I meant to link to the Justice Policy Institute's report on private prisons last week, but Andrea Nill Sanchez has a good summary of the report's conclusions about tremendous influence private prison companies have amassed by throwing money around:
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
Private prison companies are well aware of the impact of tough sentencing laws on their bottom line. The JPI report cites the Corrections Corporation of America's Annual Report, which notes that:
The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior. Also, sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation with electronic monitoring who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.
In other words, every good idea criminal justice experts have come up with over the past twenty years to reduce prison costs and the devastating social impact of mass incarceration on marginalized communities, from non-custodial sentencing to reforming drug laws to innovation in parole and probation, hurts the CCA's bottom line and it's in their financial interest to oppose any change that might lead to fewer people being locked up. When you introduce a profit motive into mass incarceration, you will inevitably end up with private companies whose bottom line is in direct conflict with the public interest. As private prison companies expand further into the realm of immigration policy, their influence is leveraged in support of restrictive immigration laws which will increase demand for their product. According to JPI, contracts from Immigrations and Customs Enforcement made up 20 percent of The GEO Group's revenues in 2010, and twelve percent of CCA's.
On the anti-tough on crime right, the influence of private prison corporations in implementing draconian criminal justice policies is sometimes ignored while the evils of current policies are attributed to large and powerful prison guard unions (on the left the reverse is often true). While those unions certainly represent a pernicious influence on criminal justice policy, conservatives and libertarians sometimes overlook the impact of private prison companies--see this Reason Foundation report arguing that private prisons can help California save money. They often don't, but to the extent that they do according to JPI, it's often by eschewing organized labor.
As frustrating as the influence of prison guard unions might be however, corrections employees often have very difficult and dangerous jobs, and they should have the right to be able to negotiate for better pay and better working conditions. Private prison companies on the other hand, don't have a right to government contracts in order to make money off of the misery of mass incarceration. I'd be interested to see a comparison of political spending by unions and private prison corporations, but at the very least unions serve an interest other than simply profiting off of mass incarceration, though they do that too. Private prison corporations don't.
