Biden’s order ends federal private prison contracts. Here is what it means.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order that will phase out the use of private prisons by the Department of Justice.

The action is part of the administration’s efforts 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 ordinance directs the Department of Justice to refuse to renew contracts with private for-profit prisons. This effort began during the Obama administration and was supported by then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. The policy was quickly suppressed by the Trump administration in 2017. Now academics are taking a closer look at the restored policy and questioning its overall impact on racial inequity.

“As far as private prisons are concerned, the impact of this ordinance will be little, if any,” 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 tells an executive agency under his control what kind of contracts they can enter into, that is. is a fundamental executive function of Biden. “

States can always choose “who to write contracts with,” Pfaff said. “In practice, this will end up being more symbolic and have little impact on any issue of racial justice and the system.” The public side is so much bigger. “

Few details have been released on the order to reduce the use of private prisons, but initial Obama-era policy focused on a dozen private facilities. The Federal Bureau of Prisons then declared that around 195,000 people were incarcerated on the premises of the office or under private contract. Today, nearly 152,000 people are incarcerated at the federal level, including 14,000 in private establishments, according to the Associated Press.

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A 2016 Justice Department report found that private prisons register high rates of assault, use of force, and lockdowns. With that, Biden said at a press briefing Tuesday that the policy was “the first step in preventing businesses from enjoying less humane and less secure incarceration.” He called it the start of his comprehensive plan to address systemic problems in the criminal justice system.

An administration spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During his campaign, Biden made a plethora of promises to tackle problems with the criminal justice system. He vowed to crack down on systemic misconduct in police departments and prosecutors’ offices and called for the immediate passage of the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Efficient Justice (SAFE) law, a set of small reforms that could eventually reduce the federal prison population and step up probation efforts.

Prisons were privatized as early as the 1800s and speeded up after the Civil War. Today, privatized prisons are a billion dollar industry with facilities known for their brutal living conditions. CoreCivic – formerly and currently the Corrections Corporation of America – and GEO Group are two of the largest private prison companies in the United States. Both operate the majority of facilities under the Bureau of Prisons.

In a statement, GEO group spokesman Pablo Paez dismissed the ordinance as a “solution in search of a problem”, adding that the policy would have economic consequences. Paez has drawn attention to the Bureau of Prison’s choice not to renew some private prison contracts in recent months.

“The decree simply represents a political declaration, which could have serious unintended negative consequences, including the loss of hundreds of jobs and a negative economic impact on the communities where our facilities are located, which are already in economic difficulty due to the Covid pandemic, ”he said.

CoreCivic spokesman Steve Owen said the company is supportive of its service, adding: “Any claim that our company or the private sector is responsible for the rate of incarceration or detention is false.”

Micah Herskind, an organizer for the Southern Center for Human Rights – a Georgia civil rights group focused on the criminal justice system – said that while the order may appear to be an important step in addressing problems in the criminal justice system , the effort is an “orientation error” Structural problems. In 2016, activist and author Kay Whitlock noted that a commitment to end private prisons only appears to tackle mass incarceration without having to structurally change the oppressive systems upon which incarceration thrives. Whitlock also noted that only a small portion of the incarcerated population is in private prisons.

In 2019, 8.1% of people incarcerated in the United States were held in private prisons, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The ordinance does not appear to apply to similar contracts with other agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“Of course, we have to end private prisons. But we also need to end public prisons, and focusing on private prisons leaves intact a massive public punishment apparatus that will continue to thrive out of the public spotlight, ”Herskind said.

“[The order] does not repeal laws and policies that criminalize people and lead to incarceration in the first place, “he added. It does nothing for the total federal prison population or the state of federal prisons. This does nothing to undermine the fundamental belief of the United States that it is okay for a country to cage millions of people – it just says that some companies should not be able to do so. I imagine that the main impact of the ordinance will actually be in mistakenly convincing many people that important steps have been taken to combat mass incarceration when the opposite is true.

Because private prisons represent only a small portion of the country’s prison population, researchers such as Pfaff and Alex Vitale, a sociology professor 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 hopes Biden will make a more substantial effort in the months to come.

“I hope this is the start of the conversation and not the end of the conversation,” he said. “I don’t think it will have an impact on people who are already incarcerated, they will simply be transferred to another institution. I would like to see him end all federal drug crimes, commute all sentences to 20 years, and replace funding for policing with funding for community initiatives. “

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