The federal government is backing away from private prisons, but that doesn't mean much in Washington
Private prisons got their foothold in the United States in the 1980s. Since then, one person’s solution to prison overcrowding has become another’s boogeyman, a terrifying marriage of capitalism and criminal justice.
Despite decades of advocacy against private prisons, government movement on the issue was checkered.
Perhaps that’s why the Aug. 18 decision by the Department of Justice to gradually end its contract with private prison companies seemed so jarring.
The Office of the Inspector General, an oversight body, released a report the week prior evaluating the relative safety and cost effectiveness of private prisons. It found that the private prisons tended to have more contraband, assaults, use of force and guilty findings on inmates than those run by the Bureau of Prisons.
The report also found that private prisons could not claim, without qualification, that they cost the taxpayer less than public prisons.
It concluded that the Bureau of Prisons, part of the Department of Justice, take a long, hard look at how it monitored its contracts with private prisons and “evaluate why contract prisons had more safety and security incidents in these categories and identify possible approaches for corrective action.”
Management and Training Corporation, one of three companies that runs private prisons for the federal government, pushed back on the report. In a statement released to the press, officials claimed that comparing public and private prisons was comparing “apples to oranges” due to demographic differences and that private facilities were cheaper.
It didn’t help.
A week later, Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates informed Thomas Kane, the acting director of the Bureau of Prisons, that as private prison contracts came up for renewal, “the bureau should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope…”
“This is the first step in the process of reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons,” Yates wrote.
That sentence dropped into the news cycle like a lead weight.
By close of the stock market on Aug. 18, the stock value of Corrections Corporation of America dropped from its Wednesday close of $27.22 a share to $17.57. Geo Group, the second of the three, saw a more dramatic plunge from $32.29 on Aug. 17 to $19.51 the day after.
The third, Management and Training Corporation, is not a publicly traded company.
Advocates rejoiced.
“It’s a very significant moment,” said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit working to reform the criminal justice system with a focus on sentencing and alternatives to incarceration.
Mauer does not support private prisons. He calls them a “fundamental problem in our democracy,” and finds the idea of contracting out the responsibility to deprive people of liberties “disturbing.” Moreover, private prisons are less and less important in the overall context of federal incarceration because the federal prison population has been declining for years.
Add declining numbers to critical reports by the Office of the Inspector General and a damning expose released earlier this year by left-leaning news outlet Mother Jones, where a reporter infiltrated the system as a guard, and you’ve got momentum.
“It’s easier for them to take an action like this now because they don’t have quite the pressure for bed spaces that they did a few years ago,” Mauer said. “It’s very much in keeping with their reform agenda.”
With fewer prisoners, private companies would have to be more cost effective to maintain their foothold in public contracting. However, the report revealed that they were not, necessarily, the cheaper option and that facilities run by the Bureau of Prisons tended to have fewer safety problems.
The impacts of private prisons go beyond what happens in the inside. It has a lot to do with how prisoners can interact with the outside world, as well.
Private prisons do not have geographic constraints — a prisoner in one state can be sent to a private prison in another. This can have implications for a prisoner’s ability to show up to court dates, or get visits from family members, Mauer said.
Officials from the state of Washington recognized the problematic nature of sending prisoners away in 2011, said Jeremy Barclay, spokesperson for the Washington State Department of Corrections.
“The state can contract with [Corrections Corporation of America] or Geo [Group],” Barclay said. “But whether that’s one in the backyard or across the U.S. is part of the problem.”
The option remains open if the state hits a capacity issue, but Washington does not currently send inmates to private prisons, Barclay said.
That means that the decision by the federal department does not have a direct impact on Washingtonians.
The only private facility affiliated with the federal government is the Tacoma Northwest Detention Center, a facility run by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It falls under the Department of Homeland Security, meaning it was untouched by Yates’ announcement.
In fact, the announcement will only change the situation of the 22,024 federal prisoners currently held in 13 private facilities across the country, and it won’t do so overnight — the contracts simply will not be renewed.
To put that in perspective, as of Aug. 25, 193,070 people were incarcerated in federal prisons. A 2014 census of 3,163 jail facilities included 39 that were privately run. In that year, there were 2,224,400 people incarcerated in the U.S., 744,600 in local jail and 1,561,500 in prison.
Still, the advocacy community sees the policy shift as a victory.
“With its announcement today, the Justice Department has made clear that the end of the Bureau of Prisons’ two-decade experiment with private prisons is finally in sight,” said David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project, in a statement.
So what would a world with fewer prisons look like?
Raphael Sperry has some thoughts.
Sperry is president of the Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR), a nonprofit out of Berkeley, California, that seeks to further social justice and environmental protection through thoughtful infrastructure and design.
Sperry has gone through a number of workshops on how to make facilities like prisons and jails work for the community after their closure.
The buildings are block-like, tend to take up large, unified spaces and are often in towns that are out of the way and have become reliant on the prison for the local economy and employment. Finding alternatives can be tricky.
Disused prisons in the United Kingdom have become hotels and student accommodations. North Carolina closed a number of rural prisons and turned them into youth training facilities that had features like a recording studio, aquaponics area and gardening opportunities.
“It does take creativity to figure out how to do this, but creativity is a renewable resource,” Sperry said.
The most important component of reuse is community outreach, a process of developing a plan that best meets local needs, he said.