For four years, the Trump administration embraced private prisons, signing contracts with corporations to incarcerate detainees, immigrants, and people serving federal sentences. Now, that era is coming to a close as President Joe Biden signs an executive order Tuesday afternoon instructing the Department of Justice to allow its contracts with for-profit prison companies to expire.

The executive order “will ultimately end the Justice Department’s use of private prisons, an industry that houses pretrial detainees and federal prisoners,” Biden said Tuesday in a speech on his racial equity policy agenda.  The decision means the gradual end for a dozen private prisons that currently incarcerate about 14,000 people—about 9 percent of the federal prison population. Most of those are men without US citizenship serving short federal sentences under low security. It could also affect for-profit jails run by private prison companies under contract with US Marshals Service, a DOJ division that holds pretrial detainees.

“Private prisons profiteer off of federal prisoners and are proven to be—or are found to be by […]