On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the federal government would be slowing down and eventually cutting off entirely its relationship with the for-profit prison industry. She specified that contracts would not be terminated, but rather that they would not be renewed when they come up for assessment, which should close all private prisons housing federal inmates in the next five years.
I’ll take a break from my usual criticisms of the state of our prison system to say: Good job, DOJ. This is a step forward by any measure. As I’ve written previously, prison privatization has turned incarceration into an industry that runs on artificially inflated recidivism rates and the principle of greed over prisoner welfare. Any departure from that model is an improvement.
But as good as it is to hear this news, this isn’t the end of the fight for prison reform. Like President Obama’s ban on juvenile solitary confinement, which only ended up helping thirteen people across the nation, this policy shift applies only to prisons at the federal level — which means that out of about 1.6 million current state and federal prisoners, only about 28,000 will be affected by the change. So while the DOJ has taken a huge step in the right direction, it’s now the states’ turn.
As the Department of Justice noted in their announcement of the policy, private prisons experience more inmate violence against both other inmates and guards than do government-run prisons. They are more dangerous and less secure. They hire poorly-trained guards — increasing the chances of abuse — cut corners with inmate healthcare and nutrition to pump up their profits as much as possible, abuse solitary confinement and in various other ways are inferior to government-run prisons while failing to reduce the cost of prison on the taxpayer.
And while we’re on the subject of things that still need fixing in the justice system, how about the continued use of solitary confinement? How about mandatory minimums providing a lack of judicial discretion in sentencing? How about three-strikes laws? How about the fact that prisons are housing mentally ill inmates they are not equipped to deal with or help? How about our high (and possibly rising) recidivism rates? How about the racial disparity in arrests, sentencing and conviction?
I could go on, but today people who have called for prison reform have something to celebrate. The war isn’t over — there’s a long way to go, and we can't forget all the things we still have to work on — but for 28,000 people, an important battle has been won this week. Their lives will improve over the course of the next five years because of the steps taken by the DOJ on Thursday.
So regardless of how much there is left to fix, mark Aug. 18. The American prison system is moving in the right direction.