Prison Industrial Complex

PIC promoted to secondary not b/c of any connection to global warming, but connected to other problems and players

Overview

Though the conventional point of view holds that racial discrimination has mostly ended with the civil rights movement reforms of the 1960s, Alexander posits that the U.S. criminal justice system uses the War on Drugs as a primary tool for enforcing traditional, as well as new, modes of discrimination and repression.^[2] These new modes of racism have led to not only the highest rate of incarceration in the world, but also an even greater imprisonment of African American men. Were present trends to continue, Alexander writes, the United States will imprison one-third of its African American population. When combined with the fact that whites are more likely to commit drug crimes than people of color, the issue becomes clear for Alexander: "The primary targets of [the penal system's] control can be defined largely by race."^[3]

This, ultimately, leads Alexander to believe that mass incarceration is "a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow". The culmination of this social control is what Alexander calls a "racial caste system", a type of stratification wherein people of color are kept in an inferior position. Its emergence, she believes, is a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement. It is because of this that Alexander argues for issues with mass incarceration to be addressed as issues of racial justice and civil rights. To approach these matters as anything but would be to fortify this new racial caste. Thus, Alexander aims to mobilize the civil rights community to move the incarceration issue to the forefront of its agenda and to provide factual information, data, arguments and a point of reference for those interested in pursuing the issue. Her broader goal is the revamping of the prevailing mentality regarding human rights, equality and equal opportunities in America, to prevent future cyclical recurrence of what she sees as "racial control under changing disguise".^[1] According to the author, what has been altered since the collapse of Jim Crow is not so much the basic structure of US society, as the language used to justify its affairs. She argues that when people of color are disproportionately labeled as "criminals", this allows the unleashing of a whole range of legal discrimination measures in employment, housing, education, public benefits, voting rights, jury duty, and so on.^[4]

...

econ update 3/17

white flight, city must find $ as tax base shrinks, so write tickets

http://www.alternet.org/investigations/new-brave-new-films-bail-trap

http://www.alternet.org/video/how-bail-system-really-screws-you-if-you-are-poor

bail trap movie bnf

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-10-25/ice-seeks-to-reopen-private-prisons-shuttered-by-justice-department

http://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/news/local/records-political-ties-of-private-prisons-raise-co/nNpdc/

....

Activists have called on investors to divest themselves of corporate corrections stock because of corporate efforts to influence incarceration policies.

MTC and GEO Group officials declined to be interviewed for this story, but CCA spokesman Steve Owen said such concerns are “unfounded. We’re not in the business of public policy. We don’t grow our business by impacting crime and sentencing laws. We grow our business by providing safe, secure facilities.”

CCA, the largest corrections company with record revenues of $1.7 billion in 2010, was also the first modern industry player. It was politically well-connected from the start, cofounded in 1983 by then-Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley. It now confines more than 75,000 male, female and juvenile inmates in 66 prisons serving 19 states, the District of Columbia, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. Marshal’s Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Owen said the company helps governments save money by using economies of scale in the purchasing of goods and services, and in negotiating with providers for employee benefits. He said the company offers competitive pay, based on the standards of the prisons’ host communities. That translates to lower pay for guards than that offered to unionized state employees.

“We’ve been able to deliver on the value proposition,” Owen said. “Marry that with the oversight and accountability of government, (and you get) the best of both worlds.

“At the end of the day, from a business standpoint, if we’re not operating safe and secure facilities, there’s no reason for government to partner with us.”

Political connections

Privatization foes say there are other reasons that politicians engage corrections companies: Campaign contributions, lobbying and other personal connections.

Soon after Ohio dipped its toe into the private prison waters, money started flowing into campaign coffers, campaign finance records show. Since 2001, when it began running Ohio’s two private prisons, MTC has contributed a total of $103,000 to legislative and state candidate and political parties. In just the last two years, MTC donated $42,000.

In December, CCA and GEO — the other two dominant players in the private prison industry — each contributed $10,000, the maximum allowed by law, to Kasich’s transition fund that pays for inaugural parties and other expenses.

Each of the three vendors hired well-connected Columbus lobbyists to advance their interests. In CCA’s corner is Donald Thibaut, who served as Kasich’s chief of staff in Congress for nearly 20 years. GEO contracted with Doug Preisse and Bob Klaffky, who both served as political advisors to the Kasich campaign. MTC hired Dan Jones, who went on a Florida fishing trip with then House Speaker Jon Husted in the midst of the 2006 budget negotiations.

After being elected governor last year, Kasich hired former CCA employee Gary Mohr as his corrections director and announced plans to privatize the five prisons. Mohr handed oversight of the deal to his chief of staff to avoid a conflict of interest.

MTC also hired former Ohio Corrections Director Terry Collins as a paid consultant. CCA announced in June it hired newly retired Federal Bureau of Prisons director Harley G. Lappin as its chief corrections officer and executive vice president.

According to OpenSecrets.org, which tracks campaign giving and lobbying influence, CCA and GEO have contributed a combined $20.9 million to federal candidates in the last decade. CCA and GEO spent a combined $19.6 million to lobby federal officials since 2000. Since 2002, GEO and CCA contributed $1 million to the Democratic Governors Association and $1.8 million to the Republican Governors Association, according to OpenSecrets.

State Rep. Mike Foley, D-Cleveland, said Ohio’s privatizations are “giveaways to corporate America, friends of John Kasich. It raises real questions about pay to play and basically buying influence to obtain state resources.”

Ohio Corrections officials deny political motivations, saying the privatization plan is one means of solving the state’s budget crisis. LoParo said the selection process is being done by an adminstration team in “a very transparent, very professional manner, far removed from the political process.”

Next steps...

http://www.acluohio.org/blog-posts/blog-titledoj-end-its-use-of-private-prisons-but-what-about-ohio

8/16

week, the Department of Justice announced an end to using private prisons to hold federal prisoners. This decision followed a scathing report which highlighted that private prisons are less safe, provide less services and programs, and do not substantially save on costs. This is a major victory for those who have fought to end prison privatization.

But don’t write off private prisons just yet.

The process will happen gradually over the next five years, as the DOJ advises the Federal Bureau of Prisons to decline contract renewals or substantially reduce the scope of contracts. Plus, this decision only affects federal prisoners.

At its highest capacity, the Federal Bureau of Prisons used private prisons to house approximately 15 percent of its population, just under 30,000 prisoners.

What Does This Mean For Ohio?

While the DOJ’s announcement is a clear warning to all states using private prison operators, it only goes so far. The policy change does not apply to immigration detention centers run by the Department of Homeland Security, or to state prisons with private operators or owners.

In Ohio, the Bureau of Prisons had already declined to renew its contract with the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for the privately-owned Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio. This decision wasn’t surprising―the facility had been riddled with problems since it opened in 1997. Within the first 14 months, the facility experienced 13 stabbings, two murders, and six escapes. Youngstown officials even sued CCA for its mismanagement of the facility. As a result, it temporarily shut down, only to later re-open again under CCA control. In 2014, the BOP decided not to renew its contract with CCA after multiple protests at the facility objecting to unsanitary food conditions, inadequate access to programming, and lack of medical care. Unfortunately, the U.S. Marshal Service still pays CCA to hold hundreds of detainees at this prison.

Ohio’s Failed Experiment with Prison Privatization

Ohio was the first, and is still, the only state to sell a prison to a private operator. Privatization was seen as a way to cut costs for our bloated prison system.

