The United States government just sounded a death knell for the prison-industrial complex.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday that it plans on ending the continued use of private prison facilities after officials “concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government,” the Washington Post reports.
The announcement comes one week after the DOJ’s inspector general published a scathing report on the status of the “contract prisons” the Bureau of Prisons began operating in 1997 to handle overcrowding in federal institutions (as of December 2015, contract prisons housed roughly 12 percent of the Bureau of Prisons’ total inmate population). The inspector general concluded that private prisons “incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Bureau of Prisons] institutions,” ranging from “extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a Correctional Officer.”
The inspector general’s report was something of a nail in the coffin for private facilities. “[Contract prisons] simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” said the DOJ’s Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates in a statement.
[For more of this story, written by Jared Keller, go to https://psmag.com/the-departme...93063f935#.7urw0lb83]
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