At the beginning of the 1980s there were no privately-operated adult correctional facilities in the United States. As of 2009, more than 129,300 state and federal prisoners were housed in for-profit lock-ups. Prison privatization has become an acceptable practice and the private prison industry is now a multi-billion dollar business. How did this drastic expansion of incarceration-for-profit occur, and more importantly how has it rearranged the criminal justice landscape?
The prison and jail population in the United States has increased exponentially over the past several decades, from 648,000 in 1983 to more than 2.3 million as of 2010. That doesn’t include another 5 million people on parole and probation, plus millions more who were formerly incarcerated and are no longer under correctional supervision. Spending on prisons has outstripped expenditures on higher education in at least five states, including Michigan, Connecticut and California, as lawmakers engage in one-upmanship to prove who’s tougher on crime.
Why has our nation’s prison population grown to epic proportions, until the U.S. – with only 5 percent of the world’s population – now has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners?
The succinct answer is because imprisonment has become enormously profitable as a result of politically-influenced decisions as to who should be locked up and for how long. In the 1980s and 90s a series of tough-on-crime laws were enacted, spurred by the so-called War on Drugs and the corporate media’s steady and often sensationalistic coverage of violent offenses. Such laws included mandatory minimums, truth-in-sentencing statutes and three-strikes laws, which required lengthy prison terms or life sentences for certain offenders.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2012/jan/15/the-societal-impact-of-the-prison-industrial-complex-or-incarceration-for-fun-and-profitmostly-profit/
Marijuana legalization advocates like to point out that pot is safer than alcohol, if for no other reason than no one has ever died from a marijuana overdose. They also like to point out that the booze industry has been working to subvert drug policy reform for decades, at least going back to the early 90s when the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) FOIA’d the donation records for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and found that it had accepted large donations from Jim Beam and Anheuser Busch.
Alcohol companies were less obvious about their opposition to legalization after being outed by NORML. That lasted until September 2010, when the California Beer and Beverage Distributors donated $10,000 to a police-run campaign opposing Proposition 19, California’s marijuana legalization initiative.
https://reason.com/archives/2012/04/22/4-industries-getting-rich-off-the-drug-w/print
Nowhere is the private prison industry’s reliance on the drug war more apparent than in CCA’s 2010 report to shareholders. “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,” reads the report CCA filed with the Securities Exchange Commission.
“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.”
1.) The Addiction Recovery Industry
The business of treating addiction has come a long way since Bill Wilson developed the 12 Step program in the 1930s. It’s now a huge industry with deep pockets, an impressive lobbying budget, and a vested interest in paternalistic public health policies. This industry has two big policy concerns: It wants the government to direct users—both hard and recreational—into addiction treatment facilities instead of jail, and it wants the government to require insurance companies to cover addiction treatment like it would any other illness. This doesn’t mean the addiction recovery industry doesn’t have voluntary clients, just that it wants government to declare drug use a disease, force anyone who has it to receive very specific treatment from very specific doctors, and have a third party pay the bill.
The addiction services industry didn’t get this power by wishing for it. Since 1989, addiction services trade groups and individual companies have donated a combined$869,405 to political campaigns and spent almost $5 million lobbying in order to secure direct and indirect government funding of addiction services.
The biggest player on the rehab block is Phoenix House, which was started in 1967 by six Manhattan heroin addicts. Today, Phoenix House runs 150 addiction programs in 10 states, including in-patient and out-patient programs, as well as Phoenix Academy, a series of boarding schools for substance-using teens. Much of its $100 million budget comes from earmarks and government contracts: $250,000 for Phoenix House in Springfield; $480,000 for Phoenix House in Brentwood; $650,000 for Phoenix House in Dallas; $750,000 for Phoenix House in Brooklyn. The list goes on, and on, and on. Those earmarks don’t come cheap, however. Between 2002 and 2011, Phoenix House spent $1.28 million lobbying.
Phoenix House also supports the Obama Administration’s most recent pledge to spend more money on (much criticized) drug courts and other diversion strategies, as nearly all such programs shuffle drug users through addiction treatment centers. The company also invited former ONDCP senior advisor Kevin Sabet to pre-emptively attack legalization advocates on the Phoenix House website the day Obama's report was released.
Lobbying and campaign finance data courtesy of the Sunlight Foundation's Influence Explorer.
Several industries have become notorious for the millions they spend on influencing legislation and getting friendly candidates into office: Big Oil, Big Pharma and the gun lobby among them. But one has managed to quickly build influence with comparatively little scrutiny: Private prisons. The two largest for-profit prison companies in the United States – GEO and Corrections Corporation of America – and their associates have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts. Meanwhile, these private companies have seen their revenue and market share soar. They now rake in a combined $3.3 billion in annual revenue and the private federal prison population more than doubled between 2000 and 2010, according to a report by the Justice Policy Institute. Private companies house nearly half of the nation’s immigrant detainees, compared to about 25 percent a decade ago, a Huffington Post report found. In total, there are now about 130 private prisons in the country with about 157,000 beds.
Marco Rubio is one of the best examples of the private prison industry’s growing political influence, a connection that deserves far more attention now that he’s officially launched a presidential bid. The U.S. senator has a history of close ties to the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison company, GEO Group, stretching back to his days as speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. While Rubio was leading the House, GEO was awarded a state government contract for a $110 million prison soon after Rubio hired an economic consultant who had been a trustee for a GEO real estate trust. Over his career, Rubio has received nearly $40,000 in campaign donations from GEO, making him the Senate’s top career recipient of contributions from the company. (Rubio’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
Washington Post
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