Ohio prisons hold over 50,000 people in a system built for less than 38,000.

Simply put – the experiment failed. The first 18 months that Lake Erie Correctional Institution was under CCA control were a failure. Drug use was rampant throughout the facility, contraband was being tossed over the perimeter fence, violence increased, and medical care deteriorated. It’s taken years for the facility to stabilize, and there are still problems.

Privatization is only in the best interest of those who make a profit. It does not benefit the staff, prisoners, local community members, or the state. The DOJ voiced these concerns loud and clear when it announced it will no longer contract with private prison operators.

So why is Ohio on a dangerous path to sell another prison to a for-profit company?

Ending Prison Privatization in Ohio

Ohio now plans to sell a second prison to a private company. Last year, in a legislative sleight of hand, the sale of the North Central Correctional Complex in Marion, Ohio was inserted into an unrelated bill right before summer recess. Concerned citizens were given no opportunity to submit testimony or engage in public discussion, and the bill passed with little media coverage at the time.

Host a screening of our award winning documentary, for your class, social club, church, or community group. Use our Prisons For Profit Toolkit to create your own program or request a speaker from the ACLU of Ohio.

For-profit prisons make more money as their populations grow. Our prisons are bursting at the seams at 130% capacity, even though recidivism rates are at an all-time low. For-profit prisons create a perverse incentive to lock up more people because empty beds are money out the window. And while the purpose of prison should be safety and rehabilitation, a private prison operator’s mission is to make money. People should never be treated like dollar signs, and Ohio needs to stop feeding this system.

Ohio should end its failed experiment with privatization and invest in real, lasting criminal justice reform. We must strive to send less people to prison, for less time, while increasing cost-effective rehabilitation programs. The DOJ is ending its use of private prisons, and it’s time for Ohio to follow suit.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/27/my_four_months_as_a_private

Between 2009 and 2011, Shane Bauer spent nearly two years locked up in an Iranian prison as one of the jailed American hikers. Last year, he went back to jail—this time as an undercover journalist working as a guard at a private prison in Louisiana. In a stunning new exposé for Mother Jones, Bauer chronicles the four months he spent undercover last year as a guard at Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Facility. Winn is the oldest privately operated medium-security prison in the country and sits in the state that holds the distinction as having the world’s highest incarceration rate—more than 800 prisoners per 100,000 residents. During Bauer’s investigation, Winn was run by the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator. Bauer’s story offers a never-before-seen look at the for-profit prison industry, exposing conditions that include violence among inmates, poor medical and mental healthcare for even the sickest prisoners, mismanagement and lack of training for staff.

UCSC

http://socialsciences.ucsc.edu/research/publications/crime-prison-reading-list.html

Craig Reinarman, Professor in the division’s Sociology Department, specializes in law, crime, and social justice and most recently published various arguments for loosening drug policy in the USA.

Reinarman comments in the Santa Cruz Sentinel how"Drug problems cannot be understood apart from the matrix of other social problems in which they are embedded. The solutions will not be simple. Not all drug abuse, licit or illicit, can be considered addiction and not everyone arrested for drug possession needs treatment. But there is a growing consensus that we cannot incarcerate our way out of our drug problems."

Julie Beck, who earned her PhD from the division's Sociology department in 2006, has gone on to research and study Prisons in California. She is currently an Associate Professor at California State University where she teaches about police and community relations, crime theory and women in criminal justice.

Beck co-authored an important chapter in the book Courts, Law and Justice (2006) about the impact of DNA evidence on the criminal justice system and wrote a piece about "lifers" in San Quentin Prison and the problems they face.

haney

“There are few, if any, forms of imprisonment that appear to produce so much psychological trauma as isolation. There’s very little doubt in psychology that enforced isolation is psychologically harmful.”

The Psychological Effects of Incarceration

Psychologist Craig Haney, PhD, studies the use and impact of solitary confinement on inmates in super-maximum security, or “supermax,” prisons.

“There’s very little doubt in psychology that enforced isolation is psychologically harmful and for some people will be very damaging,” says Haney, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Despite the shared perspective many psychologists have about the dangers of isolation and social exclusion, less research has been done into the psychological impact of enforced solitary confinement. Haney’s goal is to get the data in order to evaluate whether such confinement is harmful, how much damage it can inflict and who is most susceptible.

Studying the Supermax

Haney has inspected many supermax prisons across the U.S., conducting systematic psychological assessments of nearly 1,000 inmates in solitary confinement. In addition to conducting observations and face-to-face interviews with inmates, mental health staff and correctional staff, he has performed an extensive literature review of personal accounts and prison documents relating to the operation of confinement units.

Through his research, Haney has found little evidence to support claims that prisoners or prison systems benefit from solitary confinement. Even those prisoners deemed to be the worst offenders don’t require such extreme isolation and deprivation. Many, he argues, are placed in supermax conditions not for what they have done but on the basis of a prison official’s judgment that they are dangerous, disruptive or a threat. Often, he says, they can and should be handled differently.

Solitary Confinement and Social Deprivation

“There are few, if any, forms of imprisonment that appear to produce so much psychological trauma as isolation,” Haney says. “For many prisoners, the absence of regular, normal interpersonal contact creates a pervasive feeling of unreality.”

Haney’s research found that among the population of inmates in supermax prisons, there is a higher rate of mental illness than the general prisoner population. Some inmates entered the prison system with existing mental health problems, while others show signs of mental illness that emerged after confinement. He assessed 400 randomly selected inmates to determine if they were experiencing symptoms of psychological distress or demonstrating isolation-related psychopathological symptoms. More than half of the assessed inmates experienced 11 of the 12 recognized signs of psychological distress. Approximately two out of three of those interviewed reported having anxiety attacks and feeling on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Some inmates also reported more extreme symptoms, such as depression and suicidal thoughts.¹

His research showed that even in the correctional system, people need human interaction to be healthy psychologically.

“It borders on being common sense, but it is common sense with empirical research to support it,” Haney says. “So much of what we do and who we are is rooted in a social context. When people experience extreme isolation and social exclusion, they suffer.”

¹For example, see: Haney, C. “Mental health issues in long-term solitary and ‘supermax’ confinement.” Crime and Delinquency, 49 (1), 124 – 156. Retrieved from http://www.supermaxed.com/NewSupermaxMaterials/Haney-MentalHealthIssues.pdf

Social Psychology

Social psychologists are interested in all aspects of personality and social interaction, exploring the influence of interpersonal, intergroup and intragroup relationships on human behavior.

Learn more about the science of social psychology

SEVEN THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT UPRISING AT TEXAS PRIVATE PRISON FOR IMMIGRANTS: Last weekend, a private prison incarcerating immigrant prisoners in Willacy County, Texas erupted into a major uprising. Incarcerated immigrants and advocates have for years been warning that these prisons are tinderboxes of horrendous conditions waiting to explode. (2/23/2015)

https://movetoamend.org/five-corporations-youve-never-heard-are-making-millions-mass-incarceration

lost story on southern jail system huge $ kickback? 10 or 11/14.

