Successes This Week!

Justice Department Plans to Stop Using Private Prisons. The announcement comes after a Mother Jones investigation found serious deficiencies at a private prison in Louisiana.
The Department of Justice will stop contracting with private prisons, the department announced Thursday morning. The decision comes a week after the DOJ inspector general released a damning report on the safety, security, and oversight of private prisons, which incarcerate 12 percent of federal inmates.

The announcement comes on the heels of a Mother Jones investigation of a private prison in Louisiana that found serious deficiencies in staffing and security. It also documented a higher rate of violence than the prison reported. Last week's DOJ report found that private prisons are more violent than federal prisons.

As of December 2015, private prisons incarcerated about 22,600 federal inmates. The news of the DOJ's decision prompted a quick downturn in stock prices for the two largest private prison companies.

The decision was announced in a memo by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, according to the Washington Post. The memo directs department officials not to renew existing contracts or to "substantially reduce" their scope, with the goal of "reducing—and ultimately ending—our use of privately operated prisons."

Fonterra has now shifted on palm products too! 
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The NZ dairy giant has bowed to years of pressure and committed to using only responsibly sourced (1) palm products throughout its supply chain.

This comes after many years of Greenpeace campaigning to stop the use of palm kernel expeller (PKE) on New Zealand farms, and closely follows Landcorp’s announcement that it will stop using PKE on its farms altogether. Both have committed to re-focus on pasture-based farming. This is real progress from Fonterra - we’ll continue demanding a full phase out and a move to ecological farming - but today we celebrate.

Click here now to share the good news!

With your help we’ve made a real difference - and it just goes to show how much we can achieve when we’re tenacious and work together.

This campaign began seven years ago and you stood alongside us every step of the way - when we stopped shipments of PKE coming into port, when we carried out undercover investigations in Indonesia, when we documented and bore witness to devastating forest clearance, when we directly linked Fonterra to the problem, and when we repeatedly called on our Government to stop the import of PKE … it was all made possible through the support of people like you.

You turned out to protests, signed petitions, sent emails, shared our message with your friends and family, and many of you donated to keep us in action.

This is your win, and you should be proud of the part you have played in fighting to protect the rainforests and the climate.

Over the past ten months, we’ve had several high-level meetings with Fonterra. They came to us to help them formulate a policy - in large part due to the work we (and you) have done over the past seven years.

When Greenpeace speaks out, big companies and governments sit up and listen. That's because of the millions of people like you who are willing to stand with us to give this fragile Earth a voice.

Here’s the link again, please share the news on facebook and twitter if you can:

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Notes
(1) Responsibly sourced palm products means Fonterra will use only PKE and other palm oil products from suppliers that aren't clearing rainforest, developing peatlands or exploiting local communities and workers.