Friend,

President Biden took a first step in curbing the private prison industry, which profits off people’s pain, by signing an executive order directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) not to renew its contracts with private prisons.

While this is an important step, it doesn’t address the bulk of federal contracts with private prisons, which are not through the DOJ but through ICE.

During the Trump administration, ICE’s contracts with private prisons skyrocketed, as did the number of people held in prison-like detention centers—many of whom are asylum seekers who’ve fled their countries of origin. Over 80% of immigrants in detention are now in privately-run facilities. While the DOJ has already been phasing out private prison contracts, ICE has been expanding.

Please sign now to ask President Biden to go further to end our country’s privatization of prisons, including by ending ICE’s contracts with private prisons.

Our country’s systems of confinement have their origins in slavery and racism, and now our prison industrial complex has ballooned to a whole new level. We now incarcerate far more of our population than any other country in the world, and we lock up Black people at five times the rate of white people.

No one should profit off this unjust, cruel system.

Even as the vast majority of incarcerated people are locked in public jails and prisons, public confinement facilities have outsourced and privatized many important elements such as food, healthcare, commissary supplies, and phone and video communication with families and loved ones. Already-impoverished incarcerated people and their families are charged exploitative rates for simply trying to stay in touch or get needed items like toilet paper and tampons.

As with other industries that profit off of and further our prison industrial complex, the cash bail industry exploits and extracts as much as possible from incarcerated people and their families. About 500,000 people are in jail simply because they cannot afford bail, and each day in jail they risk losing their housing, jobs, and access to their children.

In order to fully address the multi-billion dollar private industries that have sprung up around mass incarceration, we must also take into account the ~4.5 million people who are caught up in other systems of confinement and control, primarily probation and parole.

Many of the biggest private prison corporations have “diversified” to provide for-profit “services” around probation and parole, such as fee collection, electronic monitoring, parole officers, drug treatment centers, and transitional housing.

One man who spent six months in one such re-entry facility said: “The GEO halfway house felt like moving from state prison to a local jail. I was denied permission to even see my own family. They care more about making money than actually helping you transition into society.”

Please sign now to encourage President Biden to go further to truly address the problem of for-profit incarceration and detention, including privatized services in public jails and prisons.

The petition asks President Biden to:

• End ICE’s contracts with private prison companies. Unlike the executive order which directed the DOJ to not renew contracts with private prisons, we must not only prevent new ICE contracts with private prisons, but end current contracts—some of which have over a decade left before they expire.
• Take steps to end privatized services in public federal confinement systems, including incarceration and post-incarceration—and incentivize state and local governments to do the same.
• Address mass incarceration and COVID’s spread in prisons by reducing the number of people in federal prison and detention centers, and incentivize state and local governments to do so.

We need to not only change the profit incentives in our systems of confinement, but also drastically reduce the number of people in them—especially with COVID-19 ravaging jails, prisons, and detention centers.

Last year, I introduced the landmark Dismantle Mass Incarceration for Public Health Act with my colleagues Congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Barbara Lee.

The bill would require and incentivize the release of eligible individuals who are currently in custody in a jail or prison during the COVID-19 crisis and for one year after—including people in ICE detention, people who are awaiting trial and have not been convicted of a crime, and people who are medically vulnerable to COVID-19.

Since the bill’s introduction, we’ve seen infection and death rates rise in the general population and especially in jails and prisons, which have become hotspots for the virus. In Michigan, my home state, a majority of people in prisons have tested positive for COVID-19, and the numbers keep growing.¹

We must urgently address this humanitarian crisis by quickly reducing prison populations, which public experts have demanded since the early days of the pandemic.

Thank you for taking action. Let’s honor Black History Month through action, including by starting to address our unjust, racist, and often-privatized systems of confinement.

In solidarity,

Rashida