Private Prisons Have Boomed Under Trump. Elizabeth Warren Just Vowed to Eviscerate Them. [View all]

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https://www.motherjones.com/crime-justice/2019/06/private-prisons-have-boomed-under-trump-elizabeth-warren-just-vowed-to-eviscerate-them/


46 mins ago
Private Prisons Have Boomed Under Trump. Elizabeth Warren Just Vowed to Eviscerate Them.
Other leading Democratic presidential candidates have also raised the idea.
Samantha Michaels


Sen. Elizabeth Warren unveiled a plan Friday to end the government’s relationship with private prisons if she’s elected to the White House. Warren would phase out federal contracts with private prisons, both under the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security. She would also pressure state and local governments to stop working with private prison companies by tying the receipt of federal public safety funding to their use of public facilities. “There should be no place in America for profiting off putting more people behind bars or in detention,” Warren wrote in an essay on Medium announcing her plan.

The proposal comes days before the first Democratic debate of the 2020 presidential race, and adds to a growing chorus among Democratic candidates to curtail or stop the use of private prison companies, which have seen their revenue soar under the Trump administration.

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Warren also announced a plan to reduce corporate influence in public prisons, something most other candidates haven’t talked about, according to Kara Gotsch of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice reform group. Public prisons work with thousands of companies that provide phone, banking, health care, food, and commissary services, among other things. They “come up with extortive schemes to make millions off of the backs of incarcerated people,” Warren wrote, noting incarcerated people are sometimes forced to pay around $25 for a 15-minute call.

She pledged to stop contractors from charging service fees to inmates for health care and phone calls, and to prevent them from gouging prices for commissary or package services. (Sanders’ proposed legislation likewise called for more oversight to prevent companies from overcharging inmates for banking and phone services.) Warren also suggested creating a position within the Justice Department for a “prison conditions monitor” to audit and investigate contractors. “Washington hands billions over to corporations profiting off of inhumane detention and incarceration policies while ignoring the families that are destroyed in the process,” she wrote. “We need to call that out for what it is: corruption.”

“It’s not a small undertaking, quite frankly, given how infiltrated private corporations are in prisons,” says Gotsch of Warren’s proposal.