Bureau Facilities: Prisons and Sentencing Policies

bureau facilities: The federal prison population has been declining due to changes in sentencing policies over the past three years, reducing the need for private prisons, according to Huffington Post Canada. U.S. President Barack Obama holds a news conference at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. August 4, 2016. "Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own Bureau facilities,'' Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates wrote in a memo to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The decision announced by the Justice Department comes after an audit this month found that private facilities have more safety and security problems than the government-run prisons. As private prison contracts come to an end, the bureau is not to renew the contract or it should at least "substantially'' reduce its scope, Yates wrote. As of December 2015, private prisons held more than 22,000 prisoners -- or about 12 per cent of the total federal prison population, according to an inspector general report released earlier this month. The federal government started to rely on private prisons in the late 1990s due to overcrowding. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.