Pay Attention to This Particular Part of Jeff Sessions' Private Prison Memo
ATLANTA-You know that Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions felt an ancient stirring in Little Jeffy when he got to support a "states rights" issue in rolling back Obama-era regulations that protected the rights of transgender students. But he wasn't going to let that hold him back from being exactly the kind of attorney general everybody knew he would be.
Sessions rolled back another one of the previous administration's rules on Thursday. Last August, the Obama Justice Department-speaking through Sally Yates, who seems to be in the middle of almost everything that happens these days-decided to phase out its reliance on private prisons. This announcement came after a series of investigations that revealed conditions so horrendous as to remind people that making prisons a profit center tends also to make prisoners disposable commodities.
On Thursday, of course, Sessions decided that we should go back to that again. From WYFF:
Sessions issued a new memo Thursday replacing one issued last August by Sally Yates, the deputy attorney general at the time. That memo told the Bureau of Prisons to begin reducing and ultimately end its use of privately run prisons. She said the facilities were less well run than those managed by the Bureau of Prisons, and were less necessary given declines in the overall prison population. But Sessions says in his memo Thursday that Yates' directive contradicted longstanding Justice Department policy and "impaired the Bureau's ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system."
Sessions' confidence that the "future needs of the federal correctional system" will require private prisons is a little unnerving. Remember when "criminal-justice reform" was going to be the issue that brought bipartisan comity back to our politics? Yeah, that was cool.
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