Private federal prisons are more abusive, violent, and dangerous than their government-run counterparts, according to a frightening report published this week by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General.

“Federal officials should be reconsidering their alliance on private prisons and developing plans to begin cancelling these contracts, rather than continuing this experiment.”
—Carl Takei, ACLUThe report [pdf], which examined prisons owned and operated by GEO Group, Management and Training Corporation, and the controversial and very notorious Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), discovered that inmates in those facilities “were nine times more likely to be placed on lockdown than inmates at other federal prisons and were frequently subjected to arbitrary solitary confinement,” the Guardian reports.

Moreover, for-profit prisons “almost exclusively incarcerate low risk inmates convicted of immigration offenses,” the Guardian notes.

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