DURING the third season of “Orange is the New Black”, a Netflix series about female jailbirds, the federal facility housing the protagonist felons is taken over by a private prison company. Life at Litchfield penitentiary, never a walk in the park, quickly deteriorates as cartoonishly crass executives cut costs and crowd the prison to maximise profits. This fictional turn of events isn’t so far from reality. Over the past two decades, the Federal Bureau of Prisons has signed contracts with corporations to help accommodate inmates in the country with the largest prison population in the world. Of the 2.3m people behind bars in America, 193,000 are serving time in federal prisons. And of those, around 22,000 are housed in facilities run by for-profit companies.
On August 18th, Sally Yates, the deputy attorney-general, issued a curt memo announcing that the Department of Justice would begin limiting its dealings with private prisons. Three years ago, she noted, when America’s prison population was at its peak, private prisons filled...Continue reading
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