It was recently announced by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates that the Bureau of Prisons will be phasing out its federal private prison contracts.
This is, in no small way, a major victory for civil rights in the United States. Federal private prisons, compared to other facilities operated by the Bureau of Prisons, were found to not only provide no substantial fiscal benefits, but to also severely under-perform in a wide array of categories.
Right now 30,000 federal inmates are housed in private facilities but by the end of the decade that will likely fall to zero.
However, there are still private prisons under state contracts. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, as of 2014 there were roughly 100,000 inmates in private facilities. In seven states, at least one in five prisoners were housed in this way.
It is time that private prisons, as whole, came to an end in the United States. They do not work as advertised and have become a black eye to civil rights progress.
In 2015 Sen. Bernie Sanders actually introduced a bill that would ban states from contracting with private prisons. It's time for Congress to pass it.
If you believe Congress now has a responsibility to take private prison abolition to the state level, please add your name!
