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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 25 2017, @09:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money dept.

Private prisons are making a comeback:

The Trump administration is rolling back an Obama-era plan to phase out the federal government's use of private prisons. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo Thursday to the Bureau of Prisons rescinding the Obama administration's Aug. 16 order advising the bureau not to renew any contracts with private prisons, according to a copy of the letter. Then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had instructed officials to either not renew private prison contracts or substantially reduce the scope of such contracts to ultimately end the department's use of privately operated prisons altogether.

Who stands to benefit?

Attorney General Jeff Sessions's four-sentence memo rescinding Justice Department guidance to reduce the use of private prisons sent stock soaring for the two companies that dominate the industry, Geo Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). That's not necessarily because the memo will lead to a ramp-up in Geo- or CoreCivic-run federal prisons. As of December 2015, about 12 percent of all inmates in federal prisons were housed in private facilities, representing only 22,660 inmates. That certainly won't decline under Sessions, but he didn't promise to increase it substantially. "I direct the [Bureau of Prisons] to return to its previous approach," Sessions wrote. Anyway, DoJ renewed a pair of contracts with CoreCivic despite the now-scuttled order, so it's unclear if the status quo ever stopped.

Also at CNN Money.

Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Monitoring of Contract Prisons (August 2016).


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:19AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:19AM (#471777)

    Just look at these incredibly depressing statistics including the number of prisoners and per capita figures. Land of free my ass.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 26 2017, @06:52PM (#471955)

    prison is how the rich get the middle class to pay the "taxes" for the poor. If you're too poor to "contribute to society" then you have to go to prison (after all, they can't have you hanging around stinking up the place) and the middle class has to pay for it or else stab happy MS13 wannabes or "Tavandre the shurm monster" might get them or their children. Of course, the alternative is educating all the little morons (hint: socialist indoctrination centers don't create free and educated people) before they grow into these nuisances and having a diamond shaped socioeconomic structure, but that's harder than preying on the weak or creating business models/governments not based on slavery/fraud/serfdom.