US President Joe Biden ordered the end to the use of private prisons for federal inmates, saying they incentivized throwing more people in prison without improving on government-run jails.
Biden ordered the Justice Department to phase out the use of private incarceration facilities, which house about 16 percent of federal prisoners
Biden said private prisons, which house about 116,000 of the more than two million prisoners under federal and state supervision in the country, were worse than government-run facilities.
Private prison operators first emerged in the United States in the 1980’s when the prison population began to explode, notably because of the war on drugs.It became a big and profitable business, with the prison companies publicly traded on stock exchanges.