In August of 2016, the former Dep. Attorney General Sally Yates, via the Obama administration, made a public announcement to federal officials that the phasing out “for-profit” private prisons would begin in December. At the time, contracted prisons were holding approximately 12% of the country’s federal inmates. In her memo posted on the Department of Justice (DOJ) website, Yates stated:
“We now have approximately 195,000 inmates in bureau or private contract facilities down from a high in 2013 of approximately 220,000.
This decline in the prison population means that we can better allocate our resources to ensure that inmates are in the safest facilities and receiving the best rehabilitative services – services that increase their chances of becoming contributing members of their communities when they return from prison.”
Almost a month to the day when Trump too office, his current appointee U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, known for racism and who’s been under scrutiny for lying under oath in Congress about his relationship with Russia, basically nixed all the laborious monitoring and reports that supported the phasing out of contract prisons. His actions will cause more non-violent people (especially of men of color) to spend more underserved time in prison. His actions destroyed an important Obama-era accomplishment and in one swift order set our country back again. And he not only lied saying the prison system had been working, he also helped the greedy financially fit corporations to further profit — in billions. As an aside, one can’t help wonder if Donald Trump has undisclosed stock in private/contracted prison businesses, but then the American people are not privy that kind of presidential transparency anymore.
The Sessions action was greatly objected by human rights organizations and advocates for prisoners. Wade Henderson, who heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights has a big problem with Sessions’ move.
“Continuing to rely on private prisons for federal inmates is neither humane nor budget conscious,” Henderson added. “We need a justice system that can work better for all people.”
Henderson is right. But like the National Rifle Association (NRA), private prisons are controlled by big money and thus very difficult to fight.
Why fight? In August of 2016, the Office of the Inspector General published a report after inspecting and monitoring both government-run and private contract prisons. They accumulated information that showed prisons for-profit are problematic. That’s putting it lightly.
Our analysis included data from FYs 2011through 2014 in eight key categories: (1) contraband, (2) reports of incidents, (3) lockdowns, (4) inmate discipline, (5) telephone monitoring, (6) 3 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 also had higher rates of assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff.
In a 2015, Mother Jones published excerpts from a University of Wisconsin study that held nothing back and stating privatized prisons are simply keeping inmates locked up longer — to boost profits.
Researcher Anita Mukherjee studied eight years of data from Mississippi, which has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, and found that private prisons there doled out twice the amount of infractions against inmates, lengthening their sentences by an average of two or three months.
The extra time, Mukherjee found, adds up to an increase of about $3,000 in additional costs per prisoner. Mukherjee also noted that inmates housed in private prisons were more likely to wind up back in the system after being released—despite industry claims of lower recidivism rates.
It should be noted that the majority of inmates in private prisons are people of color. A Pew report states that although the rate of black female prisoners continues to grow, one in every eleven prisoners is a black male. In no uncertain terms, this is American racism for profit. And more and more private jails and prisons are filling up their facilities with non-violent inmates. But we need to keep our prisons full for a real profit, right? Just the effort it takes to fill the cells is extremely costly.
“...Focus must be placed on locking up the most dangerous people instead of diverting time and money to incarcerate the wrong people.” U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.)
This does not include the illegal deals made with law enforcement for more arrests to be made and deals for stronger sentencing — for profit. Not only do private prisons make huge profits, law enforcement, through “civil forfeiture,” and bail companies also profit.
Reports and statistics prove for-profit prisons are not only unsafe and unproductive, many are inhumane and a waste of the people’s hard-earned tax dollars. Despite those facts, contracted prisons are first and foremost lucrative for a handful of private businesses. And now, via an executive order that Donald Trump signed only days after his inauguration, even more money will be shifted and sifted into those companies.
Trump has signed an executive order calling for expansion of immigrant detention facilities and authorized the use of private contractors “to construct, operate, or control facilities.”
The private detention facilities holding immigrants is another overlooked subject of human rights violations. Most detainees have committed no crimes other than a misdemeanor for crossing the U.S. border without proper documentation. They are segregated and kept in jail indefinitely and many are treated worse than hard criminals, with practically no medical or legal help available to them. If keeping prisoners locked up is more profitable than releasing them, then there is the crux of private prisons, and the detriment to America and human rights . And boy do we do well in that category.
“It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25 percent of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.”–Hillary Rodham Clinton speech on criminal justice at Columbia University, April 29, 2015
So the prison system is not about locking up the most dangerous criminals or rehabilitating the less dangerous so they can go back out and become productive members of society, this is about money.
Just as for-profit prison stocks, affiliated private prisons plummeted after President Obama announced the phasing out of private prisons, stocks surged on Walls Street last week as Sessions phased it all back in. Phew, now the private prisons can get back to their main priority — finding human product to fill their facilities to see their profits to grow.