Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Friday August 19 2016, @04:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the 'cell'ing-out dept.

Two Soylentils wrote in to tell us of news from the US Justice Department's plans to stop using private prisons.

Justice Department Says it will End use of Private Prisons

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or "substantially reduce" the contracts' scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is "reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons."

"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," Yates wrote.

This really took me by surprise; I had thought this was beyond hope. The article doesn't mention my main beef with private prisons though, which would be the incentive for those profiting to lobby for and otherwise encourage increased jail time for more people, including making more things illegal (war on drugs), and increased chances of wrongful prosecution.

Related Coverage:

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/20880-for-profit-prisons-eight-statistics-that-show-the-problems
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-lotke/the-real-problem-with-pri_b_8279488.html
https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-solution

[Continues...]

U.S. Begins Phase-out of Private Prisons

A memorandum (PDF version) (plain text version fraught with errors) from the deputy attorney-general of the U.S. Department of Justice to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons asks for "help in beginning the process of reducing—and ultimately ending—[the] use of privately operated prisons." This is to be done as contracts with private prison operators come up for renewal: the services contracted for are to be lessened, or the contracts are to be allowed to expire. According to the memo:

[...] the Bureau is already taking steps in this direction. Three weeks ago, the Bureau declined to renew a contract for approximately 1,200 beds. Today, concurrent with the release of this memo, the Bureau is amending an existing contract solicitation to reduce an upcoming contract award from a maximum of 10,800 beds to a maximum of 3,600.

The memo follows a report (PDF) released this month by the Department of Justice's inspector-general, which said

Our analysis included data from FYs 2011 through 2014 in eight key categories: (1) contraband, (2) reports of incidents, (3) lockdowns, (4) inmate discipline, (5) telephone monitoring, (6) selected grievances, (7) urinalysis drug testing, and (8) sexual misconduct. With the exception of fewer incidents of positive drug tests and sexual misconduct, the contract prisons had more incidents per capita than the BOP institutions in all of the other categories of data we examined. [...] Contract prisons [...] had higher rates of assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff. [...] the BOP still must improve its oversight of contract prisons to ensure that federal inmates' rights and needs are not placed at risk when they are housed in contract prisons.

On the day of the release of the memo, trading in the stocks of two of the three prison operators was temporarily halted due to declines in their prices.

Related Coverage:
Reason blog about inspector-general's report
The Atlantic about inspector-general's report
Washington Post
Reuters
BBC News
Los Angeles Times
Mother Jones
Atlanta Black Star
The Guardian
Esquire
U.S. News & World Report
Time
ABC News
NPR
USA Today
Toronto Star

Further reading:


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by fraxinus-tree on Friday August 19 2016, @04:26PM

    by fraxinus-tree (5590) on Friday August 19 2016, @04:26PM (#390136)

    ... and this is one of them.

    > the incentive for those profiting to lobby for and otherwise encourage increased jail time for more people

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=2, Total=2
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by GungnirSniper on Friday August 19 2016, @04:31PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Friday August 19 2016, @04:31PM (#390141) Journal

    What about enforcers' and cagers' unions?

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @04:51PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 19 2016, @04:51PM (#390151)

      From the Reuters article:

      Yates said in a memo that the number of federal prisoners in private facilities is expected to fall by 50 percent by May 2017 from the population's peak in 2013.

      To give you an idea of their goalposts.

    • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:26AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @03:26AM (#390411)
      Unless you've incentivised them by some stupid metric like "number of prisoners", they shouldn't be lobbying for it. Law enforcement should be applauded when crime goes down, not when number of people convicted for crimes goes up!
  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 19 2016, @05:38PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 19 2016, @05:38PM (#390179) Journal

    I gotta disagree with you on that one.

    There should be no profit motive built into the prison system. I'm sure you saw some of the movies about the Old South prison farms - there were plenty of them made. Cool Hand Luke comes immediately to mind. The sheriff kept people in prison for PROFIT, which meant, he had no incentive to ever turn you loose.

    I detest the idea of rich bastards getting wealthy at the expense of some poor people's freedom. It may not be slavery, but it's really damned closely related.

    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Friday August 19 2016, @06:02PM

      by Francis (5544) on Friday August 19 2016, @06:02PM (#390196)

      Exactly, we can quibble over things like buses and utilities being private, but things like prisons and the military need to be public institutions for practical reasons.

      One of the reasons why we've got such a massive overpopulation of prisoners is that the prison industry lobbies for tougher enforcement. That and the conditions inside are unnecessarily brutal with things like prison rape not being taken seriously.

      Remove the profit from it and we can get back to focusing on balancing punishment, rehabilitation and reducing recidivism. It does nobody any good to have people going to prison, training up on their criminal skills and then being released only to do it again.

      • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday August 19 2016, @09:30PM

        by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday August 19 2016, @09:30PM (#390300) Homepage

        The incidence of prison rape in America is waaaaaaaay overstated. Sure, it happens here and there, but very rarely not nearly as much as depicted on TV and movies -- and especially not like how it happened in American History X. Prisoners who commit crimes while being incarcerated are brought to trial.

        That does not change the fact that America prisons are violent, though. If you're locked up and you fart in a common area, you will get your ass beat. They expect you go to all the way to the latrine, sit on the pot, and fart there even if you are not taking a dump.

        Source - Jailbird brother, morally questionable friends.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:15AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 20 2016, @12:15AM (#390353)

      ...and for another angle on that, there's "The Shawshank Redemption".

      ** Spoiler alert **

      When the warden goes to retrieve the ledger containing records of his illicit activities, his reaction is priceless.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]