President Joe Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that will eliminate the Department of Justice’s use of private prisons.
The move is part of the government’s effort to tackle racial inequality in the country and deliver on Biden’s campaign promises to black Americans – which were essential to securing his presidential victory.
The order instructs the Department of Justice to refuse to renew contracts with private for-profit prisons. This effort began under the Obama administration and was sponsored by then Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. The policy was quickly deactivated by the Trump administration in 2017. Now, scholars are taking a closer look at the restored policy and questioning its overall impact on racial inequality.
“When it comes to private prisons, the impact of that order will be minimal or nil,” said John Pfaff, professor of law at Fordham University School of Law. “It’s not about reducing the footprint of the federal prison system, it’s just about transferring people to public facilities. Biden is telling an executive agency under his control what kind of contracts they can enter into, this is a central executive function for Biden. “
States can still choose “with whom to sign contracts,” said Pfaff. “In practice, this will end up being more symbolic and will have little impact on any issue of racial and system justice. Symbolism carries the very real risk of making us blind to the almost identical incentives of the public prison sector, and on the public side it is much broader in scope. “
Few details have been released on the order to reduce the use of private prisons, but the initial Obama-era policy focused on about a dozen private facilities. The Federal Bureau of Prisons then said that approximately 195,000 people were incarcerated on the premises of the bureau or under private contract. Today, there are almost 152,000 people incarcerated by the federal government, with 14,000 housed in privately managed facilities, according to The Associated Press.
A 2016 Department of Justice report found that private prisons have high rates of aggression, use of force incidents and blockades. With that, Biden said at a news conference on Tuesday that the policy is “the first step in preventing corporations from profiting from less human and less secure incarceration”. He called this the beginning of his overall plan to address systemic problems in the criminal justice system.
An administration spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During his campaign, Biden made a series of promises aimed at solving problems with the criminal justice system. He promised to crack down on systemic misconduct in police departments and prosecutors and call for the immediate approval of the Safe, Responsible, Just and Effective Justice Act (SAFE), a set of small reforms that could eventually reduce the federal prison population and increase efforts probation.
Prisons were being privatized in the early 1800s and accelerated after the Civil War. Today, privatized prisons are a billion-dollar industry with facilities known for brutal living conditions. CoreCivic – formerly and commonly the Corrections Corporation of America – and GEO Group are two of the largest private prison companies in the United States. The two operate most of the premises of the Bureau of Prisons.
In a note, GEO Group spokesman Pablo Paez considered the order a “solution in search of a problem”, adding that the policy would have economic consequences. Paez drew attention to the Bureau of Prison’s option not to renew some private prison contracts in recent months.
The “executive order represents merely a political statement, which can have serious unintended negative consequences, including the loss of hundreds of jobs and negative economic impact on the communities where our facilities are located, which are already struggling economically due to the Covid pandemic” , he said.
CoreCivic spokesman Steve Owen said the company defends its service, adding: “Any claim that our company or the private sector is responsible for the incarceration or detention rate is false.”
Micah Herskind, an organizer of The Southern Center for Human Rights – a Georgia civil rights group focused on the criminal justice system – said that while the order may seem like a significant step towards solving the problems of the criminal justice system, the effort is a “ wrong direction ”of structural problems. In 2016, activist and author Kay Whitlock noted that the commitment to ending private prisons only seems to deal with mass incarceration, without having to structurally change the oppressive systems in which incarceration thrives. Whitlock also noted that only a small part of the prison population is in private prisons.
In 2019, 8.1% of people incarcerated in the United States were held in private prisons, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The request does not appear to apply to similar contracts with other agencies, such as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
“Of course, we need to end private prisons. But we also need to end public prisons, and narrowing our focus on private prisons leaves a massive public punishment apparatus intact that will continue to thrive outside the public spotlight, ”said Herskind.
“[The order] it does not revoke laws and policies that criminalize people and lead to incarceration in the first place, “he added.” It does nothing about the total federal prison population or the state of federal prisons. It does nothing to challenge the central US conviction that it is okay for a country to cage millions of people – it simply says that some companies shouldn’t be able to do that. I imagine that the main impact of the order will actually be falsely convincing many people that significant action has been taken to combat mass incarceration when the opposite is true. “
Since private prisons represent only a small portion of the country’s prison population, academics like Pfaff and Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and author of “The End of Policing,” said the new order did not adequately address mass incarceration. and the criminalization of social problems, such as poverty, homelessness and drug addiction.
With Biden in the early days of his presidency, Vitale said, he expects Biden to make a more substantive effort in the coming months.
“I hope this is the beginning of the conversation and not the end of the conversation,” he said. “I don’t think it will have any impact on people who are already in prison, they will just be transferred to a different unit. I would like him to end all federal drug crimes, commute any sentence in 20 years, and replace funding from policing by financing community-based initiatives. “
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