WaPo | “This is a huge deal. It is historic and groundbreaking,” said David
Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “For the last 35
years, the use of private prisons in this country has crept ever upward,
and this is a startling and major reversal of that trend, and one that
we hope will be followed by others.”
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.
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.
The problems at private
facilities were hardly a secret, and Yates said Justice Department and
Bureau of Prisons officials had been talking for months about
discontinuing their use. Mother Jones recently published a 35,000-word
exposé detailing a reporter’s undercover work as a private prison guard
in Louisiana — a piece that found serious deficiencies. The Nation magazine wrote earlier this year about deaths under questionable circumstances in privately operated facilities.
