Prison reforms

In his first executive order on criminal justice, United States President Joe Biden addressed the thorny issue of private prisons.

Framing his January 25 order as part of a commitment to “racial equity”, the president wants to halt the renewal of widely reviled private prison contracts by the federal government. Biden proclaimed this as a “first step to stop corporations from profiting off incarceration”.

Reform groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) praised Biden for pulling the plug on private prison contracts but argued that it fell short of his campaign promise. Ultimately, what is missing from the order may be as telling as what it contains.

The scope of Biden’s move for prisons is small. Private prisons hold only about 16 percent of the population in federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities and the BOP slice of the carceral pie is less than 10 percent of all those behind bars in the US. Even for this small sector of the prison population, the executive order does not address the issues of poor conditions and excessive violence that have repeatedly surfaced in research and court cases involving private prisons.

Most importantly, during a pandemic, halting the renewal of private prison contracts, some of which continue for up to nine more years, does nothing to reduce the spread of COVID-19 among jailed populations.

As of January 19, the Marshall Project reported 355,957 COVID-19 cases among people in prison, with a death count of 2,232. This is twice the death rate of the wider population.

Stopping the spread inside means releasing people. According to Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, prisons have an infection rate four times higher than the general population.

Jacob Kang-Brown, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute – the justice, policy and research centre which released a national census of prisons and jails this week, noted: “The efforts to reduce incarceration so far … have been inadequate, even though they have resulted in almost 300,000 fewer people behind bars.”

Biden’s policy skirts around other crucial issues as well, some of which his campaign platform on criminal justice highlighted.

For example, Biden’s platform argued that the “federal government should not use private facilities for … detention of undocumented immigrants”. As in the private prison sector, the major players in immigration detention are the GEO Group and CoreCivic. For every 100 immigrants in detention, 32 are under GEO Group facilities, with 21 under CoreCivic.

Immigration detention has harboured one of the greatest travesties of the Trump presidency – the separation of immigrant children from their families. Although Biden promised to deal with this ‘moral failing’ on day one, so far no plan has been put in place to correct it.

Excerpted: ‘Biden and prison reforms – a soft target?’

Aljazeera.com