By David A. Love — The Grio
The federal government is getting out of the private prison game, with an announcement that the Justice Department will no longer contract with for-profit prison companies.
This is big news, and here’s why you should care.
In a memo, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision, laying out why the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has decided to go this route of “beginning the process of reducing — and ultimately ending — the use of privately operated prisons.”
She noted that with a federal prison population that grew 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, the federal government contracted with private correctional institutions in order to manage this rise in the number of prisoners. In 2013, private prisons reached their peak, with 15 percent of federal prisoners, or 30,000 inmates, housed in those facilities. (According to the ACLU, private prisons are responsible for 6 percent of state prisoners as well as local jails in states such as Texas and Louisiana.)
Now, the federal prison population is dropping for the first time in decades, from 220,000 three years ago to 195,000 today. That’s a good reason to eliminate the private prisons, but here’s one that’s even better:
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