The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced on Tuesday that it will launch an investigation into the conditions at the Trousdale Turner Correctional Center for the potential abuse of civil rights. The Center is operated by CoreCivic, an American company that plays a significant role in private correctional facilities in the US. 

Trousdale Turner Correctional Center faced multiple reports suggesting the facility is understaffed and poorly equipped. In 2023, Families for Justice Reform wrote to the Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice, urging them to look into the “mounting evidence of unsafe conditions, violence, deaths, and understaffing at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center.” Furthermore, the DoJ stated that reports regarding conditions of the facility include physical and sexual assaults. The DoJ affirmed that it is committed to protecting the constitutional rights of the Trousdale Turner prisoners. 

Speaking about the investigation, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke stated that:

In our country, people do not surrender their constitutional rights at the prison door. Every person held in a jail or prison retains the fundamental right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment. In our legal system, proper punishment does not, and cannot, include violence and sexual abuse.

The power to investigate is drawn from the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act.

Private prisons are used by multiple countries throughout the world. It is primarily a solution to the inability of the state to develop and maintain correctional facilities by itself, due to a lack of resources. Outsourcing the work to private entities is a less resource-intensive alternative.

However, a common criticism of this alternative is that it is unethical and opens the door to human rights violations of those incarcerated within these facilities. Sourcing a task of such immense public importance to a private entity lowers the threshold of diligence with which the facilities are run and obscures their social and moral purpose with economic considerations. American Civil Liberties Union has previously criticised the system of “locking people in cages for profit,” and pointed out that “[t]hese private prisons have also been linked to numerous cases of violence and atrocious conditions.”