Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

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Isgrimnur
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Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Isgrimnur »

WaPo
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.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical report 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. Yates said there are 13 privately run facilities under the Bureau of Prisons purview.
...
The privately run facilities will not close overnight. Yates said the Justice Department would not terminate existing contracts but instead review those that come up for renewal. She said all the contracts would come up for renewal over the next five years.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

That seems like a huge change. It's an entire industry that they are nationalizing, again.

I've never been at ease with Imprisonment for profit, so in general I think the change is good, I'm just thinking about the actual change over, employment, facilities.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Isgrimnur »

The 10th amendment means that the states are free to keep doing whatever they'd like.

Stocks
Shares of two major prison stocks dropped sharply late Thursday morning following a report the U.S. Justice Department will end the use of private prisons.

Corrections Corp. of America and GEO both plunged more than 40 percent in midday trade. Trading in both stocks was intermittently halted amid their decline Thursday.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Isgrimnur »

ACLU
Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6 percent of state prisoners, 16 percent of federal prisoners, and inmates in local jails in Texas, Louisiana, and a handful of other states.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Moliere »

How about changing the drug and prostitution laws so we don't need so many damn prisons?
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Isgrimnur »

The states are working on the first, despite no movement from the feds.

The states would have to work on the second. There are legal brothels in Nevada, with some counties outlawing it on their own accord.

If you want to work on the second issue, you could start here.

And at the federal level, drug offenses outnumber sex offenses at a rate of 6:1.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

Isgrimnur wrote:ACLU
Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6 percent of state prisoners, 16 percent of federal prisoners, and inmates in local jails in Texas, Louisiana, and a handful of other states.
Ah, ok. That still seems like a huge amount of prisoners who need new homes. Assuming the Feds have a lot of people locked up. I have no idea what that number is, other than to assume it's large enough to make this a major undertaking.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Jeff V »

Does this also effect private detention centers that are massively overcrowded and used to incarcerate people sometimes for years as they wait for immigration hearings?
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by malchior »

According to their own stats they'll need to move 22,000 or so inmates somewhere. Perhaps they'll just buy out the private prisons. In any case, a huge change.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

That's actually less than I expected.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Blackhawk »

I know others have said it, but if they'd just ease enforcement 'War on Drugs' laws and keep releasing those offenders with what would no longer be criminal offenses, they'd have plenty of room to move the private offenders in. We've built so many prisons to support drug offenses that without the War on Drugs we'd have too much room.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Sepiche »

Mother Jones did a fascinating undercover report about conditions in one of CCA's prisons in Louisiana recently:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/201 ... tion-bauer

It's long, but worth the read for a little more background into how private prisons are often run.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

Thanks Sepiche. I'm not quite done the article but almost.

Eye opening. Especially since the author seemed to have picked that particular prison at random, not because it was reportedly one of the worst offenders.

Talk about awful for everyone, inmates and employees.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Blackhawk »

Damn, that's horrific. I worked in a low/medium/max/supermax prison run by the state. It has its problems, and lots of them, but nothing like that.

One thing I did gain from all the training there was an understanding of how certain things work.
Either the system shuts down the way it seems to be now, or there will end up being a massive, massive event comparable to Attica or New Mexico that will result in dozens of deaths and a huge backlash.

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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by stessier »

Man, that is a long article but totally worth reading.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Moliere »

Don’t end federal private prisons
By Sasha Volokh
This is unfortunate, for two reasons.

First, Yates seems to be exaggerating what empirical studies tell us about private vs. public prison comparisons. They do save money (though how much is a matter of dispute). And they don’t clearly provide worse quality; in fact, the best empirical studies don’t give a strong edge to either sector. The best we can say about public vs. private prison comparisons is a cautious “We don’t really know, but the quality differences are probably pretty minor and don’t strongly cut in either direction.” The Inspector General’s report doesn’t give us strong reason to question that result.

Second, even if all the bad things people say about private prisons were true, why not pursue a “Mend it, don’t end it” strategy? there’s a new trend in corrections to develop good performance measures and make payments contingent on those performance measures. If the private sector hasn’t performed spectacularly on quality dimensions to date, it’s because good correctional quality hasn’t been strongly incentivized so far. But the advent of performance-based contracting has the potential to open up new vistas of quality improvements — and the federal system, if it abandons contracting, may miss out on these quality improvements.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Isgrimnur »

A for-profit prison industry gives private corporations and individuals the limited self-interest to lobby and vote for draconian law enforcement procedures to keep their investments growing.

Of course, with the military industrial complex as a model, why wouldn't we want them to continue to sell the prison state as the solution to all that ails us?
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

If one side of a contract doesn't meet it's obligations under the contract, then the contract is broken. Why on earth would it be government's responsibility to "mend it", unless there was suitable motivation to do so?

