US to end federal use of private prisons

A government report found that violent incidents were more common in private prisons

The US Justice Department will phase out use of privately owned prisons, citing safety concerns.

Contracts with 13 private prisons will be reviewed and and allowed to expire over the next five years.

"They do not save substantially on costs and ... they do not maintain the same level of safety and security," Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said explaining the decision.

The majority of US prisoners are held in state-run prisons. 

On Wall Street, the stocks of private prison companies declined sharply after the news was announced.

By Thursday afternoon, Corrections Corp stock had plunged by nearly 50%.

An Inspector General's report released this month found that private prisons saw higher rates of violent incidents and rule infractions in comparison with government-run institutions. 

During the Democratic presidential primary race, Hillary Clinton's main rival Senator Bernie Sanders made a campaign promise to end the "private, for-profit prison racket".

Senator Sanders sponsored a bill during his campaign attempting to end the use of private prisons in September 2015 saying "we cannot fix our criminal justice system if corporations are allowed to profit from mass incarceration".

In a statement after the decision, Senator Sanders called the move "an important step in the right direction", and that it is "an international embarrassment that we put more people behind bars than any other country on Earth... due in large part to private prisons". 

Mrs Clinton's website states that she will "end the era of mass incarceration, reform mandatory minimum sentences, and end private prisons".

Mother Jones magazine published an expose earlier this month after one of their reporters took a job as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana for four months.

The magazine found the wide scale use of violence by prisoners and guards alike.

The federal government began to rely on private prisons in the 1990's during a period of overcrowding, with the inmate population peaking in 2013.

The decline in prisoner population over the past three years contributed to the Justice Department's decision, Mrs Yates said.

As of December, private prisons housed 22,660 federal inmates, out of a total of nearly 200,000.

Source: BBC