In the rich history of Really Bad Ideas brought to us by the age of privatization, the notion of private prisons holds a special pride of place. It is almost inconceivable that someone believed that finding a way to make a profit on incarcerating people didn’t see the inevitable consequences of the idea—namely, that you need a steady flow of incarcerated product to turn a buck and you need to treat them as miserably as possible to increase your profits. President Obama saw this fundamental absurdity and decided to phase out federal participation in the private prison industry. Here comes the punchline, courtesy of Government Executive.

The Bureau of Prisons has the stated goal of “increasing population levels in private contract facilities,” according to a memorandum sent by the agency’s Assistant Director for Correctional Programs Division Frank Lara on Wednesday and obtained by Government Executive. The memo follows guidance from Attorney General Jeff Sessions last year that reversed an Obama administration policy to phase out the use of private prisons. In 2016, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memo instructing the bureau to either end private facility contracts when their terms expired or “substantially reduce [their] scope” to correspond with declining inmate populations. Sessions said in February 2017 that Yates' decision “changed long-standing policy” of the bureau and impaired its “ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.”

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“The future needs” is an interesting phrase to toss in there considering that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III already has committed himself to restarting the drug war.

In Wednesday’s memo, Lara tasked facility leaders with identifying inmates to transfer to private contract prisons, saying it would “alleviate the overcrowding at Bureau of Prisons’ institutions and maximize the effectiveness of private contracts.” Lara laid out certain criteria for determining which inmates should be transferred, such as those designated “low security” and those having 90 months or less remaining on their sentence.

The memo came just days after the bureau held a conference call with facility administrators, instructing them to prepare for a 12 percent to 14 percent reduction in their authorized staffing levels. Such cuts would result in shedding 5,000-6,000 jobs, at least some of which are currently vacant. Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposed a cut of about 6,000 bureau positions, more than 1,800 of which were correctional officers. Congress has yet to enact full-year appropriations for the current fiscal year and those cuts have yet to take place.

I am sure the president* would approve of this nonsense but I have a genuine hunch that nobody tells him what’s going on in the government these days and that he’s happy that way.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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