The Justice Department recently decided to phase out the confinement of federal inmates in private prisons, but tens of thousands of state prisoners — including 10,700 from California — will remain in the corporate-owned institutions that a government report has criticized over safety and security.
California has transferred prisoners to private institutions, some of them in other states, for more than five years to relieve overcrowding in state prisons, but state, and local, use of them is beginning to be questioned.
One California lawmaker has called for the state to stop sending inmates to prisons far from their families or California inspectors, and another legislator is moving to stop cities and counties in California from contracting with private prisons to hold federal immigration detainees.
State Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, chairwoman of the Senate’s Public Safety Committee and its budget subcommittee on Corrections and Public Safety, said California should terminate its contracts with private prisons in other states.
With no state employees at those sites, “we have no way of knowing what’s going on there,” Hancock said. Abuses have been reported at other prisons run by the same company, she said, and their location “makes it almost impossible for families to visit.”
Hancock, who will be termed out of office in January, said there’s not much the Legislature can do about the state’s use of private prisons. But lawmakers are considering a bill to end local governments’ ability to contract with prison companies for detention of immigrants.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
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