Summary
In a major shift promoted by the Obama administration, the United States federal government is poised to end its use of private prisons, concluding that they are less secure and not cost effective. What does this shift mean for Latin America, where in recent years governments have been increasingly interested in prison privatization?
On August 18, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released a landmark memo instructing federal personnel to phase out their reliance on private prisons. The announcement was based on a report comparing 14 prisons operated by private companies and 14 prison facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The findings are staggering. Researchers found that private prisons had significantly higher incidents of violence than their government-operated counterparts. According to the report, private prisons saw nine times as many lockdowns due to emergency security situations, roughly 30 percent more incidents of inmates assaulting each other, and over 50 percent more incidents of assaults on prison staff. Private prisons also seized larger numbers of contraband like drugs, weapons, and cell phones. The report also identified major pitfalls in overseeing healthcare provision at private prisons, corroborating multiple press reports in recent years.
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The August 18 DOJ memo concluded that the department should either refrain from renewing contracts with private prison operators when they expire, or “substantially reduce” their scope. This is a significant shift in federal policy, but as Stanford Law Fellow Mirte Postema has pointed out, its impact nationally is limited because it applies only to privately-operated prisons at the federal level, which currently number 13 and whose inmates account for only about 8 percent of the nation’s entire prison population. State and local governments are still free to use private facilities, and the DOJ directive does not apply to immigrant detention centers, which today account for the lion’s share of private prison contracts in the country and are granted through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Still, the DOJ report sends a signal to state authorities and DHS officials that they should also be questioning their reliance on the private sector to operate prison facilities.
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