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/2/4/kids_for_cash_inside_one_of

Today a special on "kids for cash," the shocking story of how thousands of children in Pennsylvania were jailed by two corrupt judges who received $2.6 million in kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities. We hear from two of the youth: Charlie Balasavage was sent to juvenile detention after his parents unknowingly bought him a stolen scooter; Hillary Transue was detained for creating a MySpace page mocking her assistant high school principal. They were both 14 years old and were sentenced by the same judge, Judge Mark Ciavarella, who is now in jail himself — serving a 28-year sentence. Balasavage and Transue are featured in the new documentary, "Kids for Cash," by filmmaker Robert May, who also joins us. In addition, we speak to two mothers: Sandy Fonzo, whose son Ed Kenzakoski committed suicide after being imprisoned for years by Judge Ciavarella, and Hillary’s mother, Laurene Transue. Putting their stories into context of the larger scandal is attorney Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Center. The story is still developing: In October, the private juvenile-detention companies in the scandal settled a civil lawsuit for $2.5 million.

Inmates Die in Droves After Governor Rick Scott Outsources Prison Healthcare

Suffering from lung cancer? Here’s a Tylenol and some warm compresses. Are your intestines escaping? Not to worry; here’s some K-Y Jelly to shove them back in. An investigation reveals that Florida inmates have been dying in droves since the state privatized prison health care.

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Governor Snyder Stands Behind Prison Privatization, Even After Maggots and Murder for Hire

Ideological slogans often trump facts when it comes to the outsourcing of public services. When independent studies are commissioned, the conclusions are often disregarded. In some cases, however, there seems to be solid research supporting the cost-efficiency of privatization. Such was the case in Michigan – at least at first glance.

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7/14

Changing Criminal Justice Laws

The "Resolution in Support of Post-Release Supervision of Offenders" expands parole, or post-release supervision, and would benefit ALEC member the American Bail Coalition, the trade group for the for-profit bail industry. ALEC already pushes bills to put for-profit bail bondsmen in the position of supervising individuals on parole or post-conviction release through its "Conditional Post-Conviction Release Act." (In fact, ALEC re-approved this bill in December 2013, after the dissolution of its "Public Safety and Elections Task Force" in 2012.) This new resolution would call for more inmates to be released with supervision, rather than on their own recognizance, thus expanding the market for private bounty hunters in states where ALEC's earlier bill has already become law. This resolution will be discussed by ALEC's "Justice Performance Project," yet another indication that it is taking on the roles of the shuttered "Public Safety and Elections Task Force."

2012

his month the United States celebrates the Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965 to commemorate our shared history of the civil rights movement and our nation’s continued progress towards racial equality. Yet decades later a broken criminal-justice system has proven that we still have a long way to go in achieving racial equality.

Today people of color continue to be disproportionately incarcerated, policed, and sentenced to death at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. Further, racial disparities in the criminal-justice system threaten communities of color—disenfranchising thousands by limiting voting rights and denying equal access to employment, housing, public benefits, and education to millions more. In light of these disparities, it is imperative that criminal-justice reform evolves as the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Below we outline the top 10 facts pertaining to the criminal-justice system’s impact on communities of color.

1. While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.

2. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime. Individuals of color have a disproportionate number of encounters with law enforcement, indicating that racial profiling continues to be a problem. A report by the Department of Justice found that blacks and Hispanics were approximately three times more likely to be searched during a traffic stop than white motorists. African Americans were twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.

3. Students of color face harsher punishments in school than their white peers, leading to a higher number of youth of color incarcerated. Black and Hispanic students represent more than 70 percent of those involved in school-related arrests or referrals to law enforcement. Currently, African Americans make up two-fifths and Hispanics one-fifth of confined youth today.

4. According to recent data by the Department of Education, African American students are arrested far more often than their white classmates. The data showed that 96,000 students were arrested and 242,000 referred to law enforcement by schools during the 2009-10 school year. Of those students, black and Hispanic students made up more than 70 percent of arrested or referred students. Harsh school punishments, from suspensions to arrests, have led to high numbers of youth of color coming into contact with the juvenile-justice system and at an earlier age.

5. African American youth have higher rates of juvenile incarceration and are more likely to be sentenced to adult prison. According to the Sentencing Project, even though African American juvenile youth are about 16 percent of the youth population, 37 percent of their cases are moved to criminal court and 58 percent of African American youth are sent to adult prisons.

6. As the number of women incarcerated has increased by 800 percent over the last three decades, women of color have been disproportionately represented. While the number of women incarcerated is relatively low, the racial and ethnic disparities are startling. African American women are three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated, while Hispanic women are 69 percent more likely than white women to be incarcerated.

7. The war on drugs has been waged primarily in communities of color where people of color are more likely to receive higher offenses. According to the Human Rights Watch, people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites, but they have higher rate of arrests. African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses. From 1980 to 2007 about one in three of the 25.4 million adults arrested for drugs was African American.

8. Once convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes. The Sentencing Project reports that African Americans are 21 percent more likely to receive mandatory-minimum sentences than white defendants and are 20 percent more like to be sentenced to prison.

9. Voter laws that prohibit people with felony convictions to vote disproportionately impact men of color. An estimated 5.3 million Americans are denied the right to vote based on a past felony conviction. Felony disenfranchisement is exaggerated by racial disparities in the criminal-justice system, ultimately denying 13 percent of African American men the right to vote. Felony-disenfranchisement policies have led to 11 states denying the right to vote to more than 10 percent of their African American population.

10. Studies have shown that people of color face disparities in wage trajectoryfollowing release from prison. Evidence shows that spending time in prison affects wage trajectories with a disproportionate impact on black men and women. The results show no evidence of racial divergence in wages prior to incarceration; however, following release from prison, wages grow at a 21 percent slower rate for black former inmates compared to white ex-convicts. A number of states have bans on people with certain convictions working in domestic health-service industries such as nursing, child care, and home health care—areas in which many poor women and women of color are disproportionately concentrated.

Theses racial disparities have deprived people of color of their most basic civil rights, making criminal-justice reform the civil rights issue of our time. Through mass imprisonment and the overrepresentation of individuals of color within the criminal justice and prison system, people of color have experienced an adverse impact on themselves and on their communities from barriers to reintegrating into society to engaging in the democratic process. Eliminating the racial disparities inherent to our nation’s criminal-justice policies and practices must be at the heart of a renewed, refocused, and reenergized movement for racial justice in America.

There have been a number of initiatives on the state and federal level to address the racial disparities in youth incarceration. Last summer Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Schools Discipline Initiative to bring increased awareness of effective policies and practices to ultimately dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline. States like California and Massachusetts are considering legislation to address the disproportionate suspensions among students of color. And in Clayton County, Georgia, collaborative local reforms have resulted in a47 percent reduction in juvenile-court referrals and a 51 percent decrease in juvenile felony rates. These initiatives could serve as models of success for lessening the disparities in incarceration rates.

Sophia Kerby is the Special Assistant for Progress 2050 at American Progress.

also npr court fees the new poorhouse http://www.npr.org/2014/05/19/312158516/increasing-court-fees-punish-the-poor

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-probation-privateers-prey-poor

...

A growing predatory industry

Judicial Correction Services and Sentinel Offender Services are the two companies most often cited in the report and are, according to Human Rights Watch, "arguably the most significant industry players, and ...the two firms that have been most widely implicated in alleged abuses."

The Georgia-headquartered Judicial Correction Services (JCS) is, relatively speaking, "an industry giant." In 2011, it was acquired by Correctional Healthcare Companies, a "privately held corporation that also focuses on the provision of healthcare services to prisons and bills itself as a provider of 'integrated healthcare solutions' to the criminal justice system 'including inmate healthcare, outpatient treatment, mental health, behavioral programming and treatment case management services." In 2012, the private equity group GTCR acquired CHC.

