EDITORIAL: Behind bars

As the federal prison population climbed in the 1990s and early 2000s, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons found itself running short on space. The Justice Department responded by farming out some operations to a handful of private facilities.

That practice is now coming to an end.

On Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the government was phasing out the use of private prisons. “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources,” she told USA Today. “They do not save substantially on costs, and … they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.”

It’s unclear why Ms. Yates opted to put an ideological twist on her explanation. As Sasha Volokh pointed out in The Washington Post on Friday, private systems continue to offer some advantages.

“They do save money (though how much is a matter of dispute),” he writes. “And they don’t clearly provide worse quality; in fact, the best empirical studies don’t give a strong edge to either sector.”

In fact, the Justice Department is taking this step for a much more prosaic reason. Private prisons are no longer a necessary part of the system because the federal prison population has dwindled — and will likely continue to do so.

From 1980 until 2013, the number of people doing time for federal crimes skyrocketed from 25,000 to 219,000, the Los Angeles Times reports. Three years ago, about 15 percent of these prisoners were housed in private facilities.

In the past two years, however, the population has shrunk by 22,000. By next spring, the Justice Department estimates just 14,200 inmates will remain in private prisons.

Given the bipartisan congressional push for reforming the federal criminal code to ensure that non-violent offenders don’t clog the system, the number of people confined will almost certainly stay in decline.

Liberal critics of privatization argue the practice helps explain the large increase in incarceration rates in past decades, maintaining that profit-hungry corporations pushed to jail more offenders. This willfully ignores the fact that politicians and public-sector interests had far more incentive to keep high the number of men and women put in jail. Don’t believe it? According to The Intercept, almost half the money being spent in California to fight a marijuana legalization referendum on the November ballot “is coming from police and prison guard groups.”

With proper oversight and performance incentives, private prisons can serve a useful purpose. If a shrinking federal prison population means it no longer makes financial sense to use corporate-run facilities, fine. But don’t blame the private operators.