13 private prisons run by companies like GEO and CXW”.
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They are not as safe or as well run as government correctional facilities, the Justice Department concluded after an extensive review process.
