Trump Admin Scraps Plan To Abandon For-Profit Prisons — Stocks Hit Record High
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By Jack Burns
The Trump Administration’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a one paragraph memo to the Federal Bureau of Prisons Thursday, reversed an Obama administration directive to phase out and ultimately end private prison corporations’ partnership with the federal government. The Federal Bureau of Prisons contracts with the private prisons to house inmates largely convicted of immigration violations. “The 14 private prisons currently contracted by the federal government almost exclusively incarcerate low-risk inmates who were convicted of immigration offenses. The prisons house around 22,000 people at an annual cost of $600m,” writes The Guardian.
The move by Sessions came less than a year after the Justice Department concluded, as a result of an extensive investigation, the private prisons were unsafe, understaffed, overpopulated, and often placed prisoners in punitive solitary confinement, simply because the prison was overpopulated.
Their use is not without controversy and justifiable objections. The Orlando Sentinel explains the conflict of interests inherent in using private companies to punish prisoners convicted in the public’s judicial system. “Many public agencies use for-profit vendors, and rightly so,” meaning it’s one thing to use a wholesale food supplier to supply the prison’s cafeteria, “But incarcerating and rehabilitating a human being is not the same as delivering office paper,” writes the Sentinel. “In the case of criminal justice, the profit motive creates incentives,” to jail more prisoners by lobbying legislators to pass tougher penalties for laws, thereby bringing in more prisoners and keeping them in prison for longer jail sentences.
Those “values,” writes the Sentinel, “conflict with the public interest” and lead to the industry known as the Prison Industrial Complex, an industry which exists only if it has inmates to house. “The States should follow the lead of the Department of Justice and phase out private prisons,” concludes Orlando’s most influential newspaper.
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