By late last year, JCS was "operat[ing] in some 480 courts ... [in] Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi. ...At any given point in time JCS employees are supervising approximately 38,000 probationers."

Sentinel Offender Services "is a privately held California corporation whose physical presence is largely based in Georgia, [and] is largely controlled by its founder Bob Contestabile and his son Mark Contestabile, who heads up the company's east coast operations." According to the report, "Sentinel claims to operate in 48 US states, mostly providing GPS monitoring and other services for government clients. The company's offender-funded probation supervision business operates exclusively in Georgia. There, the company works with 80 courts and supervises between 23,000 and 35,000 offenders at any given point in time. Sentinel boasts that it has supervised more than 500,000 probationers since 1992.

"Sentinel also provides electronic monitoring and other services to government clients in California and elsewhere. It operates a monitoring center in Irvine, California that tracks offenders on various forms of electronic monitoring for Sentinel's government clients as well as its own probation business."

Over the past few years, any civil liberties organizations have been working to make debtors prisons truly a thing of the past. It is now time to shine the spotlight on predatory probation privateers that are preying on the poor.

http://www.democracynow.org/2014/3/6/angela_davis_on_prison_abolition_the

ISI, correctional sericves inc YOUTH http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

Non-Violent Offenders Fill Jails in Prison Nation’s Worst State: Louisiana

October 30, 2013 |

The United States is the world’s foremost prison nation—with the highest percentage of people behind [3] bars—and Louisiana is its capital, with the most senseless mix of lengthy sentences for non-violent crimes, skyrocketing prison costs, and little evidence that its “lock ‘em up and forget ‘em” policies have reduced violence.

That’s the conclusion by a coalition of libertarian groups seeking [4] sentencing reform in the state with highest incarceration rate—especially for non-violent drug offenses—who, along with Louisiana’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, have launched a joint campaign to try to unwind one of America’s nastiest prison systems.

“When thePelican Institute and the ACLUcombine on a topic, comedians may lick their chops,” wrote [5] James Varney, a New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist. “Or folks could conclude, ‘It’s time…’

Time is a curious word to use when describing how terrible Louisiana’s court system is. Despite some recent attempts to give judges some discretion in sentencing non-violent offenders, decades of mandatory sentencing laws—overwhelmingly snaring [6] the state’s African-American population—add up to years in jail. According to a Mother Jones analysis [6], Blacks make up 33 percent of the population, but 76 percent of prisoners.

ACLU Executive Director Marjorie Esman told a recent sentencing forum that one-in-86 Louisiana adults are in prison—double the national average, Louisiana Weekly reported [7]. “Esman said that one out of three black men in Louisiana are under some kind of correctional control… and the fact that Black men are more likely to go to jail for pot than white men.”

“As of December 31, 2012, there were approximately 242 inmates serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for non-violent drug and property crimes,” the “Smart on Sentencing, Smart on Crime” report [4] from the Reason Foundation, Pelican Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation said. “These laws have been disproportionately applied to non-violent crimes, nonviolent offenders now account for the majority of inmates and admissions to prison in the state.”

Elsewhere in the country, the Reason Foundation has promoted [8] privatizing prisons. But their latest report emphasized that Louisiana was wasting tax dollars and not stopping the most serious crimes.

This has produced a number of unfortunate consequences, such as an increase in the state’s prison population from 21,007 in 1992 to 39,709 in 2011 and a $315 million increase in correction expenditures during the same time period, from $442.3 million (in 2011 dollars) in 1992 to $757.4 million in 2011. Meanwhile, there is little evidence that the laws have done anything to reduce Louisiana’s violent crime rate, which remains considerably above both the national average and the rates in its neighboring states. Today, Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the country, with 868 of every 100,000 of its citizens in prison.

What’s particularly eyebrow-raising is that “numerous violent crimes, such as negligent homocide, manslaughter, aggravated assault with a firearm, aggravated battery, simple rape and simple kidnapping carry no mandatory minimum at all,” Reason reported. In contrast, Louisiana law—especially drug laws—draw “essentially trivial lines between degrees of criminal activity that can result in dramatic differences in punishment.”

The report offers glaring examples. Possessing 199.9 grams of cocaine has a mandatory minimum sentence of five year of hard labor plus a $50,000 fine, while possessing 200 gram doubles the time at hard labor sentence and fine. Five years of hard labor and a $50,000 fine is also the penalty for “offenders convicted of growing or selling any amount of marijuana,” it notes.

The analysis goes on to describe how repeat offenders face complex sentencing formulas that add up to years, if not decades, spent in jail—often at hard labor.

“To see how this works, consider a defendant who is convicted of distributing or cultivating any amount of marijuana as a first offense. She will then be subject to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of five years of hard labor in prison. If within 10 years of release, she is convicted for the same offense, she will then be required to serve a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 15 years, which is one-half the maximum sentence prescribed for a first conviction. If within 10 years of release for this second conviction, she is again convicted of distributing or cultivating any amount of marijuana a third time as a habitual offender, she will be subject to serve a mandatory minimum sentence of 22.5 years of hard labor in prison, which is two-thirds the maximum sentence prescribed for a first conviction.”

Many of Louisiana’s drug laws date back to the early 1970s when then President Richard Nixon declared [9] “war on drugs” and states responded by enacting harsh sentences, Reason noted. In Louisiana, the result of this legacy is predictable—jails filled with people who did not commit violent crimes but are treated as harshly as rapists and murderers.

“Between 1994 and 2011, violent offenders made up an average of only 17.3 percent of prison admissions in Louisiana; 37 percent of prison admissions were for drug offenses, and 33.6 percent for property offenses,” their report states. “Between 1994 and 1996, during which time the state experienced some of its highest violent crime rates, the average percentage for inmates admitted for violent crimes was 23 percent lower than those admitted for drug crimes, 18.4 percent lower than those admistted for property crimes, and 0.6 percent lower than inmates admitted for all other crimes.”

These statistics mean that Lousiana’s drug and property offenders keep getting caught and throw back into the prison system’s jaws. Reason interprets the state’s high rate of recidivism as a waste of taxpayer dollars—especially for non-violent drug crimes.

“With 50 percent of inmates returning to prison after five years, a violent crime rate well above its neighboring states, high corrections expenditures, and a majority of inmates incarcerated after nonviolent offenses, it makes one wonder whether Louisiana is effectively prioritizing its criminal justice expenditures,” they conclude.

Reason said it was “beyond the scope of this study” to analyze why Louisiana’s violent crime rates have risen and fallen. Beyond their high cost to taxpayers, its report never mentions race or poverty as factors in the state’s court system—although it has appeared at forums with the ACLU where those factors have been raised and discussed.

But it is not unreasonable to suggest that many of the state’s drug offenders are railroaded into jail, where they should never be in the first place, and then, after exiting with prison records, can’t find a decent job. Thus, they revert to dealing drugs—or theft, what the report calls property crime—to survive. There was anecdotal evidence of that pattern in Times-Picayune column [10].

