Governor of California Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) is set to sign a bill into law this week that will ban the practice of private companies running prisons and illegal alien detention facilities in the state of California, Reuters reports.
Supporters of the bill claim, without evidence, that private prisons “spend less on personnel, and are less safe,” than government-run facilities. Opponents of the bill point to the fact that such private facilities provide relief for government-run prisons when overcrowding occurs in the prison populations, including recent lawsuits that led to judges ordering decreases in certain inmate populations as a result.
The bill primarily targets private companies such as GEO Group and CoreCivic. There are only three private prisons remaining in California, which together house a collective total of 1,400 inmates. By also targeting illegal alien detention facilities, four such private facilities in California are also set to shut down, which would free over 4,000 illegal aliens.
The impending signing of this bill follows another significant leftward shift on the matter of prisons by some of the Democratic Party’s key figures. Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) recently came out in support of abolishing all prisons in the United States, both private and public.