Mike Riggs has a piece pointing out that Democrats like California Senator Dianne Feinstein take money from the Corrections Corporation of America, which contributed to legislators who helped pass Arizona’s SB 1070. As with that law, the CCA stands to lose money if fewer people are imprisoned for doing drugs, the inevitable consequence of the success of a California proposition legalizing marijuana. Riggs might have pointed out that Feinstein also recently sponsored a silly bill targeting “candy-flavored” narcotics like pot brownies because she apparently thinks there need to be more people imprisoned for longer periods of, even though she represents a state where the prisons are bursting at the seams.
Riggs’ piece takes the sort of predictable “Dems are hypocrites” route, but the fact that Feinstein takes money from CCA hardly vindicates SB 1070 or the legislators who wrote it. The real point here is that a for-profit prison industry creates some really bad public policy incentives, whether we’re talking criminal justice or immigration policy.
Also, their occasional contributions to Democrats aside, the CCA really does have a good idea of who their friends are (From the National Institute on Money in State Politics):
Feinstein’s 20th largest contributor gave her more than $20,000 dollars. Twenty-five hundred from CCA isn’t going to curry a whole lot of favor. The culture of dumb on crime is pretty bipartisan, but unlike with SB 1070 and Arizona there’s not a lot of evidence here that Feinstein is corrupt as opposed to just supportive of bad policies.
