Hey, it's Alan. I hope 2022 has been a good year for you. But to be honest, it's been a tough one for us.

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From the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, this is reveal. I'm Aledson.

The week President Joe Biden took office, he signed a record 22 executive orders.

Many of them to undo actions taken by Donald Trump, like ending the Muslim travel ban and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline.

Biden also called for the Department of Justice to stop renewing contracts with private companies that run prisons and pre-child detention centers.

A step we started to take in the end of the Obama administration and was reversed under the previous administration.

The step the Obama administration took was directed specifically at those private federal prisons, most of which are used to hold non-citizens convicted of federal crimes.

People locked up inside had protested for years over poor conditions and medical negligence.

This is new at 10 in FBI, affidavit details would happen during an almost eight hour deadly riot.

The housing units set on fire inmates violently shaking the fence. They may told us they want the public to know the reason they're doing this is because an inmate was sick and they don't believe he was given the proper medical care.

Even with the news coverage, the public didn't really know what was going on inside these prisons until Seth Friedwester of type investigations sued the federal government.

He got an extensive set of prison medical files and in partnership with Reveal and the Nation magazine, he started to piece together life inside these prisons.

Today, we're going to bring you that investigation from 2016. Seth teamed up with Reveal Stan Alcorn. They begin in Big Spring, Texas, a town on the edge of oil country where one of these private prisons and a regular government run prison sits side by side.

If you want to know what's going on inside a prison, you can't just walk in the front door and look around. But in the case of Big Spring's private federal prison, you can get a pretty good look at the soccer field.

From the road through a couple barbed wire fences, you can see men in khaki and white streaming out of a squat tan building, playing soccer, walking in pairs around the track.

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