Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons
88 replies, posted
[quote]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.
The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a [URL="https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e1606.pdf#page=2"]critical report[/URL] concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and had eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report.
Disturbances in the facilities, the report said, led in recent years to “extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a Correctional Officer.” The report listed several examples of mayhem at private facilities, including a May 2012 riot at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi in which 20 people were injured and a correctional officer killed. That incident, according to the report, involved 250 inmates who were upset about low-quality food and medical care.
“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services, and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that,” Yates said in an interview.[/quote]
[url]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/08/18/justice-department-says-it-will-end-use-of-private-prisons/[/url]
this is big.
if true, then the US again moves one step closer to being a reasonable society.
Oh wow, really?
Haven't heard a thing about this in the news or anything. Guess the election is sort of overshadowing literally everything else.
Wow, this is excellent. There aren't a whole lot of private federal prisons, but getting rid of them is a huge step forward. Props to the DoJ. They're on a roll.
I hope this sets some kind of precedent for the DoJ to investigate private state prisons and see if they're similarly poor-quality and pointless. That's actually a larger issue for me - because private state prisons have way more nonviolent criminals than federal ones, and they're incentivized to keep them in prison for as long as possible to get as much cheap labor out of them as possible. Shut that shit down.
Wow, this is huge actually. One of the biggest problems... if not THE biggest problem in America right now is it's Private Prisons.
So, so, so many problems stem from the private prison system, it's absurd. This is really great.
This is too good to be true
[quote]Scott Marquardt, president of Management and Training Corporation, wrote that comparing Bureau of Prisons facilities to privately operated ones was “comparing apples and oranges.” He generally disputed the inspector general’s report.
“Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons,” Marquardt wrote. “The conclusion is wrong and is not supported by the work done by the [Office of the Inspector General].”[/quote]
Boohoo, stop crying that you can't exploit criminals for profit anymore.
I'm in complete agreement with this (private prisons being phased out) as it's become a huge problem with how the inmates are being treated and how they have a worse record in general when it comes to inmate safety and inmate programs.
Another one to perhaps add to Obama's legacy? Because private prisons are abhorrent and getting rid of them would be the first step on the way to reforming the American justice system, which seems to be in dire need of change.
Thank you, Department of Justice, for starting to end this scandal.
wow i didn't expect this to happen for quite a few years or so, this is great news
HOLY SHIT YES. Fuck those things, finally some good news about the justice system
If this turns out to be true, it'll be a major blow to the profit gained from the war on drugs.
Good. Decriminalization will become a lot easier with less profit on the line for its opponents.
Private prisons?
I didn't even know such things existed until now.
Wonder what California and New Orleans/Louisiana are gonna do for money now.
If that is true that is HUGE news. Very good news.
Holy shit! This is massive. This is going to dramatically change the face of the criminal justice system in the US!
That sounds positive - but what about all the kickbacks? Cash for criminals and all that? Someone's going to be losing money somewhere, surely? Will it be allowed?
Hold on what, [I]what[/I]?
[I]We had privately owned prisons?[/I]
jfc the rest of the world was right, we're dumb. Why in the absolute hell would anyone think this was a good or safe idea?
Now I just want to see this actually get done.
this is a huge step in the right direction for america
Holy fuck is this for real?
What's with the sudden change of heart???
[QUOTE=JoeSkylynx;50908469]Holy fuck is this for real?
What's with the sudden change of heart???[/QUOTE]
The intense public scrutiny of the criminal justice system the past several years has likely been a motivating factor. The data to support this decision has existed for ages, but widespread demand for justice system reforms may have actually prompted the action.
[QUOTE=gk99;50908441]Hold on what, [I]what[/I]?
[I]We had privately owned prisons?[/I]
jfc the rest of the world was right, we're dumb. Why in the absolute hell would anyone think this was a good or safe idea?[/QUOTE]
Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector with the requirements and stipulations that they want, and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.
This is awesome, but is this only for federal prisons, or is this a nationwide policy? In other words, are private prisons gone for good, or just some of them?
Killing the private sector in industry that should by all rights be governed by the government is a step in the right direction.
Hopefully this will be the jump off point to reforming criminal judgement standards. The war on drugs is still going strong even though it's pretty much common knowledge these days it's a massive failure and only doing more harm than good. One war in which the private reform centers are profiting off of the most. Disgusting.
Private prisons jesus, sounds like something from the 1800s
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;50908483]Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector with the requirements and stipulations that they want, and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.[/QUOTE]
I think you are missing the biggest issue with private prisons.
They are like any other service, yes. But a prison should absolutely not be.
It's a for profit company that benefits from having more prisoners so they bribe politicians to enforce more strict laws to bring more people to prison.
They have an incentive to get as mane people as possible behind bars.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;50908483]Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector with the requirements and stipulations that they want, and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.[/QUOTE]
But.. We're posting in a thread where the Justice Department is literally declaring that private prisons are worse than government-run prisons. I don't understand how you can say private prisons aren't inherently worse when literally all of the evidence (and just common sense based on the incentivizing of imprisonment) points to that being wrong.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;50908483]Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector with the requirements and stipulations that they want, and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.[/QUOTE]
The primary issue being that private prisons are, first and foremost concerned about maximizing profit, which almost unfailingly results in less effective, less h7mane, and more dangerous prison environments. While I'm all for the idea of a cost efficient prison system, we cannot forget that the ultimate role of the prison system is to rehabilitate and release prisoners, molding former criminals into productive members of society. This is epically mismanaged by private prisons, not the least of which is because they have no incentive to rehabilitate. The bigger the prison population, the more money private prisons make, and thus it is in their own best interests to only provide the bare minimum, and with little oversight, to comply with regulations.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;50908483]Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector [B]with the requirements and stipulations that they want[/B], and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.[/QUOTE]
Bold part is where it has consecutively gone wrong and wrong and wrong...
The private market has its benefits, but some things just need to be done by well meaning bureaucrats not working with profit margins but with result percentages in mind.
[QUOTE=Silence I Kill You;50908483]Privately owned and run prisons aren't inherently any worse than state run prisons. That's determined by how they are operated. Prisons are like any other service. The government has two choices. They can create their own system, or they can contract it out to the private sector with the requirements and stipulations that they want, and pay them to do all of the work and take all of the risk.[/QUOTE]
There's an inherent problem with private prisons, though - they're for-profit. They aren't incentivized to rehabilitate and release prisoners back into society. They'd rather have them be repeat offenders so that they go back to prison and continue to work for pennies on the hour. Private prisons have no incentive to rehabilitate, they only have an incentive to make a profit - and they do that by abusing the law to pay inmates far below the legal minimum wage. There's zero incentive to release for good behavior or anything else.
Government prisons are the opposite - they're incentivized to get prisoners out quickly to lower costs. That doesn't mean they'll do well on recidivism and repeat offenders necessarily, but repeat offenses cost them more, while in private prisons repeat offenders [I]earn[/I] them more.
The only way to incentivize private prisons to rehabilitate is for the government to inspect them and give them grants based on their recidivism rate. And at that point, you just have the government paying a private company to run a prison like the government would already run them, except now you're incentivizing them to just barely hit the mark to get the grant and not go any further. It's inherently broken - and if they aren't doing any better than government-run prisons, why bother with it? You're paying a company to run a prison for you, paying them to focus away from the profit incentive - why not just run it yourself?
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