The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons for federal prisoners, according to a memo from Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates released on Thursday. According to Yates, the Department of Justice plans to either not renew existing private prison contracts or significantly reduce the scope of the agreements in the coming years. Over time, this will end the use of private prisons at the federal level, but that’s only part of the picture. Let’s take a closer look at what this means.

Why Now?

The decision comes less than a week after the Office of the Inspector General released a harsh report about the quality of these contract prisons. According to the report, “in most key areas, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions and that the BOP needs to improve how it monitors contract prisons in several areas.” The announcement also comes on the heels of an investigation from Mother Jones, which involved a reporter going undercover for multiple months in a Louisiana private prison. That story highlighted many of the security concerns involved with private prisons as well as the way that the profit motive can negatively affect prison conditions.

In her memo, Yates also points out that this move is in part a response to recent progress shrinking the size of the federal prison population. The use of private prisons was largely a product of the massive increase in federal prisoners over the past several decades. But 2014 marked the first year in which the number of federal prisoners actually decreased. The chart below shows the massive growth in the number of federal prisoners since 1980.

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, CSTAT

In 2013, the Department of Justice began its Smart on Crime Initiative, which sought to improve fairness and efficiency in the criminal justice system. An important part of the initiative was sentencing reform, which sought to ensure that sentence lengths were appropriate, particularly for nonviolent criminals. The new sentencing guidelines later became retroactive for drug offenders, which allowed inmates to challenge their sentence and get it reduced if approved by a judge. As a result, the DOJ hopes that the recent prison population decline will become a sustained trend, which in turn will reduce the need for private prisons.

How Many Prisoners Does This Affect?

While we know that the federal prison population has grown significantly over the past couple decades, how many of those prisoners are held in private prisons? Currently, private prisons account for about 11 percent of all federal prisoners, or about 22,100 prisoners. There are 13 private prisons used by the federal government, which will now be phased out over the next several years. But it’s important to note that most of the prisoners held in private prisons are at the state level. Here’s a look at the use of private prisons by states and the federal government since 1999:

Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, CSTAT

What This Won’t Change

As you can see in the chart above, states use private prisons a lot more than the federal government and that won’t change with the DOJ’s recent decision. Another prominent use of private prisons is immigrant detention, which is overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the U.S. Marshalls Service. Because immigration detention is not overseen by the DOJ, this decision will also not affect those facilities.

Simply put, this decision will not affect the majority of inmates in private prisons. But that doesn’t mean that the DOJ’s move will have no effect. In her memo, Assistant Attorney General Yates notes:

Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities. They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’ s Office oflnspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.

While she compares private facilities to the ones operated by the Bureau of Prisons, her comments amount to a strong statement against these prisons. Having a clear federal policy to stop using these facilities on the grounds that they are inferior to publicly controlled prisons may send a message to states to reconsider their private contracts. And shortly after the decision was announced on Thursday, Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group–the two largest private prison companies–saw their stock prices plummet.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

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One of the biggest deterrents for people not to commit murder–besides of course, moral reasons—is knowing that they could potentially get the death penalty. However, a recent review of capital punishment figures by the Department of Justice (DOJ) shows that if you’re convicted of capital murder, the odds are in your favor that you will never be executed.

The DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that of the 8,466 prisoners who were sentenced to death between 1973 and 2013, only 1,359 (16 percent) of them were executed. So what’s happening to the other 84 percent of death row inmates? Well, for most, their sentences are being overturned on appeal and amended to lesser penalties.

Here’s a more detailed look into some of the findings:

• Between 1973 and 2013, 8,466 prisoners were sentenced to death.
• However, 3,194 prisoners had their death penalty sentences overturned on appeal. Of those, 523 convictions no longer stood because the law they were based on was declared unconstitutional, 890 had their conviction overturned, and 1,781 were still declared guilty but no longer sentenced to death.
• During those years, 509 died on death row from other causes.
• An additional 392 had their sentences commuted to life in prison by a governor.
• There were 33 who weren’t put to death for other miscellaneous reasons.
• As of December 31, 2013, 2,979 still remain on death row.

According to the Washington Post,

But by far the most likely outcome of a U.S. death sentence is that it will eventually be reversed and the inmate will remain in prison with a different form of death sentence: life without the possibility of parole.

