In the days since the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) announcement that it would “end the use of private prisons,” as the Washington Post put it, activists have reacted with warranted enthusiasm. Few corporations so ably combine American capitalism’s most grotesque features like for-profit prison companies, so any news of their potential downfall is good news.

Yet like anything the DOJ announces, a closer look, with a skeptical eye, is probably in order.

The August 18 memorandum, authored by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, directs the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) — the DOJ agency that runs the federal prison system — to discontinue the outsourcing of operations to private entities. “[A]s each contract reaches the end of its term,” Yates writes, “the Bureau should either decline to renew that contract or substantially reduce its scope in a manner consistent with law and the overall decline of the Bureau’s inmate population.” (That decline, which began in 2013, amounts to about twenty-five thousand people.)