“We have to be realistic about the time it will take, but that really depends on the continuing decline of the federal prison population, and that’s really hard to accurately predict”, Yates said. The decline, she wrote, is primarily due to retroactively applying new drug sentencing guidelines, implementing new policies for charging low-level and nonviolent drug offenders, and continuing the Obama administration’s clemency program.
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Still, the policy will affect the operation of only 13 prisons used by the Bureau of Prisons – not the 100-plus for-profit facilities used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to house immigrant detainees.
Among federal prisoners, only about 30,000 – 15% of the total – are now housed in private facilities.
2,187 federal offenders are now in the Taft facility, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “While an unexpected need may arise in the future, the goal of the Justice Department is to ensure consistency in safety, security and rehabilitation services by operating its own prison facilities”.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has said the US should move away from using private facilities to house inmates.
The U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday it has seen enough of private prisons, and will phase them out as soon as possible. “This is the right step forward”. The private prison lobby is a major contributor to the Republican campaigns.
But don’t make the mistake of thinking the announcement spells the end of the billion-dollar business that is the private prison industry.
To be sure, states’ use of private prisons has been under protest.
The private prisons are operated by three companies – Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group Inc. and Management and Training Corporation. The announcement sent the stocks of the country’s two largest prison corporations, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, crashing.
The number of prisoners held in privately run facilities at both the state and federal levels has been slowly decreasing since its peak in 2013.
The US federal prison population increased by nearly 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, and in an effort to manage the rising prison population, US authorities began contracting with private prisons to confine some federal inmates a decade ago. Amnesty International, on Thursday, urged states to follow suit.
The Bureau of Prisons houses about 193,000 inmates.
The Justice Department does not have jurisdiction over state prisons. “Lives have been lost to this broken system”.
“For example, the contract prisons confiscated eight times as many contraband cell phones annually on average as the BOP institutions”, the report said.
The memo offers valid points to reduce and “ultimately end” the use of private prisons.
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He said a year ago that “we can not fix our criminal justice system if corporations are allowed to profit from mass incarceration”.
