Well that didn’t take long. Only two months after Donald Trump overturned the Obama administration decision to eliminate the use of private prisons, the Justice Department released a report slamming the private prison company CoreCivic for problems at Leavenworth Detention Center in Kansas. As a result of the numerous problems cited in the report, security risks and low morale were rampant and it’s not hard to see why. With high vacancy rates and unsafe conditions, it appears the company made it very hard for corrections officers to do their jobs.
The audit found that CoreCivic, formerly known as the Corrections Corporation of America, struggled with periodic staffing shortages at Leavenworth. In September 2015, there was a 23 percent vacancy rate among correctional officers, who appeared to be leaving for higher-paying jobs with benefits. As a result, the audit found, CoreCivic required long-term mandatory overtime and had to shutter essential security posts, making it harder to respond to emergencies and control access in and out of the facility. The failure to "consistently fill these posts compromised its ability to run the facility in a safe and secure manner," the auditors wrote.
You’d think with such a high vacancy rate that the company would take steps to address understaffing. But instead, they simply sent staff to work at other correctional institutions. And somehow, they were never held accountable by anyone for their understaffing issues.
CoreCivic, the nation's second-largest private prison company, told the Office of Inspector General that the understaffing at Leavenworth in 2015 was an "isolated incident." It said the facility offered "among the highest correctional officer wages of CoreCivic's institutions" and did not struggle to recruit officers.
To be clear, these problems did not start under the Trump administration. The audit covers the period of 2010 to 2015 and holds the US Marshals Service accountable for failing to hold CoreCivic responsible for fixing myriad issues cited in the report. However, there was good reason that the Obama administration’s Justice Department made the decision to end the use of private prisons. Investigations found that they were less safe and had more security incidents than federally run facilities. In fact, previous audits found that CoreCivic specifically "had the highest rates of inmate fights and inmate assaults on other inmates." But it seems that a few poor practices and inmate fights won’t stop the Trump administration.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions wrote that private prisons were necessary to "meet the future needs of the correctional system."
He forgot to add that there is a ton of money to be made for the contractors who run these facilities. In case it isn’t obvious, it doesn’t look like private prison reform will be high on the list of DOJ priorities anytime soon.