Over the past decades, private corporations have increased their control over prison services in the United States and around the world. Despite enormous lobbying efforts by the private players, citizens have started to reject this agenda of profiting from the criminal justice system, and instead demand to return prison management to public authorities. Biden has announced an end to renewing federal private prison contracts, which should be the starting point for wider changes.

On 26 January 2021, the newly inaugurated President of the United States, Joe Biden, signed an executive order directing the Department of Justice (DOJ) to phase out contracts with private federal prisons in what he called ‘the first step to stop corporations from profiting off of incarceration that is less humane and less safe’. The Federal Government of the United States is the single-largest customer of the private prison industry [1], yet the executive order (EO) is said to only have a limited impact on prison privatization and mass incarceration in the country, as it only affects a fraction of the privatized prison system. For example, the Department of Homeland Security, which is in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), is not included. To put it into context, only nine percent of people incarcerated in the federal prison system are housed in private prisons, while, as of January 2020, 81 percent of ICE detainees are held in privately operated facilities. Nevertheless, the EO throws a major curveball at a multimillion-dollar industry that influences the lives of tens of thousands of incarcerated people, possibly costing the companies almost 20 percent of their annual revenues in the United States [2].

Currently, the Bureau of Prisons has contracts with three private prison operators: CoreCivic (formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America), GEO Group, and MTC (Management and Training Corporation), which together operate twelve private federal prisons across the country. The executive order had its first effects at the end of March 2021, when the contracts with two privately owned federal prisons expired, the Moshannon Valley Correctional Facility in Pennsylvania and the Rivers Correctional Institution in North Carolina. The people imprisoned at the two facilities were transferred to public federal facilities.