Almost three years ago, during his first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order instructing the Justice Department to stop renewing its contracts with private prison companies. The news was like a glimpse of blue sky for critics of the controversial sector—especially after four years of Donald Trump, who had fostered a cozy, mutually lucrative relationship with the private prison industry.
The order restored an Obama-era policy first announced in 2016—and later suspended by Trump administration—after a damning federal report found that private federal prisons were less safe and less secure than their publicly run counterparts. No longer would the Bureau of Prisons sign deals with corporations to lock up people serving federal prison sentences. Nor would the US Marshals Service, in charge of detaining people while they await trial on federal criminal charges, enter or renew contracts with those same companies.
Or, at least, that was the idea. And over the last three years, the Bureau of Prisons has indeed ended its use of private prisons—moving the roughly 14,000 […]
When a company is hired to do something, it’s main purpose is making money. Let’s be real. So is it with private prisons where inmates are dying from lack of proper medical care, eat terrible food, have untrained guards who do not foster any well-being in these prisons. There are no longer training programs (because that would cost them money) to help inmates have skills when they leave prison and use solitary confinement as a first case punishment, which is detrimental to the health of anyone who has experienced this. ALL prisons must get rid of for-profit prison systems. They are anathema to anything that would hope for rehabilitation and reform for any inmates. Terri Quint