Obama administration to phase out some private prison use

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 stated in the memo to the federal Bureau of Prisons that it should decline to renew contracts with private prisons or substantially lower its capacity.

The policy change followed a recent audit report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, in which concerns were raised on safety and security problems in privately operated prisons.

In the memo, Yates said that by May 2017, the bureau is expected to house just 14,200 inmates in private prisons – a small percentage of the approximate 195,000 federal inmates now in the US.

The U.S. Justice Department will be ending its contracts with private prisons, but watchdog groups point out that Homeland Security will continue to use them for immigration detainees. Civil liberties groups have sued private prison companies over their treatment of migrant children.

Yates wrote that the initial contracts were written in response to an exploding prison population, but by 2013 that population began to decline, due in part to a resetting of sentencing guidelines.

The men and women working in our federal Bureau of Prisons are the most professional, highly trained correctional workers in the nation, and are uniquely equipped to handle the heavy demands of inmate supervision.

As of last December, less than 23,000 federal inmates were housed in private prisons.

The Bureau of Prisons spent $639 million on private prisons in fiscal 2014, according to the inspector general’s report.

The Department of Justice announced Thursday it will phase out its use of private prisons.

The directive, however, only applies to federal prisons, not state ones.

McFadyen said she expects the private-prison companies to intensify their lobbying in the General Assembly to staunch further losses. “And the worst cases, like the sickest inmates, they just hand back to the (Colorado Department of Corrections) to care for”.

The Department of Justice says it is no longer accepting new or renewing any contracts for private prisons. The Florida-based Geo Group saw its stock down 39.58% at Thursday’s closing bell on the New York Stock Exchange.

IN is home to two privately-owned prison facilities. Several for-profit prison companies, like LaSalle Southwest Corrections and Emerald Correctional Management, are private companies. Both companies get about half their revenue from the federal government.

The Inspector General’s report says there were an estimated 22,660 federal inmates housed in private prisons in 2015.