The Pelican Insititute President Kevin Kane and ACLU’s Esman have been holding [7] forums across the state to call for sentencing reforms. Last week, they were joined by Judge Fredericka Wicker, who heads a non-partisan Louisiana Sentencing Commission. In one sessions, the Times-Picayune reported [5] that Esman asked “the audience who among them knew someone who at one time in their life possessed marijuana. Every hand in the room went up. When she extended her question to three times, the yes answer was again 100 percent.”

At that meeting, an ex-sheriff’s office employee, Republican state Representative Joseph Lopinto, told the paper’s columnist, “It’s not as if Louisiana’s jails are stuffed with guys who got pulled over three times and happened to have dime bags on the passenger seat. More common… is the burglar who got probation twice and, the third time arrested, also had marijuana and winds up getting multiple billed and facing a 30-year term.”

The Reason report noted that Louisiana’s Legislature has passed and their Republican governor has signed piecemeal sentencing reforms, reducing some mandatory terms and turning to probation and parole, but only under very strident conditions. What it has not done is repeal mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenses, reform its Habitual Offender Law that compounds jail terms, and also reform parole rules.

“Either of these changes would ensure that violent criminals continue to be punished for their crimes, while nonviolent offenders face sentences that are more proportionate,” they conclude. But those obvious steps will be difficult, the Times-Picayune notes, because “housing prisoners has become a key source of cash for politically powerful sheriffs, and elected officials fear the vulnerability attached to a soft on crime label.”

Indeed, the estimated 2013-2014 budget for Louisiana’s Department of Corrections (DOC) is [7] $390,625,856. That nearly doubles [4] when including all the police, prosecutors and public defenders. As the Pelican Institute’s Kane noted, the DOC pays $24.39 per diem to sheriffs to warehouse prisoners, compared to $11.25 a day for the DOC’s transitional work programs, or $15.39 for locally run transitional programs.

In other words, crime and punishment pays in Louisiana—not for prisoners, but for the jailers who keep them behind bars.

See more stories tagged with:

Reason Foundation [11],

Louisiana ACLU [12],

prison nation [13],

race and incarceration [14],

U.S. prison nation [15],

Louisiana prison system [16],

Louisiana incarceration rate [17]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/liberals-and-libertarians-try-lower-louisiana-prison-rates

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld

[3] http://www.prisonstudies.org/images/news_events/wppl9.pdf

[4] http://reason.org/files/louisiana_sentencing_reform.pdf

[5] http://blog.nola.com/opinions_impact/print.html?entry=/2013/10/a_breakout_and_escape_from_lou.html

[6] http://www.gibbsmagazine.com/blacks_in_prisons.htm

[7] http://www.louisianaweekly.com/groups-seek-to-address-la-s-incarceration-rates/

[8] http://reason.org/news/show/annual-privatization-2011-pubsafety

[9] http://stash.norml.org/nixontapes

[10] http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2013/10/a_breakout_and_escape_from_lou.html

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/reason-foundation

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/louisiana-aclu

[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/prison-nation

[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/race-and-incarceration

[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/us-prison-nation

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/louisiana-prison-system

[17] http://www.alternet.org/tags/louisiana-incarceration-rate

[18] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

5 Industries That Are Mercilessly Robbing the American People

September 29, 2013 |

There are more than five ways, of course. There are numerous product ripoffs, as described in a recent article byLynn Stuart Parramore [3], who identified textbooks and bottled water and print cartridges as a few of the ways Americans are duped into paying a lot more than reason and regulation would dictate.

And there are many industry-specific ripoffs, most notably in health care. We have the most expensive [4] health care system in the world, and yet we're falling behind [5] other developed countries in numerous health measures.

Here are five more industry-specific ripoffs of the American people:

1. The Retail Industry (Walmart): Building Owner Fortunes with Public Tax Money

A study [6] in Wisconsin by the U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce determined that a typical Walmart store costs taxpayers over $1.7 million per year, or about $5,815 per employee. A 2004 study [7] in California put the cost per employee at $2,103.

For the year 2012, Walmart's pre-tax U.S. income [8] was almost $18.7 billion. That's over $14,000 per U.S. Walmart employee [9].

For the year 2012, the four Walton family members made over $20 billion [10] from their investments. That's over $15,000 per Walmart employee.

2. The Financial Industry: Printing Their Own Money

Thanks in good part to the derivatives market, the world's wealth [11] has doubled in ten years. Estimates of the speculative value of the financial derivatives market vary, from $708 trillion [12] to $1.2 quadrillion [13]. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange [14] alone reported a 2011 trading volume of over $1 quadrillion on 3.4 billion annual contracts.

A quadrillion is a thousand trillion. A return to the financiers of just .1 percent (a tenth of a penny from every dollar) would generate $1 trillion, the total Adjusted Gross Income for half of Americans [15].

3. The Private Prison Industry: Billing Taxpayers for Empty Cells, then Selling Inmate Labor and Paying Them Sub-Minimum Wages

Almost two-thirds of the private prison contracts analyzed by In the Public Interest [16] "included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a 'low-crime tax')."

Some private prisons, such as Corrections Corporation of America and G4S, sell inmate labor [17] to corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM, and pay the prisoners less than a dollar an hour [18].

4. The Telecommunications Industry: Low Quality at High Prices

In the 1990s the FCC deregulated [19] phone and cable and Internet companies, with the intention of promoting competition. But just a few companies -- Verizon and AT&T and Comcast and Time Warner -- have divided up the market [20], reducing competition as they remain poorly regulated.

So now South Korea [21] has Internet access speeds 200 times faster than us at half the cost. Same thing in Hong Kong. And in Europe [20] unlimited texting and voice from Verizon costs about a third of U.S. prices.

It gets worse, according to David Cay Johnston [22], who reports that regulations have been written that allow large corporations to add unsubstantiated charges to cell phones, cable TV, internet service providers and others that can cost American families over $2,000 per year.

5. The Drug Industry: Buy American...But Tax Us Like We're Foreigners

Bernie Sanders [23] notes that pharmaceutical companies like Eli Lilly and Pfizer have lobbied to keep Americans from buying cheaper prescription drugs from Canada and Europe, but then they their shift drug patents and profits to offshore tax havens to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

Higher drug prices cost an average American family over $1250 per year [24].

Drug companies also participate in "Pay-for-Delay" [25] deals, through which brand-name firms pay generic makers to keep their cheaper drugs out of the market for a number of years.

That's capitalism. Ripping a once-strong society into little pieces

See more stories tagged with:

capitalism [26],

economy [27],

america [28],

wages [29],

wealth [30],

walmart [31]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/economy/5-industries-are-mercilessly-robbing-american-people

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/paul-buchheit-0

[3] http://www.alternet.org/economy/product-rip-offs?paging=off

[4] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/03/04-0

[5] http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_138575.html

[6] http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/sites/democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/files/documents/WalMartReport-May2013.pdf

[7] http://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/retail/walmart.pdf

[8] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/104169/000010416913000011/annualreporttoshareholders.htm

[9] http://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/locations

[10] http://www.usagainstgreed.org/Forbes400_2011-12.xls

[11] http://www.thefinancialist.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/2012-GlobalWealthReport-.pdf

[12] http://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1111.pdf

[13] http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2012/10/the-economy-derivatives-market-a-1-2-quadrillion-time-bomb-2479924.html

[14] http://www.cmegroup.com/investor-relations/annual-review/2011/financial-milestones.html

[15] http://taxfoundation.org/article/summary-latest-federal-individual-income-tax-data-0