Assuming private sector has shown it cannot meet its contractual obligations (at least not profitably) then this is a prime example of public sector doing what the private sector can't, or won't.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Jeff V »

Blackhawk wrote:I know others have said it, but if they'd just ease enforcement 'War on Drugs' laws and keep releasing those offenders with what would no longer be criminal offenses, they'd have plenty of room to move the private offenders in. We've built so many prisons to support drug offenses that without the War on Drugs we'd have too much room.
Until it's legal and above the table, there's always going to be a huge, often violent, organized crime element involved. Those people need to be put away. A kid with a lid in his pocket? Not so much.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by ydejin »

Isgrimnur wrote:A for-profit prison industry gives private corporations and individuals the limited self-interest to lobby and vote for draconian law enforcement procedures to keep their investments growing.
+1

I see this as one of the most problematic aspects of the for-profit prison system.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Kraken »

ydejin wrote:
Isgrimnur wrote:A for-profit prison industry gives private corporations and individuals the limited self-interest to lobby and vote for draconian law enforcement procedures to keep their investments growing.
+1

I see this as one of the most problematic aspects of the for-profit prison system.
+2. Prisoners should not be a commodity.

I wonder if anyone compared recidivism rates. Aren't state prisons still nominally "correctional facilities"? Even though the concept of rehabilitation is old fashioned, private prisons are biased toward making repeat customers.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by em2nought »

I guess my plan to let China build and run all of our prisons in China is out the window. All those shipping containers headed back over the Pacific would finally contain something too. Darn! :mrgreen:
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by Pyperkub »

Yeah, not so much I guess (Leavenworth is run by a private prison company? Who knew?). And constitutional rights abuse may be extremely rampant:
A court-appointed investigator has found that the United States Attorney’s Office for Kansas is in possession of hundreds of phone and video recordings of communications between attorneys and their clients, inmates at a privately run prison facility in Leavenworth.

At least 700 attorneys are believed to have been recorded without their knowledge, the investigator’s report submitted to a federal court said. Last week Special Master David Cohen asked to expand his probe to determine whether prosecutors regularly listened to and compiled attorney-client conversations. Already, 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings have been discovered in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City.
Oops. Thanks Obama!
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

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Pyperkub wrote:Yeah, not so much I guess (Leavenworth is run by a private prison company? Who knew?). And constitutional rights abuse may be extremely rampant:
A court-appointed investigator has found that the United States Attorney’s Office for Kansas is in possession of hundreds of phone and video recordings of communications between attorneys and their clients, inmates at a privately run prison facility in Leavenworth.

At least 700 attorneys are believed to have been recorded without their knowledge, the investigator’s report submitted to a federal court said. Last week Special Master David Cohen asked to expand his probe to determine whether prosecutors regularly listened to and compiled attorney-client conversations. Already, 227 phone call recordings and at least 30 videos of attorney-client meetings have been discovered in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Kansas City.
Oops. Thanks Obama!
There are threet prisons there, the military ones are run by the military.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_St ... y_Barracks
The United States Disciplinary Barracks (or USDB, popularly known as Leavenworth, or the DB) is a military correctional facility located on Fort Leavenworth, a United States Army post in Kansas.

It is one of three major prisons built on Fort Leavenworth property, the others being the federal United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth, four miles (6 km) to the south, and the military Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, which opened on 5 October 2010.

It reports to the United States Army Corrections Command and its commandant usually holds the rank of colonel.

The USDB is the U.S. military's only maximum-security facility that houses male service members convicted at court-martial for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Only enlisted prisoners with sentences over ten years, commissioned officers, and prisoners convicted of offenses related to national security are confined to the USDB. Enlisted prisoners with sentences under ten years are confined in smaller facilities, such as the nearby Midwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility or the Naval Consolidated Brig at Chesapeake, Virginia. Corrections personnel at the facility are Army Corrections Specialists (MOS 31E) trained at the U.S. Army Military Police school located at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, as well as Marine and Air Force corrections personnel.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by AWS260 »

The article that spurred this Justice Department decision is now a book.
“People say … we’ll hire anybody,” the prison’s head of training tells Bauer and his fellow cadets. “Which is not really true, but if you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver’s license and you willing to work, then we’re willing to hire you.” (Yes, that is an exact quote — Bauer carried a recording device concealed in a pen.) If you like that line, you’ll love this book; the sheer number of forehead-slapping quotes from Bauer’s superiors and fellow guards alone are worth the price of admission.
***
Bauer is a generous narrator with a nice ear for detail, and his colleagues come across as sympathetic characters, with a few notable exceptions. In a wonderful twist, he interviews a number of them after his deception is eventually exposed. How much loyalty does $9 per hour buy? About as much as you’d imagine; most are all too happy to help pull the curtain back on CCA.
The book review also includes an update on the topic of this thread:
It turned out to be a short-lived mandate, reversed almost immediately by the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Today the industry is thriving thanks to a bull market in immigrant detention.
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Re: Justice Dept to end use of private prisons

Post by GreenGoo »

*shocked*

Ok, not really.
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