The federal government is getting out of the private prison game, with an announcement that the Justice Department will no longer contract with for-profit prison companies.
This is big news, and here’s why you should care.
In a memo, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision, laying out why the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has decided to go this route of “beginning the process of reducing — and ultimately ending — the use of privately operated prisons.”
She noted that with a federal prison population that grew 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, the federal government contracted with private correctional institutions in order to manage this rise in the number of prisoners. In 2013, private prisons reached their peak, with 15 percent of federal prisoners, or 30,000 inmates, housed in those facilities. (According to the ACLU, private prisons are responsible for 6 percent of state prisoners as well as local jails in states such as Texas and Louisiana.)
Now, the federal prison population is dropping for the first time in decades, from 220,000 three years ago to 195,000 today. That’s a good reason to eliminate the private prisons, but here’s one that’s even better:
“Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities,” Yates wrote. “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” she added. “The rehabilitative services that the Bureau provides, such as educational programs and job training, have proved difficult to replicate and outsource — and these services are essential to reducing recidivism and improving public safety.”
To understand how “important” a role private prisons played to give the government a change of heart, check out the report the Justice Department’s Inspector General released last week. The report examined the 14 private contract prisons and compared them to 14 federal prisons on eight criteria: contraband, reports of incidents, lockdowns, inmate discipline, telephone monitoring, selected grievances, urinalysis drug testing, and sexual misconduct. With only two exceptions — positive drug tests and sexual misconduct — the contract prisons had a worse track record than the government-run Bureau of Prisons facilities. According to the report, the private institutions confiscated twice as many weapons and eight times more cell phones and had higher rates of assault, both inmate-on-inmate (28 percent higher) and inmate-on-staff (double) violence.
“The three contract prisons we visited were all cited by the BOP for one or more safety and security deficiencies, including administrative infractions such as improper storage of use-of-force video footage, as well as more serious or systemic deficiencies such as failure to initiate discipline in over 50 percent of incidents reviewed by onsite monitors over a 6-month period,” the report said. Moreover, two of the facilities were placing new inmates in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) — also known as solitary confinement — until beds became available in the general population. Solitary, which has been condemned by the UN because it makes prisoners lose their minds, is used for disciplinary and administrative segregation. And these inmates hadn’t even committed any offenses.
What’s more, Mother Jones had conducted a damning investigation on a private prison in Louisiana — the state with the highest incarceration rate in the world — run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). The expose found serious problems with security and staffing, as well as more violence than the prison had reported. Meanwhile, The Nation had reported that 20,000 pages of reports from investigators revealed the problem of deaths in private facilities contracting with the BOP — at least 38 men who died due to inadequate medical care, including 34 between 2007 and 2015. Most of the deaths took place in prisons operated by CCA and GEO Group, who together earned revenues of $2.9 billion in 2010 and account for half of the private prison contracts in the country.
So, private prisons are less safe, less secure and more violent. Plus, they’re just wrong. Certain public functions, such as incarceration and education, don’t work out so well when money enters into the equation. When there is a profit motive — look at slavery and the prison plantations of the Jim Crow era — the exploitation, typically of black bodies, is inevitable and inherent. Because when the goal is to maximize profit and the shareholder’s return on investment, the human raw materials are going to lose out every time.
Follow David A. Love on Twitter @davidalove