[16] http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/sites/default/files/Criminal-Lockup%20Quota-Report.pdf

[17] http://www.alternet.org/story/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century

[18] http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

[19] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service.html

[20] http://www.alternet.org/bill-moyers-why-us-internet-access-slow-costly-and-unfair

[21] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/internet-speed-united-states-digital-divide_n_1855054.html

[22] https://soundcloud.com/danahey/tim-danahey-show-david-cay

[23] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/09-7

[24] http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/09/23

[25] http://www.alternet.org/drugs/where-does-it-say-supreme-court-has-constitutional-power-hike-medicine-prices-5x-their-cost

[26] http://www.alternet.org/tags/capitalism

[27] http://www.alternet.org/tags/economy-0

[28] http://www.alternet.org/tags/america

[29] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wages

[30] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wealth

[31] http://www.alternet.org/tags/walmart

[32] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

April 19, 2012 |

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the*latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.* [4]

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons [5] in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed [6] whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America[7] and G4S [8] (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor [9] at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid [10] somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.....[long]

http://www.alternet.org/story/155061/getting_paid_93_cents_a_day_in_america_corporations_bring_back_the_19th_century

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/prisonlabor.html

PRISON LABOR

>- Year slavery and involuntary servitude abolished by the 13th Amendment except as punishment for crime503: 1865

Year the Virginia Supreme Court declared that prisoners were "slaves of the state"504: 1871
Year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed the United Nations, giving "[e]veryone ... the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests"505: 1948
Year the Supreme Court upheld a North Carolina warden's ban on prisoners forming a labor union506: 1977

>- Number of prison and jail industries in 1998507: 2,500

Minimum estimate of annual value of prison and jail industrial output508: $2 billion

Prison labor in the federal prisons

>- Percent of able-bodied sentenced federal prisoners required to work in the prison509: 100%

Number of prisoner workers in UNICOR, the federal prison industries510:22,560
Pay scale for federal prisoners who work outside of UNICOR in prison maintenance, in dollars per hour511: $0.12-$0.40
Minimum wage in Haiti in dollars per hour512: $0.30

>- Percent of federal prisoner-workers who work for UNICOR rather than in prison maintenance513: 25%

Minimum UNICOR wage, in dollars per hour514: $0.23
Maximum UNICOR wage, in dollars per hour515: $1.15
Number of prisons where UNICOR makes office furniture516: 18
Average hourly earnings of a non-prisoner U.S. worker making office furniture517: $13.04
Number of prisons where UNICOR makes clothing and textiles518: 22
Average hourly earnings of a non-prisoner U.S. worker in a textile mill519:$10.95

>- UNICOR 2001 sales520: $583.5 million

Amount purchased from UNICOR in 2001 by the Department of Defense521:$388 million
Amount purchased from UNICOR in 2001 by the U.S. Postal Service522: $21 million
Number of prisoners UNICOR projects will be in federal prisons in 2009523:211,516
Number of prisoner-workers UNCOR plans on hiring in 2009524: 31,826
Percent of industrial orders delivered late, industry-wide525: 6%
Percent of UNICOR orders delivered late526: 42%
Percent failure rate of wire sold by UNICOR to the military compared to the military's next-worst supplier527: 200%

Prison labor in the states

>- Minimum wage in the United States, in dollars per hour528: $5.15

Average hourly rate paid at a prison camp in Nevada529: $0.13
Maximum wage paid to prisoner workers in dollars per day in Georgia and Texas530: $0
Most prisons that pay prisoners for work have a range of pay depending on the job. Average of the minimum wages for prisoners paid by the states, in dollars per day for non-industry work531: $0.93
Average of the maximum wages paid to prisoners by the states, in dollars per day532: $4.73
Lowest wage reported, in dollars per day, for prisoners working in private industry533: $0.16

This page is an excerpt from The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (April 2003) by Peter Wagner, published by the Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative.

Footnotes

503 U.S. Const. Amend XIII.

504 Ruffin v. Commonwealth 62 Va. 1024 (1871).

505 Declaration of Human Rights, Article 23(4)

506 Jones v. North Carolina Prisoner’s Labor Union, Inc. 433 U.S. 119 (1977)

507 Joel Dyer, Perpetual Prisoner Machine, p. 18.

508 Joel Dyer, Perpetual Prisoner Machine, p. 19.

509 General Accounting Office, Prisoner Labor: Perspectives on Paying the Federal Minimum Wage, May 1993 GAO/GGD-93-98, p. 19.

510 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, 3rd unnumbered paged of the pdf file.

511 http://www.bop.gov/ipapg/ipaover.html#work

512 http://www.sweatshopwatch.org/swatch/newsletters/1_2.html (although Disney and others pay 12cents.)

513 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, 3rd unnumbered page of the pdf file.

514 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, 3rd unnumbered page of the pdf file.

515 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, 3rd unnumbered page of the pdf file.

516 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 12.

517 Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001, The National Data Book, Table 609.

518 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 12.

519 Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001, The National Data Book, Table 609.

520 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, 3rd unnumbered paged of the pdf file.

521 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 9.

522 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 9.

523 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 13.

524 UNICOR Annual Report 2001, p. 13.

525 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America, p. 232.

526 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America, p. 232.

527 Christian Parenti, Lockdown America, p. 232.

528 U.S. Department of Labor Compliance Assistance — Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) http://www.dol.gov/esa/whd/flsa/ viewed January 25, 2003.

529 General Accounting Office, Prisoner Labor: Perspectives on Paying the Federal Minimum Wage, May 1993 GAO/GGD-93-98, p.19.

530 Corrections Yearbook 2001, p. 130-131, fn6.

531 Corrections Yearbook 2001, p. 130-131.

532 Corrections Yearbook 2001, p. 130-131.

533 Mississippi. Corrections Yearbook 2001, p. 130-131.

The Secret Behind New York's Alternative to a Prison Economy? Milk

By Von Diaz / ColorLines

one of 4 horsemen:

Cornell West Speaks

In a recent dialogue with Institute of New Economic Thinking’s [34] (INET) Rob Johnson at Columbia Theological Seminary, Cornell West used the first three of what I am now calling “plagues” as examples of what is scaring him as he sees our society heading toward fascism. I thank him for his help in advancing my thinking.

I was struck by what West said, but I realized that it is necessary to add criminalization as a fourth plague for a fuller picture. In our world of mass incarceration, we see students, poor people, the homeless, debtors, drug users, and whole neighborhoods being criminalized in huge numbers. One powerful example is in the efforts by the New York Police Department known as “stop-and-frisk [35].” Since Michael Bloomberg became mayor of New York City in 2002, stop-and-frisk increased by 600%, [36] from 100,000 New Yorkers targeted to almost 685,000 in 2011. Nearly 90% of those stopped are black or Latino.

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

More than 2 million people in jail has resulted in what author and lawyer Michelle Alexander has called the “New Jim Crow,” in her book of the same name. Despite the civil rights movement, theoretical progress on racism, and even an African-American president, more people of color are in jail than were ever slaves; more people are jailed in the U.S. than in any other place in the world. As Alexander writes: “Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color ‘criminals’ and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind.”