Opinions on capital punishment have long been a divider between people weighing its moral ramifications against the old “eye for an eye” argument. Many find themselves picking a side based on stereotypical party lines: Republicans tend to be in favor of the death penalty and Democrats trend against. However, party allegiance doesn’t seem to be a factor in who is overturning these cases. According to the Washington Post:

Both Republican and Democratic appointees have voted to overturn these convictions because they so often involve such issues as evidence withheld from the defense, improper instructions to the jury, or other serious flaws in the original trials.

As a whole, these findings are good news for anyone in trouble with the law, but slightly unnerving when examining how our justice system works. The BJS review could end up being fuel for death penalty opposers to show its ineffectiveness, as death row inmates are actually three times more likely to see their sentences overturned or lessened on appeal. Regardless, a debate over the death penalty, particularly as states like Utah weigh new methods of execution, certainly needs to take into account the infrequency with which it is actually implemented.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The number of prisoners under federal jurisdiction decreased for the first time since 1980, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Attorney General Eric Holder praised the new statistics Tuesday and announced that an even larger decline, as many as 10,000 prisoners, is projected to come over the next two years. Holder’s speech, a keynote address to the New York University School of Law, took place just two days before he announced his resignation, highlighting one of the largest achievements during his tenure as the nation’s top prosecutor.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there were roughly 1,900 fewer federal prisoners at year end in 2013 than there were at the same point in 2012. However, this drop was offset by an increase in the number of inmates in state prisons, which had roughly 6,300 more prisoners in 2013 than the previous year. A total of 28 states saw population increases in state prisons, which led to the first net increase in the total U.S. inmate population (federal and state) since its peak in 2009.

The chart below shows the trends for both state and federal prisons over the last 35 years.

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in 2013 Report

The U.S. prison population went from roughly 307,000 in 1978 to more than 1.5 million in 2013, an increase greater than 400 percent. Many attribute this dramatic growth to the “tough on crime” policies that dominated criminal justice legislation from the mid-1980s to the early-2000s.

Smart on Crime

The recent statistics come just over a year after Attorney General Eric Holder announced his Smart on Crime Initiative, which aims to increase sentencing fairness and offer alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent criminals. The initiative gained significant momentum earlier this year when the U.S. Sentencing Commission voted to reduce mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug crimes in April. Shortly after that, the commission made the new guidelines retroactive, allowing as many as 50,000 prisoners to have their sentences reduced starting in 2015.

“This is nothing less than historic,” Holder said of the federal prisoner decrease on Tuesday in a keynote address at the Brennan Center for Justice. In his speech, he emphasized the new Smart on Crime policies and argued that they are starting to have some measurable effects.

In addition to last year’s decline, Holder said that the number of federal inmates is projected to drop by roughly 2,000 in the next year and by nearly 10,000 by the end of 2016, according to internal numbers from the Bureau of Prisons.

The consequences of this decline are significant for several reasons. Recent studies have argued that decreasing the prison population will not cause significant increases in crime rates.

“High incarceration rates and longer-than-necessary prison terms have not played a significant role in materially improving public safety, reducing crime, or strengthening communities.”

-Attorney General Eric Holder

Reducing the prison population is seen as a civil rights issue, as sentencing for drug crimes is widely seen as unfair to minorities. Reform advocates like the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) often cite the disproportionate amount of minorities who are arrested for drug crimes. According to the DPA:

Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial lines, people of color are far more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, prosecuted, convicted and incarcerated for drug law violations than are whites.

Arrest disparities combined with troubling recidivism statistics may indicate that long prison sentences are not always the best solution for nonviolent criminals. However, not everyone is in favor of decreasing the number of inmates, as some continue to argue that high incarceration rates were an important factor to America’s falling crime rates.

The high incarceration rate has also created a significant economic burden for the federal and state governments. According to a report from the Congressional Research Service, the cost per inmate in federal prisons was $29,291 in 2013, an increase of over 35 percent since 2000. In 2010 alone, the United States spent nearly $80 billion on incarceration in federal and state prisons.

The economic and civil rights issues connected to growth in the prison population have created bipartisan support for reform. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) cosponsored the Smarter Sentencing Act of 2014, which aims to reduce the influence of mandatory minimums in the sentencing process. The bill, which a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office said could save more than $4 billion, would give judges more discretion in the sentencing process, allowing them to decide penalties on a case-by-case basis.

While the future of sentencing reform and the size of the prison population are not yet certain, supporters like Attorney General Holder proudly claim that change is coming:

Clearly, criminal justice reform is an idea whose time has come. And thanks to a robust and growing national consensus… we are bringing about a paradigm shift, and witnessing a historic sea change, in the way our nation approaches these issues.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

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