The Department of Justice report seems to provide enough evidence to justify ending federal contracting with private prison firms.

But the gaps it identifies between public and private prisons are very, very much smaller than the gaps between the American public carceral state and either a) normal conditions (including the prevalence of incarceration itself) in other liberal democracies, or b) a morally tolerable and decent state of affairs.

And DOJ– through the US Attorneys, through the Bureau of Prisons– is itself an actor in that morally intolerable state of affairs. So I can’t help but see an element of deflecting blame in deciding to start with the particular symptom that is intolerable private prisons. If DOJ and the administration wanted to seriously address the crisis of the carceral state, they could end the directive to US Attorneys to seek maximum sentences, to take just one example. But that would involve acknowledging their own institutional responsibility.

Private prisons hold <10% of all prisoners in the correctional system. (The separate immigrant detention system is more heavily private, and also terrible.) Private prison firms have been followers, not leaders, in the growth of mass incarceration (see this chart, via). They have been profiting from misery and injustice, and I certainly don’t feel any pain for their shareholders today. And they have sometimes, as documented in the DOJ report, been the proximate cause of misery and injustice. But they are not the ultimate cause of it, and there’s a real limit to how much credit DOJ gets for acting against one outside actor profiting on a wicked system that it continues to oversee.

The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, including the billion-person Communist dictatorship in China. And today’s announcement won’t change that, at all.