Tag: shane bauer
Justice Department Plans To End Use Of Private Prisons

Justice Department Plans To End Use Of Private Prisons

The Justice Department announced plans to cease using private prisons Thursday, a week after a highly critical report was released by the DOJ inspector general about the oversight and safety of private facilites. Currently, private prisons house 12 percent of federal inmates, and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in the memo released Thursday that the goal was “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

The memo instructs federal officials to not renew private prison contracts at their expiration or to reduce their scope.

According to Yates,“They 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.”

The announcement and DOJ report come after a Mother Jonesinvestigation revealed major deficiencies in a private prison in Louisiana and a Nation magazine investigation earlier this summer that highlighted many cases of prisoner deaths under questionable circumstances. The Mother Jones exposé detailed reporter Shane Bauer’s undercover experiences as a private prison guard and documented a serious lack of staffing, security and higher levels of violence. The DOJ’s report itself, as well, found that private prisons are generally more violent than federal prisons.  According to the Nation report, the Bureau of Prisons contracted with private facilities in order to cut costs. Because of this scheme, the companies running private prisons are permitted to operate under a looser set of rules than government-run facilities — which led directly to unnecessary prisoner fatalities.

 

After the news was released Thursday, there was an immediate drop in stock prices for two of the country’s largest private prison companies. Although the private prisons will not have their government contracts ended immediately, every contract is expected to come up for review within five years.

“We have to be realistic about the time it will take, but that really depends on the continuing decline of the federal prison population, and that’s really hard to accurately predict,” Yates said.

Yates also said that private prisons had been shown to be less effective than government-run facilities. The three major operators of private prisons are Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.

Yates will unsure about the cost of the closure of prisons and did not make a decisive judgment on whether government costs would escalate.

Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton has stated that she would like to end the use of private prisons. The cessation of private prisons by the Justice Department will likely see an uptick in costs, despite what Yates may be publicly stating at this time, but the “for-profit” prison industry has been under public scrutiny for many years. Ending the use of private prisons may be the first critical step in restructuring the justice system at large.

Photo: U.S. Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates testifies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Going Dark: Encryption, Technology, and the Balance Between Public Safety and Privacy” in Washington July 8,  2015. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque  

Freed Hikers Highlight American Hypocrisy

Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer — the two American hikers who were freed last week after more than two years of imprisonment in Iran — held a revealing press conference this morning that shined a light on the United States’ hypocritical national security policies.

Fattal and Bauer began by describing their horrible treatment while imprisoned in Iran, saying that “we have been held in almost total isolation from the world and everything we love, stripped of our rights and freedom. … Solitary confinement was the worst experience of our lives.” Fattal went on to say that “[m]any times, too many times, we heard the screams of other prisoners being beaten and there was nothing we could do to help them.”

If their ordeal sounds familiar, perhaps it’s because it is so similar to the way that the United States treats its prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons across the globe. The United States holds detainees for years at a time without any hope of due process, and has been unapologetic about using torture to interrogate prisoners.

Indeed, that irony was not lost on Fattal and Bauer. As Bauer explained:

“In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.

We do not believe that such human rights violation on the part of our government justify what has been done to us: not for a moment. However, we do believe that these actions on the part of the U.S. provide an excuse for other governments — including the government of Iran — to act in kind.”

Bauer is exactly right. The United States’ deplorable treatment of its detainees does not justify Iran’s, but it should not go unnoticed in this story. How can the United States criticize Iran’s treatment of American prisoners, when it would treat suspected Iranian spies captured in the United States in almost the exact same manner?

The mere fact that the United States’ human rights record can now be reasonably compared to Iran’s is an embarrassment. When Senator Obama was running for president, he promised to close Guantanamo Bay and end the use of torture on detainees. As Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer have reminded us, we’re still waiting for him to follow through.