According to the NAACP [13], from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled, from roughly 500,000 to 2.3 million people. Today, the US is 5% of the world population and has 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Millions in jail is part of a strategy of mass incarceration fueled by the highly funded and militarized war on drug users, which is primarily aimed at the poor and people of color. The racist caste of the criminal justice system is overwhelming: African Americans, incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, now constitute nearly one million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population. Mass incarceration accomplished in the 21st century what slavery accomplished more than 150 years ago: the oppression and disenfranchisement of a whole generation of black men.

So, looking through the lens of these four plagues provides me with a useful handle on what is happening to our country, and to the globe. They help explain trends and shifts that are destroying the middle class, exacerbating poverty, keeping millions in jail, and traumatizing many millions more. Most of it can be attributed to one or more of the plagues, and often all four.

Essential Ingredients for the Success of the Plagues

Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There (with Bounty Hunters)

In the past year, at least 49 global corporations have dropped their ALEC membership, apparently recognizing that they don't want their brands publicly associated with an organization that pushes anti-union legislation and discriminatory voting laws.

But one of the most surprising hangers-on has been State Farm, an insurance company that has crafted an image as a "good neighbor." But some might say it does not seem very neighborly to bankroll an organization that has promoted "Stand Your Ground" laws that make it easier for self-appointed neighborhood watch vigilantes to get away with murder.

State Farm has not only stuck with ALEC, but it has retained a leadership role in the organization, with a State Farm representative acting as the co-chair for ALEC's Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force -- the source of ALEC's anti-labor bills and other controversial legislation.

Joining State Farm on that task force is thebail bond industry. Last year, ALEC made a big PR announcement that it was disbanding the controversial Public Safety and Elections Task Force that had been responsible for bills like Stand Your Ground, Voter ID, and prison privatization, but the for-profit bail industry didn't jump ship. The American Bail Coalition President and CEO Bill Carmichael remains on the ALEC corporate board (now called the "Private Enterprise Advisory Council"), and the Surety Insurance Subcommittee -- chaired by the American Bail Coalition's Dennis Bartlett -- is now part of the State Farm-chaired Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force.

ABC, the for-profit bail bond industry's national organization and lobbying wing, has long been involved with ALEC, calling it the industry's "life preserver."

The American Bail Coalition (ABC) describes itself on its website as the "premier underwriters of criminal court appearance bonds." ABC has stated, "We have formed a national organization, primarily to perform a two-pronged task to educate local government on the benefits of commercial bail bonding and to advance the interests of the member companies' many retail agents."^[1]

The Coalition was formerly known as the National Association of Bail Surety Underwriters (NABSU), then the National Association of Bail Insurance Companies (NABIC), and became the American Bail Coalition in 2001.

Support for the American Legislative Exchange Council

The American Bail Coalition has been a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) since 1993, and the Coalition refers to ALEC as its "life preserver." ^[2]

A list of ALEC Corporations can be found here.

About ALEC
ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site.

About ALEC

ALEC is a corporate bill mill. It is not just a lobby or a front group; it is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, corporations hand state legislators their wishlists to benefit their bottom line. Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations. They pay for a seat on ALEC task forces where corporate lobbyists and special interest reps vote with elected officials to approve “model” bills. Learn more at the Center for Media and Democracy's ALECexposed.org, and check out breaking news on our PRWatch.org site.

William Carmichael, ABC President & CEO is on ALEC's "Private Enterprise Board" in 2011. ^[3]

Dennis Bartlett, ABC Executive Director, has been an ALEC member since 1998, serves on the Private Sector Executive Committee and is a member of the Public Safety and Elections Task Force in 2011. ^[4]

Jerry Watson, Senior Legal Counsel for the American Bail Coalition, was ALEC’s Private Enterprise Board Chairman from 2006-2008, and "actively participated on ALEC’s Task Force on Criminal Justice and has undertaken several projects with the ALEC Foundation, including the publication of Evidence of a Failed System: A Study of the Performance of Pretrial Release Agencies in California." ^[5] He was awarded ALEC's Leadership Award in 2010 "for his commitment to the private sector in the war on crime and his tireless and generous contributions to ALEC and its members," and previously received other ALEC awards, including the Thomas Jefferson Freedom Award. ^[5]

ALEC and ABC's Legislative Agenda

From an October, 2010 ABC Newsletter: "Within two years of joining ALEC, a member of the ABC board, Jerry Watson, was invited in 1995 to join the ALEC private enterprise board where he would ultimately become Chairman. Watson served until August 2010 when he stepped down to become Chairman Emeritus of the private enterprise board. Another ABC member, Bill Carmichael, was appointed to the ALEC private enterprise board. During its two decade involvement with ALEC, ABC has written 12 model bills fortifying the commercial bail industry. In addition to the model bills ALEC has issued ABC sponsored State Factors, Legislative Briefs, and studies related to the bail issue. The major reason behind this focus was to offset the threat posed to commercial bail." ^[2]

According to January, 2010 NPR report, "Some states ban commercial bail bondsmen outright and have the state's court act as the bail bond business. But in others, the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization backed in part by the bail bond lobby, has worked to pass the Citizen's Right To Know Act, a law that requires reformatting and increased reporting of pretrial release information and encourages the use of commercial bail bondsmen." ^[6]

Citizen's Right To Know Act:

Enacted: Florida (2009), Texas (1995)

Enrolled (in legislature): Iowa (2009), North Carolina (2009), Tennessee (2009)

Failed: Virginia (2009)

States that ban commercial bail bondsmen: Illinois, Kentucky, Oregon, Wisconsin ^[6]

According to a June 2011 news release, the ABC- and ALEC-penned "Citizen's Right to Know Act" has gone national. On June 3, 2011, "the American Bail Coalition. . . called on Congress to pass HR 1885, the Citizens Right to Know Act, introduced by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX) and Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK)."^[7]

Other ALEC Activities

Jerry Watson, General Counsel for the American Bail Coalition addressed the Annual Meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council in Philadelphia, PA, July 25 - 27, 2007.

In 2010, ABC spent $80,000 on lobbying.^[8] They worked with the lobbying firm Fidelis Government Relations.Lobbying

Christine M. Frahm has been a lobbyist in California for ABC since 2005.^[9]

In 2010, ABC spent $80,000 on lobbying on the federal level.^[10] They worked with the lobbying firm, Fidelis Government Relations.

Members

2011^[11]

Professional Bail Agents of Arizona
California Bail Agent Association
Florida Surety Agents Association
Bail Agents Independent League of Florida
Georgia Association of Professional Bail Agents
Indiana Surety Bail Agents Association, Inc.
Michigan Professional Bail Agents
Oklahoma Bondsmen Association
Tennessee Association of Professional Agents
Professional Bail Agents of Texas

Reporting on ABC

NPR did a series on the bail system in January 2010.

"The regulation of bail bond agents varies widely across the country. Many states require bondsmen to be licensed. Generally, bond agents must undergo eight to 16 hours of training, submit to fingerprinting and a background check and be a resident of the state to receive a license. However, some states do not require bondsmen to be licensed. In Wyoming, for example, agents using their own capital are not required to be licensed." ^[6]

In a section on for-profit bail bondsmen in Lubbock, Texas:

Statistically, most bail jumpers are not caught by bondsmen or their bounty hunters. They're caught by sheriff's deputies, according to Beni Hemmeline from Lubbock's district attorney's office.

"More often than not, the defendants are rearrested on a warrant that's issued after they fail to appear," Hemmeline said.Asked if the bondsmen are fulfilling their end of the deal, Hemmeline says, "Well, it may be that [the bondsmen] can't find them. They can't camp at the door 24 hours a day. They do the best that they can, I think."

