The Justice Department has decided to put an end to the use of private prisons as officials agreed that the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing ample correctional services in contrast to their government counterparts.

Sally Yates, Deputy Attorney General, announced that officials have been instructed to prohibit contract renewals for private prison operators when they expire or significantly reduce the scope of their contracts. For Yates, the goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate the prisons operated privately.

In the report, Yates states that the private counterparts do not provide the same level of services, programs, and resources that government facilities do.

While this is a big deal in the terms of incarceration, privately run federal prisons house only a fraction of the inmate population. The majority of the incarcerated in America are housed in state prisons, rather than private prisons.

Private  facilities were meant to house inmates who are low security with 90 months or less remaining on their sentence. Yates wrote that the prison population began to decline beginning in 2013, because of efforts to adjust sentencing guidelines and to change the way low-level drug offenders are charged.

Yates indicated that private prisons served a crucial role during a difficult time, but has now proven less effective than facilities run by the government. The US spends $639 million dollars a year on one private prison alone. It is not definite if private prisons are less expensive and whether closing them would cause costs to go up, but officials do not plan to hire additional Bureau of Prisons staff.

While prisons are supposed to rehabilitate people and keep them from re-offending, these private prisons want more people to be incarcerated so they can reap the financial benefits that are derived from this system of mass incarceration.For each person the private prisons  hold in their facilities they get paid about $150-$200 dollars for each prisoner. These prisons profit from humans and constantly want more and more prisoners so that they can continue to advance economically. Since prisons are supposed to rehabilitate people and keep them from coming back, these private prisons want people to continue to get convicted and serve sentences so they can reap the financial benefits from incarceration. Private prisons are counterproductive and unjust as they are biased based upon a clear profit motive  and should be eliminated immediately.

Correction Corporation of America is one of the largest privatized prison industries in America and funds most of these private prisons. To learn more about them and the private prison industry read more here: Private Prisons-ACLU

For further reading:
Private Prisons Embrace Corruption to Boost Profits - the Huffington Post

Private Prisons-ACLU