KANSAS CITY, Mo. — One federal inmate was murdered, his lung punctured in an altercation; another was stabbed 17 times; a third was beaten and needed to be hospitalized; and two inmates died by suicide. Staff members have been attacked, including one doused with hot water and stabbed.
Advocates in four Midwestern states say those incidents and other alleged constitutional violations happened this year at Kansas' Leavenworth Detention Center, which houses federal prisoners awaiting trial. The advocates highlighted those troubles when asking the Biden administration to make good on an executive order to shutter such private facilities.
In January, President Joe Biden promised when he signed the order that “this is a first step to stop corporations from profiting off of incarceration."
The order built on efforts by the Obama administration to phase out private prisons. Those efforts were reversed under President Donald Trump, when private prison company revenues doubled in value.
The September letter from the American Civil Liberties Union and federal public defenders in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri and Nebraska ramps up the pressure on Biden to effectively shut down the industry by not renewing contracts with corporations that run Department of Justice prisons and detention centers.
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"We wanted to sound the alarm on that executive order," said Sharon Brett, legal director at the ACLU of Kansas, who helped write the letter and organize the effort against the maximum security Leavenworth center.
The profit-driven structure of private prisons means they capitalize on high crime rates and mass incarceration, according to critics such as Tammie Gregg of the national ACLU. She said the Leavenworth facility is just the "pinnacle" of problems seen in facilities across the country.
CoreCivic, the privately run, publicly traded company that operates the Leavenworth center, issued an emailed statement pushing back at the letter's allegations that it has poorly served incarcerated individuals and the government.
"Claims that our facility is 'dangerously understaffed, poorly managed, and incapable of safely housing' individuals entrusted to our care are false and defamatory,” the statement reads.
A 2016 U.S. Department of Justice inspector general report found that inmate discipline, lockdowns and contraband recovery were more frequent in private than government-run facilities.
Also, inmate assaults on other inmates were nearly 30% higher in private than public federal prisons, according to a federal justice department report, while assaults involving inmates on staff were "well more than twice (the rate) each month on average" than seen at government-run federal prisons.