Breaking the Shackles of Private Prisons
Private prisons in the United States have long been the topic of controversy, for example over their role in housing undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border. Several states have banned them, some banks have vowed to stop financing them and more than one presidential candidate has pledged to end them at the federal level.
During his first week in office last year, President Joe Biden signed an executive order demanding the Department of Justice not renew its contracts with privately operated criminal detention centers. The directive only covers 13 private prisons with roughly 20,000 prisoners, but in fact, the U.S. houses over 200 of said facilities, holding more than 110,000 inmates—some 8 percent of
