U.S. Marshals Nominee Defends Her Ties to the Private Prison Industry
When Stacia Hylton retired from the Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this year, she did what a lot of former federal officials do: she became a consultant, raking in more than $112,000 from her sole client, GEO Group, the second large private prison company in America. Now President Obama wants her to head up the U.S. Marshals where -- guess what? -- she’ll be in a position to oversee the very private prison industry that helped her remodel her kitchen with that inflated consulting fee.
Hylton’s nomination has sparked an outcry from a number of groups, including Public Citizen and the National Lawyers Guild, which allege her close relationship with private prison companies -- the CEO of the largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, even attended her retirement party -- constitute a clear conflict of interest, pointing out she began forming her consultancy even before leaving DOJ.
As DOJ’s Federal Detention Trustee, Hylton also oversaw the awarding of contracts valued at up to $88 million to GEO Group, her once-and-perhaps-future employer. She also opposed a measure that would have limited the profits private prison firms can make from imprisoning Americans.
Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Hylton argued the outcry was much-ado about nothing.
"I'd like to assure the entire members of the committee that I did follow all ethics requirements and regulations and worked closely with the ethics office before retirement and subsequently after," Hylton said. "I incorporated the consulting business about a month before I retired just simply so I could begin the paperwork and begin to set up the office so that when I did retire ... the company would no longer be dormant.”
But Tracy Velazquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, says Hylton’s claims were unpersuasive.
“She’s going straight from a position where she was benefitting from the private prison industry to a position where she’s regulating that industry, and that hasn’t changed,” Velazquez tells Change.org. “I don’t feel like she has adequately answered how she’s going to avoid conflicts of interest, and certainly her record of supporting the private prison industry with very lucrative contracts should give people pause.”
Committee spokeswoman Erica Chabot would not comment on whether Hylton’s answers satisfied Chairman Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont. But she did tell Change.org that senators have another week to submit questions to Hylton and that a committee vote on her nomination has not yet been scheduled.
In a letter to the committee, the coalition opposed to Hylton’s nomination lays out why senators should use the time between now and a possible confirmation vote to explore her relationship with the industry she will be well positioned to benefit.
“As part of its business model the private prison industry seeks to increase the number of people who are incarcerated – whether that constitutes sound public policy or not,” reads the letter, signed by the Alliance for Justice, Human Rights Defense Center and others. “With her documented ties to private prison companies, there are serious concerns that under Ms. Hylton’s leadership, in which she would oversee detention services for the U.S. Marshals, there will be an increased reliance on the use of private prisons and a decreased emphasis on reducing levels of incarceration.”
With more than 2.3 million of them already, the last thing the U.S. needs is more prisoners -- or a head of the U.S. Marshals with a financial stake in increasing incarceration.
Photo Credit: Michele Molinari
Charles Davis
has covered Congress and criminal justice issues for public radio and Inter Press Service.
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