Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has instructed all Justice Department officials to not renew their contracts with private prison corporations, beginning a long process to completely phase out the use of private prisons.
As of this writing, private prison stocks are nosediving.
Shares of GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America were originally halted on the news, but have since reopened, falling more than 20 percent. Both stocks were then halted again and again for volatility.
GEO shares were last down more than 47 percent, while CCA was down more than 52 percent.
The fact that our prisons and thus prisoners are a publicly traded commodity is really the whole problem, isn't it? There should not be a profit motive in law enforcement.
As someone with an extended family member who spent nearly 20 years in a prison managed by a private company, I find private prisons to be abhorrent. Unfortunately, most private prisons are not operated by the federal government, they're operated by states. With that said, this is a big first step toward eliminating them.
You should mark this down as yet another reason why Hillary Clinton must be elected as our next president, because a Trump administration would probably mandate that all prisons go private.