Department of Justice, Prisons

There Were Only 13 Federal Private Prisons... But Closing Them Is Still A Big Deal

Golly, who'd have thought marrying private equity and the Stanford Prison Experiment could go so awry?

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prison prisoner crime criminalYesterday the Department of Justice announced that it will be cutting ties with the private prisons it’s used to house some prisoners. This comes on the heels of investigations that revealed rampant abuses, with dozens of deaths stemming from substandard care and widespread medical neglect.

Golly, who’d have thought marrying private equity and the Stanford Prison Experiment could go so awry?

The DOJ’s move also kicked off the familiar ebb and flow of lefty commentary. First the liberal hordes of Washington Post readers, having been duly appalled by Humphrey making an inmate eat a mouse on last season’s Orange Is The New Black, hailed the decision. Hours later the more progressive wing took a break from some march against pesticides or drones or drones spraying pesticides to began plastering social media with reminders that the federal private prison program was tiny, that publicly owned and operated prisons are rife with abuse anyway, and openly wondered if this move is little more than a cosmetic gesture to allow the liberals to go back to their lattes guilt-free.

In the end, they’re both kind of right: this is a tiny, mostly symbolic gesture, and it is an important one.

First up, yes, there are only 13 private prisons in use by the federal system. And there are only small percentage of federal inmates in those prisons. And this memo does nothing to state contracts with private prisons, which warehouse many more prisoners.

That said, check this out:

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That’s the five-day share price for the Geo Group. Until yesterday it was a private prison company making a killing on Wall Street. Now, not so much. That’s what you get for profiting off of human pain and misery! The same should befall Papa John’s soon and for the same reason.

So did no one tell the market that this decision impacts only 13 prisons?

No, the market understands this as a critical blow to the private prison industry. These companies lost a revenue stream. They will have to lay people off. The national attention this generates could and probably will spill over to several states. Creditors will balk at lending to the industry. When the federal government calls something an excrement sandwich, it tends to dampen the national appetite.

And that’s not to say that government-run prisons are bastions of enlightened management. But you know what you can do with government-run prisons? Watch them.

Yes, one of the primary reasons we have a private prison industry in the first place is that a bunch of officials got tired of having to respond to embarrassing FOIA requests about throwing folks in the hole for ten days. Private prisons have the luxury of being exempt from those requests, and that’s why reports from the likes of The Nation Institute and Mother Jones cost so much money — the latter had to embed a guy as a guard to figure out what was going on inside a private facility.

Sponsored

Say what you will about the public facilities, but at least you can bombard them with all the requests you need to perform proper watchdog efforts. That alone justifies gutting the private prison industry.

There are a lot of empty, band-aid solutions in this world. This isn’t one of them. This is a small move that can, if it plays out right, have a big impact on the landscape of criminal justice going forward.

Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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