Biden bans use of private prisons

US President Joe Biden has signed a decree that will end the use of privately-run prisons, Report informs, referring to Bloomberg.

According to a White House statement, Biden instructed the attorney general not to renew contracts with private prison operators.

"This is the first step to stop corporations from profiting off incarceration that is less humane and less safe," Biden said in remarks at the White House on Jan. 26.

The order does not apply to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, which contract with private prison operators as well, or private prison contracts with agencies other than the Justice Department.

The move may hurt the country’s two largest private prison operators, GEO Group Inc. and CoreCivic Inc. They saw their share prices gain significantly after former President Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump ended an Obama-era prohibition on the Justice Department’s use of private prisons.

GEO and CoreCivic have sought to diversify from federal contracts by signing deals with states to build and operate prisons.

In its statement, GEO said it has ‘almost exclusively housed non-citizen criminal aliens convicted of federal crimes, thus allowing government-run facilities to care for US citizens without significant overcrowding challenges.’

At the end of 2019, there were about 116,000 prisoners held in privately operated facilities, which represented roughly 7 percent of all state prisoners and 16 percent of all federal prisoners, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.