President Joe Biden has made a major move from the White House. During his first week in the Oval Office, Biden has moved to gradually phase out the federal use of private prisons. This decree will affect approximately 14,000 incarcerated people across the United States.
“To decrease incarceration levels, we must reduce profit-based incentives to incarcerate by phasing out the federal government’s reliance on privately operated criminal detention facilities,” Biden wrote in his order to the Department of Justice.
While the move will lessen the government’s reliance on federal prisons in the long run, critics are weary of the impact that it may have. Some of the federal government’s contracts extend well beyond Biden’s four-year term and were recently signed during the Biden administration. Essentially, the next administration could move to reverse Biden’s decision and little to nothing would change in the long run. Furthermore, the order will only apply to the Department of Justice and not ICE or DHS.
“That’s just 9 percent of the fed prison population, and many of those contracts are 10 year contracts, and some of them were recently signed,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University told The Hill.
“If the administration is serious about removing profit from incarceration, they need to look at DHS and ICE contracts with these firms.”
All in all, this is an important first step in prison reform. Private prisons have often been criticized for not aligning their goals with the rehabilitation of incarcerated people. With that stated, there is still a long way to go.
