At a campaign rally in Nevada on Tuesday, Vermont Senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders told a gathered crowd that he would introduce a bill aimed at ending the for-profit prison industry, supplementing an already comprehensive racial justice reform package targeting racial violence in the physical, political, legal, and economic spheres.

"When Congress reconvenes in September, I will be introducing legislation which takes corporations out of profiteering from running jails," Sanders said, following remarks on broader issues of racial violence such as improving police-community relations and rolling back widespread mass incarceration.

In video footage of the rally, Sanders' remark on private prisons (1:03:20 mark) is met with loud cheers and applause.

Sanders' remark Monday was brief, but his stance on the issue is slightly more fleshed out on his campaign website, touching on both the profit margins of private-prison corporations and the money they dump into political campaigns.

"It is morally repugnant and a national tragedy that we have privatized prisons all over America. In my view, corporations should not be allowed to make a profit by building more jails and keeping more Americans behind bars. We have got to end the private-for-profit prison racket in America. Profiting off the misery of incarcerated people is immoral and it is immoral to take campaign contributions from the private prison industry or its lobbyists."

Private prison firms have grown substantially since their inception in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when overflow in public facilities created a need for more space. Today, through lucrative contracts with federal, state, and local governments, private prison corporations have grown into a major campaign donor source and a heavyweight lobbying force. Since 1989, for-profit companies, including the two largest, GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America, have spent almost $25 million on lobbying efforts and more than $10 million on candidates in successful efforts to secure their longevity and political clout.

Sanders' bill will likely face intense pushback—a bill just to open up private prisons to the Freedom of Information Act has tried and failed multiple times. But the Senator has so far been one of the only candidates to address the issue of private prisons explicitly in his campaign platform. In March, Sanders called on the White House to take executive action against certain tax breaks—among them, a real estate loophole allowing businesses like private prisons to avoid corporate income taxes by claiming they make money from rents.