In the summer of 2016 C.E., the U.S. Justice Department issued a directive that reversed 35 years of expanding reliance on private prisons. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates sent a memo to Bureau of Prisons officials instructing them to phase out contracts with private operators — letting them expire or dramatically shrinking their scope — with the stated goal of ending the federal government’s use of privately operated prisons entirely.
Key findings
- Private prison safety: A Justice Department Inspector General report found that privately operated federal facilities had higher rates of inmate-on-inmate and inmate-on-staff assaults, and confiscated eight times as many contraband cellphones annually as government-run facilities.
- Federal prison contracts: The phase-out applied to 13 privately run facilities housing roughly 22,100 federal inmates — about 12 percent of the total Bureau of Prisons population — with all contracts set to come up for renewal within five years.
- Bureau of Prisons reform: Three weeks before the memo, the bureau had already declined to renew a 1,200-bed contract in New Mexico, and Yates directed officials to reduce a pending 10,800-bed solicitation to a maximum of 3,600 beds.
What the evidence showed
The Inspector General’s report, released just days before Yates’ memo, was damning in specific terms. Private facilities recorded more assaults, more contraband, and more serious incidents than comparable government-run prisons. One example: a May 2012 riot at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi, where 250 inmates upset about food and medical care injured 20 people and killed a correctional officer.
Yates was direct about the conclusion. “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” she wrote.
The announcement sent private prison stocks into a sharp decline. Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group, the two largest operators, disputed the Inspector General’s findings and said independent studies showed their facilities were comparable or superior to government-run ones. Their pushback signaled that the phase-out would face real-world friction, not just bureaucratic inertia.
Why it was seen as historic
Private prisons had expanded almost continuously since the early 1980s C.E., when the Reagan administration began exploring market-based solutions to prison overcrowding. By 2016 C.E., the industry had become deeply embedded in the federal and state carceral systems, with contracts worth billions of dollars and a well-funded lobbying presence in Washington.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project, called it “a startling and major reversal” of a 35-year trend. Criminal justice reform advocates had long argued that the profit motive in private prisons created incentives misaligned with rehabilitation — companies earned more when facilities stayed full, which critics said created pressure against reducing incarceration rates.
The directive also came in a broader moment of reckoning with mass incarceration in the United States. Investigative journalism had helped shift public awareness. Mother Jones published a 35,000-word undercover account of life inside a private prison in Louisiana just weeks before the memo. The Nation had reported on deaths under questionable circumstances in privately operated facilities. The Inspector General’s report landed in a political climate that was, at least briefly, receptive to reform.
Lasting impact
The Yates memo was a genuine inflection point — and also an illustration of how quickly policy can reverse. The Trump administration rescinded the directive in February 2017 C.E., just six months later, instructing the Bureau of Prisons to keep using private facilities. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented how private prison use subsequently rebounded, particularly in immigration detention.
Still, the 2016 C.E. directive mattered. It established a formal federal record that private prisons underperform government-run facilities on safety and cost — a finding that advocates have cited in subsequent legislative fights at the state level. Several states, including California, passed laws restricting or banning private prisons in the years that followed. The Biden administration in 2021 C.E. reinstated the policy through an executive order directing the Justice Department to phase out private prison contracts once again.
The question of what replaces private prisons — and whether government-run facilities are meaningfully better for the people inside them — remains contested. Prison Policy Initiative data shows the U.S. still incarcerates more people per capita than any other country, private or public.
Blindspots and limits
The Yates memo never applied to the majority of incarcerated people in America. State prisons, which house the vast majority of U.S. inmates, were untouched. So were ICE detention centers and U.S. Marshals facilities — sectors where private operators hold a much higher share of the population and conditions have drawn sustained criticism from human rights organizations. The 2016 C.E. directive was a significant step inside a narrow jurisdiction, not a systemic transformation of American incarceration.
Read more
For more on this story, see: The Washington Post
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Global suicide rate has fallen by 40% since 1995
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- The Good News for Humankind archive on criminal justice
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