the Justice Department announced it plans to phase out the use of privately run federal prisons. In a memo describing the policy shift, Deputy Attorney General [Sally] Yates said research showed private prisons, “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources” and “do not save substantially on costs,” either. Yates added that government education and training programs for prisoners, “proved difficult to replicate and outsource” in the private sector. In the memo, she said, as the contracts for 13 private federal facilities come to the end of their terms over the next five years, “the Bureau [of Prisons] should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope.” Some 22,000 federal prisoners out of a total of 193,000 will eventually be impacted by the move. Most are immigrants convicted of crossing the border without permission—charges that currently account for 50 percent of all federal prosecutions.
The Department of Justice announcement will have no direct impact on private immigrant detention facilities, which contract with the Department of Homeland Security. It also has no direct bearing on contracts for privately run prisons at the state level which house less than 7 percent of the total state prison population. But the news still sent stocks plummeting—Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation, which operate the 13 federal prisons.
CCA issued a statement today saying, “We are disappointed with the BOP’s decision to reduce its utilization of privately operated facilities to meet their capacity needs, and believe our value proposition remains strong. … At this time the contracts at the three facilities CCA operates on behalf of the BOP remain unchanged, and the BOP will determine whether to extend these contracts at the end of their respective contract terms,” unquote. The statement noted the contracts account for 7 percent of CCA’s total annual revenue.
All of this comes after a report released last week by the federal inspector general that found federal prisons run by private companies are substantially less safe and secure than ones run by the Bureau of Prisons, and feature higher rates of violence and contraband. It also follows a series of reports by investigative journalists. Some documented riots at these facilities in recent years, sparked by substandard food and medical care, and poor conditions. In other cases, prisoners have suffered in silence until their plight was exposed.
Seth Freed Wessler talking:
announcement by the Department of Justice came as a surprise to nearly everybody outside and inside the Bureau of Prisons. What the announcement says is that the Bureau of Prisons, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, over the next several years, will have to start shutting down its private prisons. You know, few people know that the federal government has established, over the last two decades, a sort of subsystem of federal private prisons used exclusively to hold noncitizens convicted of federal crimes. And these prisons have been the sites of repeated protests by prisoners, as I’ve documented in my reporting, and, as I found in an investigation for The Nation, deep and systemic failures to provide baseline levels of care to prisoners held inside, dozens of deaths of men who are held in these facilities, after substandard, negligent medical care.
And so, this decision by the Department of Justice will begin a process of shuttering these very facilities that I’ve been investigating, where protests have erupted over the years. And over the next five years, we’re going to see these prisons close. There are 13 of these federal prisons operating right now, scattered around the country, in Texas and California and the South and elsewhere. And I spoke yesterday to the relatives, actually, of several men who died inside of these facilities after pretty extreme kinds of medical neglect. Both of those families said that they felt that this decision to close these facilities brought some kind of justice, if too late for them. It’s a big decision.
– this policy has been in effect about two decades. Actually, it was in the mid-1990s, during the Bill Clinton administration, actually, that this began.
as the federal government was beginning to incarcerate more and more people, and the size of the federal prison population was growing, the federal government, Congress and the White House, decided to begin a process of privatizing a subset of federal prisons to meet their capacity needs. In several years after the process began, the government actually decided, quite explicitly, that immigrants, noncitizens, would be an ideal group of people to be held in these stripped-down federal prisons. The government has said in statements, the BOP has said it in statements, that the immigrants, because they will later be transferred to immigration authorities and deported, that the government doesn’t have to provide them with the same kinds of rehabilitative or re-entry services that they might provide to U.S. citizens, that immigrants are an ideal group for these kinds of segregated subsystem of prisons.
These facilities have expanded rapidly over the last 15 years as the number of immigrants who are prosecuted criminally for crossing the border has grown massively. Last year, 70,000 people were prosecuted in federal courts for border-crossing crimes, for entry after deportation or illegal entry. And this has helped to expand the federal criminal justice system and expand these private prisons.
Shane Bauer talking:
this news is certainly unprecedented and surprising. I mean, the findings of the Inspector General’s Office are not surprising. They’re consistent with findings from the Department of Justice over the years, from, you know, reports by journalists. They’re consistent with things that I saw at Winn in Louisiana. But, you know, this measure is certainly bigger than anything I expected.
