In a memo that said the privatization of federal prisons has been, in effect, a financial and operational failure, the Department of Justice announced Thursday that it will not renew any of its existing contracts with companies that incarcerate and monitor inmates for the federal government.
The memo, signed by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, said that while private prisons were necessary years ago, when incarceration rates surged and the federal government was unable to establish new capacity, they are no longer a desirable alternative to corrections facilities run by the Bureau of Prisons.
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“Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities,” she wrote.
“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. The rehabilitative services that the Bureau provides, such as educational programs and job training, have proved difficult to replicate and outsource -- and these services are essential to reducing recidivism and improving public safety.”
At its peak, the federal government spent $639 million on private prison contracts in 2014.
The Inspector General’s report to which Yates referred was released last week. It was prompted by the finding that “In recent years, disturbances in several federal contract prisons resulted in extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a Correctional Officer.”
In the review, the IG’s investigators found that private prisons are not as well run as federal prisons.
“In a majority of the categories we examined, we found that contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions and that the BOP could improve its contract monitoring efforts in several areas,” it reads.
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“Our analysis of data on safety and security indicators found that contract prisons had more incidents per capita than BOP institutions in three quarters of the categories we examined. While the contract prisons had fewer positive inmate drug tests and sexual misconduct allegations than BOP institutions, they had more frequent incidents of contraband finds, assaults, uses of force, lockdowns, guilty findings on inmate discipline charges, and selected categories of grievances.”
There was pushback from the private prison industry, which called the DOJ findings unfair because the demographic makeup of prisoners relegated to contract facilities is different -- typically containing more immigrants and non-English speakers -- from the federal inmate population.
Scott Marquardt, president of Management and Training Corp., which managed contract prisons, wrote, “MTC strongly disagrees with the conclusions and inferences of this report. Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons. The conclusion is wrong and is not supported by the work done by the OIG.
“The comparison of two sets of prisons is comparing apples and oranges. The contract prisons are holding criminal aliens. The OIG reports that 90% of the inmates in the contract facilities are Mexicans. If the OIG looked into the composition of the BOP prisons, it would find a much more balanced demographic mix.”
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Marquardt noted that it is standard practice in BOP facilities to disperse inmates of similar background to reduce the influence of gangs in the facilities, and suggested that the concentration of prisoners with similar backgrounds in contract prisons could explain the difference in safety incidents.
The Department of Justice was evidently not persuaded, and its reaction to the IG report was dramatically different from what the IG recommended, which was only an increase in the degree and quality of oversight.
In her memo, Yates wrote, “I am eager to enlist your help in beginning the process of reducing -- and ultimately ending -- our use of privately operated prisons. As you know, all of the Bureau’s existing contracts with private prison companies are term-limited and subject to renewal or termination. I am directing that, as each contract reaches the end of its term, the Bureau should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope in a manner consistent with law and the overall decline of the Bureau’s inmate population.”
The announcement came just two months after a major investigative project by Mother Jones magazine placed a reporter undercover as a guard in a privately run prison. The resulting expose revealed extraordinary inefficiency, incompetence and abuse in the system.
