Today, U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) issued the following statement:
“Our criminal justice system should represent the best of America’s values. Attaching a profit motive to imprisonment is inherently inconsistent with ensuring that our legal system promotes fairness and justice for all. The federal Bureau of Prison’s own inspector general has found that privately-managed prisons housing federal inmates are systematically less safe and less secure than federal prisons. Repeated instances of civil rights violations at these facilities are troubling and demand a change.
“That’s why today’s Justice Department announcement is a significant step forward for criminal justice reform. I applaud this policy shift and hope to see the use of for-profit prisons phased out entirely at the federal and state level as soon as possible.”
Currently, 11 percent of the Bureau of Prisons’ federal inmates are housed in private prisons. That equates to privately-managed facilities holding 22,104 federal inmates out of 193,299 total federal inmates.
Sen. Booker, a leading voice in the Senate for criminal justice reform, has been critical of privatized prisons. Last year during a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing, Booker criticized the Bureau of Prisons overreliance on for-profit facilities. In July, Sen. Booker authored a letter to US Attorney General Loretta Lynch urging the Department of Justice to investigate the nature and extent of prisoner abuse and neglect within the private prisoner transport industry.