As far as Damien Coestly, Damien was somebody who I had met while I was working at Winn. And after I left the prison, I learned that an inmate had committed suicide and that, you know, it was Damien Coestly. Damien was somebody who was very troubled. He, over the years, reported being suicidal. He also had been trying to change the way that CCA provided services, mental health services. At that prison of 1,500 inmates, there was only one part-time psychiatrist, one part-time psychologist and one full-time social worker. Damien had been trying to get into mental health programs; he had been waitlisted for two years. And he frequently went on suicide watch. And just to describe briefly what that is, it’s a solitary confinement cell, where a prisoner is naked, has only a tear-proof blanket. He’s given worse food, food that falls below USDA standards, and usually has no reading material or anything whatsoever in his cell. So this is the mental health services that Damien had. Damien went on hunger strike to try to get better mental health services. And eventually, Damien was put on suicide, and he was taken off, even though he was still claiming to be suicidal. He was not checked on the way that he was supposed to. And from what I saw at Winn, this was standard procedure. And he hung himself. And at the time of Damien’s death, he weighed 71 pounds.
CCA and GEO both, you know, started operating prisons in the 1980s. This was a time when the prison population was skyrocketing. States were trying to build prisons to take up, you know, some of that increased population, and they couldn’t build them fast enough. And CCA stepped in and said, “Look, we’ll operate prisons. We’ll also build prisons. We’ll run them more cheaply. And, you know, we’ll be helping you deal with this overcrowding problem.” So they kind of, you know, had—there was a need for them at one point.
And their argument now has consistently been that they’re saving money. And this is questionable, as the Department of Justice inspector general pointed out. But what’s important is that the—you know, to look at how they’re saving money. The main way that they save money is through staffing costs. The prison that I worked at, guards were paid $9 an hour. This was $3.50 less than the starting pay of guards at state-run facilities. Medical costs—you know, the company at the prison I worked, they had—if they sent a prisoner out for medical care, they had to bear that cost, so there’s, you know, a lot of resistance to sending prisoners out to the hospital. They had less mental health staff. There were days that I came into work where there were 24 guards for 1,500 prisoners. This is far below what their contract requires. And this problem has been found throughout CCA’s state and federal prisons. The inspector general has made reports on their audits showing that in one prison, where there were riots in the prison, that the riot was caused by understaffing and poor medical care. After they issued the report, they went back and found that that problem had not been corrected. This has happened in several states, as well.
And, you know, I think, to your question about how this is going to affect the states, I think it remains to be seen, but what I did see at Winn is that the company was under a lot of pressure by the state at that time to kind of get its act together, to improve security, improve healthcare, prevent escapes. There had been escapes while I was there. You know, the question is: How consistent is this throughout the country? But I certainly had a sense, from inside that one prison, that the company was struggling to try to hang onto it.
Seth Freed Wessler talking:
I talked to medical workers, doctors, physician’s assistants and nurses who work in this subsystem of federal prisons that will now begin to be shut down. And across the board, they said that they were pressed to cut costs. That particular doctor said that his corporate bosses, soon after he got his job as the medical director, had come to town to tell him to cut down on the number of 911 calls made, because they were expensive. In that very prison, shortly after he left his job, a prisoner died after suffering a stroke, and the prison decided to just leave him in his cell until morning. The only medical worker on the shift that night was a licensed vocational nurse with about a year of training. And across the board, these prisons are operating with deep understaffing, using undertrained workers. And I found stories in 30,000 pages of federal records I obtained through an open records request, an open records lawsuit—I found stories of people who went months, even more than a year, in some cases, seeing only nursing staff, often only licensed vocational nurses, complaining of increasing pain, increasing illness, until they became so ill that they died inside of these prisons.
What’s remarkable about the documents that I obtained and the interviews I did with people who work in these prisons, as well as letters from prisoners who later died, is that the Bureau of Prisons knew for years about the very problems that I’m talking about. After the Bureau of Prisons set up this subsystem of federal private prisons, they actually established a monitoring system, an oversight system, hired monitors to go in and check on these facilities. And those monitors would flag repeat and systemic failures, especially in medical care, over and over again, send those flags to Washington in hopes that something would change. In fact, when those flags went up, federal officials in Washington refused to impose the fines, the full penalties available to them. And when monitors tried to shut down federal prisons that were failing, the top officials in the Bureau of Prisons in Washington actually refused to let those monitors shut these prisons down. So, the decision today about—rather, yesterday, to shut down these private prisons comes as a great surprise, because monitors have been saying for years these prisons are failing, documenting these problems, the very same problems, in some cases, that the inspector general found in its report and that I found in my reporting. Now, finally, these facilities are going to start being closed as their contracts come up for renewal.
__________
Seth Freed Wessler
investigative reporter, author of a series on federal private prisons for The Nation magazine.
Shane Bauer
award-winning senior reporter for Mother Jones.
— source democracynow.org