Mail service is critical to prison life, giving incarcerated people a rare window to the outside world and a tactile connection to family members and loved ones. Pilots of new for-profit products from private prison companies “tend to happen unbeknownst to most of the public,” explained Wanda Bertram, communications strategist for the Prison Policy Initiative. But despite stated goals to remove for-profit companies from incarceration, the Biden administration has yet to reverse the program, and in a statement to the Prospect, the BOP said that it is actively considering an expansion, pending funding. The one-year pilot program, under way in two federal corrections facilities, started under the Trump administration in March 2020. A company called Smart Communications has an exclusive pilot program with the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) called MailGuard, which eliminates nonlegal physical mail in federal prison facilities and transfers it to either crude paper printouts or electronic files accessed through tablets or kiosks. One such contractor is poised to gain control of the means by which people communicate with those in the federal prison system. Critics charge that these contractors prioritize their own balance sheets over the well-being of prisoners and their families, and that the services they provide are often exploitative, of low quality, and infringe on inmates’ civil rights. Food, medicine, telecommunications, banking, and practically every other service for incarcerated people are almost entirely privatized, through a network of subcontractors. “e must reduce profit-based incentives to incarcerate by phasing out the Federal Government’s reliance on privately operated criminal detention facilities,” the order stated.īut the profit motive will still exist in the federal prison system, even after private prison operations contracts are exhausted. In his first-week blitz of executive actions, Joe Biden directed the Justice Department to not renew federal contracts with the private prison industry.
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