Elizabeth Warren's Unworkable Policy to Ban Private Prisons

Elizabeth Warren’s Unworkable Policy to Ban Private Prisons

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to ban private prisons is yet another unworkable policy with massive unintended consequences that she is espousing on the campaign trail.

October 10, 2019
Elizabeth Warren’s Unworkable Policy to Ban Private Prisons

Elizabeth Warren’s plan to ban private prisons is yet another unworkable policy with massive unintended consequences that she is espousing on the campaign trail.

Independent Journal Review has a piece out today outlining that “she doesn’t actually explain how she would make the transition” if private prisons were completely eliminated under a Warren presidency. 

“Right now, 8% of the U.S. prison population is in private facilities. Unless Warren plans to somehow change the sentences of inmates in those private detention centers, she’ll have to find a new place to put them — but that’s just for federal prisons.

She’ll also likely face pushback from the states. If a nationwide ban of private prisons took place, states would have to foot the bill to replace the outlawed facilities.”

The article also details how just this year, Denver saw negative ramifications from a similar ban: 

“As IJR reported at the time, Denver’s city council banned privately-owned halfway houses in protest of the companies — CoreCivic and GEO Group — that operated facilities used by ICE. Because of this decision, individuals who were reentering society via a halfway house faced being sent back to prison instead of continuing with their rehabilitation because the private facilities were banned.

Despite not having a plan, the council passed the measure. When they were hit with outcry from residents of the halfway houses, they were forced to crawl back to CoreCivic and GEO Group to come to a verbal agreement to keep six of the banned facilities open while they figure out what to do with the populations inside. The agreement between the three parties has no end date.

There are no guarantees that Warren’s ban would turn into the mess that Denver is seeing, but it does highlight the negative impact such a massive change can have on incarcerated people and their communities if it is not properly thought out.”

Not only is Warren not fully explaining the ramifications for such a ridiculous policy, but she has personally benefited from private prisons. On the campaign trail, she says “no one should make a profit locking people up.” But The Free Beacon reported that Warren “invested up to $50,000 in a Vanguard Group fund that owned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of shares in leading private prison companies. Warren sold her stakes in that fund in exchange for a different retirement account in 2013. At the time, the fund was the largest shareholder of America’s largest private prison corporation.”