From Inquest:
Soon after President Biden took office, he issued an executive order phasing out the use of private prisons by the Department of Justice. It would be great to believe there are ethical reasons behind this move, that the Biden administration found the profiting off incarceration of human beings so morally bankrupt that it could no longer be justified. But upon closer examination, the reason for the federal government’s shunning of private prisons likely has much more to do, on one hand, with their limited significance in the carceral landscape. And on the other, with the growing Black Lives Matter movement and the fitful reckoning on race, policing, and imprisonment taking place in the United States.
The importance of the federal government phasing out private prisons should not be downplayed, but if the fight ends at getting rid of private prisons, we will have failed. As we consider strategies to continue dismantling the carceral state, it is critical for us to understand the outsized role private prisons play in the immigration enforcement apparatus, reflect on internal movement tensions around the issue, and assess why the federal phaseout is happening now. A better understanding of these dynamics shows the pitfalls of a focus on privatization and affirms the need for an abolitionist approach to anti-detention and anti-prison organizing.
Every administration since President Ronald Reagan’s has advanced the relationship between private prison companies and the federal government. From Reagan’s war on drugs and the explosion of immigration detention during the Clinton years through the anti-immigrant, post-9/11 period and the later privatization boom of the Obama era, the bonds between immigration enforcement and private prisons have grown deeper and more complicated over time. By the time Donald Trump rode into office, his administration benefitted from a robust, bipartisan immigration detention structure, largely reliant on private prisons — currently nearly 80 percent of immigration detention beds — that others had built and maintained for him over decades. Continue reading >>>
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