Trump Reverses Biden Order that Eliminated DOJ Contracts with Private Prisons
The action’s impact is limited to contracts with the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service.
The action’s impact is limited to contracts with the Bureau of Prisons and U.S. Marshals Service.
www.brennancenter.org
“… The Biden
executive order — one of his first — had directed the Justice Department not to renew contracts with private prison firms. In one of his first moves as president, Trump — as part of a slew of reversals of Biden-era actions — reversed Executive Order 14006, which had eliminated Justice Department contracts with “Privately Operated Criminal Detention Facilities.”
This reversal by the Trump administration is not a surprise, and it is in fact something that the two largest corporations that manage prisons and detention centers — the GEO Group and CoreCivic — expected to happen. In fact, on the GEO Group’s third quarter investor call the day after the 2024 presidential election, the company’s executive chairman and founder, George Zoley,
said, “We kind of get the sense of President-elect Trump’s remarks that he will reverse all of the Biden executive orders on Day One.” Another sign of an administration friendly to the industry: Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi,
lobbied for the GEO Group in her role with a DC-based firm.
The reversal affects contracts with the federal Bureau of Prisons, which is responsible for housing the more than 150,000 people in its custody. The bureau began to rely on private prisons in the 1980s to house incarcerated populations with specialized needs and undocumented individuals who are sentenced to federal prison. When Biden took office, about
14,000 people in the federal bureau of prisons were housed at privately managed facilities. Following Biden’s executive order, the bureau
terminated all of its contracts with privately managed prisons, and it transferred people incarcerated in private prisons to other bureau facilities.
The reversal also allows for new contracts between private prison corporations and the U.S. Marshals Service, which still uses private industry to house a significant portion of the more than
60,000 people under its supervision, despite the directive from Biden to terminate this relationship. This end run around the 2021 Biden executive order is partly due to intergovernmental services agreements where these corporations’ contract with counties and the counties then in turn contract with the Marshals Service. At the time of Biden’s directive, the agency raised
concerns about the order out of fears this population would be moved further from courthouses, increasing the time and money needed to transporting them to and from court. …”
