•Black Americans are incarcerated at five times the rate as white Americans.
•A 2016 Justice Department report found that for-profit prisons in the United States were more likely to endanger inmates’ security and rights.
•This Obama administration phases out private prisons. The policy was quickly axed by the Trump administration in 2017.
Biden signs an executive order which had eliminated Justice Department contracts with “Privately Operated Criminal Detention Facilities.”
When Biden took office, about 14,000 people in the federal bureau of prisons were housed at privately managed facilities. Following Biden’s executive order, the bureau terminated all of its contracts with privately managed prisons, and it transferred people incarcerated in private prisons to other bureau facilities.
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•-Attorney General Jeff Sessions revoked the Obama administration’s initiative, and by April 2017, the DOJ began requesting bids for contracts to house federal inmates in private prison facilities once again.
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That same month, the GEO Group won a $110 million contract to build the first detention center under the new administration. A proTrump PAC and the president’s inaugural committee have benefited from the private prison industry’s financial contributions.
Between 2017 and 2021, Black males received sentences 13.4% longer, and Hispanic males received sentences 11.2% longer, than White males.
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Black and Latino defendants are more likely to be detained before trial and less likely to be able to post bail compared with similarly situated white defendants. In fact, black and Latino men respectively pay 35 percent and 19 percent higher bail than white men.
Senator Kamala Harris introduces a bail reform bill to encourage states to reform their cash bail systems so that lower-income people aren't unfairly kept in jail as a result of their inability to pay steep bail costs.
“In our country, whether you stay in jail or not is wholly determined by whether you’re wealthy or not — and that’s wrong,” Harris said in a news release. “We must come together to reform a bail system that is discriminatory, wasteful and fails to keep our communities safe.”
On January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order reversing a previous Biden administration order that had directed the Justice Department to phase out contracts with privately operated, for-profit detention facilities.
Following the 2024 election, private prison stocks jumped significantly (around 75%) on expectations of increased government contracts.
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