If a defendant does run, the bondsman is also supposed to pay the county the full cost of the bond as a sort of punishment for not keeping an eye on the client.

But that doesn't happen, either, Hemmeline says.

Hemmeline says Lubbock usually settles for a far lower amount than the full bond. In fact, according to the county treasurer in Lubbock, bondsmen usually only pay 5 percent of the bond when a client runs.

Consider that math for a minute. The bondsmen charge clients at least 10 percent. But if the client runs, they only have to pay the county 5 percent. Meaning if they make no effort whatsoever, they still profit.

Hemmeline says asking for more might put the bondsmen out of business.

"Bond companies serve an important purpose," she says.

NPR found bondsmen getting similar breaks in other states. In California, bondsmen owe counties $150 million that they should have had to pay when their clients failed to show up for court. In New Jersey, bondsmen owe $250,000 over the past four years. In Erie, Pa., officials stopped collecting money for a time because it was too much of a hassle to get the bonding companies to pay up."^[6]

Contact

American Bail Coalition

Telephone: (877) 385-9009

Fax: (703) 385-1809

Address:

3857 Lewiston Place

Fairfax, VA 22030

Articles and resources

Brendan Fischer Wisconsin: Open for Bounty Hunters, PRWatch.org, June 9, 2011

External resources

External articles

References

↑ American Bail Coalition, "Introduction ABC," organizational website, accessed June 2011
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 American Bail Coalition, [www.americanbailcoalition.com/documents/ABC_Newsletter.pdf October Newsletter] (pdf), organizational newsletter, October 2010
↑ American Legislative Exchange Council Private Enterprise Board, ALEC organizational website, accessed July 8, 201
↑ American Legislative Exchange Council Private Sector Executive Committee, organizational website, accessed June 2, 2011
↑ ^5.0 ^5.1 PRWeb, Bail Bond Industry Leader, Jerry Watson, Honored by National Legislative Organization, PRWeb.com, Aug. 27, 2010, accessed July 8, 2011
↑ ^6.0 ^6.1 ^6.2 ^6.3 Laura Sullivan, Bail Burden Keeps US Jails Stuffed With Inmates, National Public Radio, January 21, 2010, accessed July 8, 2011
↑ PRNewsWire, End the Abuse: Federal Tax Payer Funded Bail Program a Mess, News release, June 3, 2011
↑ Center for Responsive Politics, "Annual Lobbying of ABC, OpenSecrets.org, online database, accessed May, 2011
↑ Christine Frahm Bio,"Follow the Money" database
↑ Annual Lobbying of ABC,Open Secrets.org, accessed July 11, 2011
↑ American Bail Coalition Associations, organizational website for the American Bail Coalition, accessed July 9, 2011

Categories:

Gov. Walker Vetoes Bail Bonds, Attack on Investigative Journalism

by Brendan Fischer — July 1, 2013 - 11:57am

Projects: ALEC Exposed, Wisconsin Protests

ALEC-Supported Bail Bonding Vetoed

Since 1979, Wisconsin has been ahead of most U.S. states in banning for-profit bail bonding, joining many nations like Canada and the United Kingdom in recognizing that the practice warps the criminal justice system. Wisconsin's pre-trial release system, unlike 46 other states, is managed by courts and law enforcement rather than for-profit companies.

Republicans tried changing this system by adding a privatized bail bonding provision into the budget at the last minute with zero public input or debate. The proposal prompted outcry from prosecutors, judges and attorneys across the political spectrum, including Wisconsin's Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, a Republican.

Nobody in Wisconsin's criminal justice system was calling for the privatization of pre-trial programs -- and the source of the budget provision may be tied back to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The American Bail Coalition, the for-profit bail bond industry's national organization and lobbying wing, calls ALEC the industry's "life preserver". ABC pays for ALEC membership, and a representative sits on the ALEC corporate board, as well as ALEC's Executive Committee. The trade group boasts that "during its two decade involvement with ALEC, ABC has written 12 model bills fortifying the commercial bail industry." The most outspoken supporter of bail bonding in Wisconsin has been the ALEC State Co-Chair for Wisconsin, Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.

Sen. Leah Vukmir, the other ALEC State Co-Chair for Wisconsin and a member of the ALEC Board of Directors, met with the President and CEO of the American Bail Coalition, William Carmichael, at an ALEC meeting last month.

The bail industry has long targeted Wisconsin. In 2003, Rep. Scott Suder, a longtime ALEC member, introduced a standalone bill to reinstate commercial bail bonding, with backing from ABC, whose chair had donated to Suder's campaign the previous year. Almost exactly two years ago, when the Republican-led legislature was writing the 2011-2012 budget, ALEC State Chair Rep. Robin Vos again squeezed a similar last-minute provision into the budget, which was similarly vetoed by Walker.

Kringle is Now the Official State Pastry

Walker signed the budget Sunday afternoon, leaving intact a $651 million income tax cut that primarily benefits the wealthy and rejects federal funds to expand Medicaid.

He also left untouched at least one non-fiscal item: a budget provision naming the kringle as the official pastry of Wisconsin.

Pushback Against Privatization Across the Country

by Brendan Fischer [1] — June 28, 2013 - 8:17am

Topics: Corporations [2], Democracy [3]

Share this [4]

The decades-long effort to privatize public services and assets is hitting some bumps, with state and local governments reconsidering whether for-profit companies should be allowed to indiscriminately profit off of taxpayer dollars with limited accountability.

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In New Jersey, legislation to ensure that public services won't be privatized unless it will result in actual savings for taxpayers has passed both chambers of the legislature. In Texas, a bipartisan coalition is fighting against a private prison in Montgomery County, and Kentucky is rejecting private prisons altogether. And in Fresno, California, voters rejected a proposal backed by the city's popular mayor to privatize trash collection services.

“The fact is, when taxpayers see what they lose by handing over control of their roads, prisons and other services, they don’t want anything to do with outsourcing," says Donald Cohen, chair of In The Public Interest, a resource center on privatization. "We hope that what we’re seeing in places like New Jersey, Texas, Kentucky and Fresno is part of a trend to restore control of services to American taxpayers.”

New Jersey Could Curb Privatization Abuses

The New Jersey bill, if signed by Governor Chris Christie, might be the first of its kind in the nation. The legislation would prohibit privatization contracts that achieve "cost savings" by cutting services or raising rates, and also require that the company provide its workers comparable wages and benefits. This would thwart efforts by corporate interests to provide the veneer of cost savings by replacing middle-class public employees with low-wage workers.

The bill would also require for-profit corporations to actually stand by their promises: their performance would be subject to audit, which could lead to penalties or the loss of a contract if they fail to produce the promised cost savings.

Not surprisingly, the bill is opposed by groups like the Chamber of Commerce, who will likely urge Christie to veto it. And Gov. Christie is no stranger to privatization: at the same time the bill was moving through the legislature, Gov. Christie entered a contract to privatize the state's lottery system. Whether he will sign this latest bill to guarantee accountability for privatizers remains to be seen.

Tea Party and Others Raising Voices Against Private Prisons

Although the New Jersey proposal tracks a Republican-Democrat divide, in Texas, opposition to prison privatization is crossing party lines.

GEO Group is seeking to purchase a second prison in Montgomery County, but Tea Party groups and others are rallying against it.

Jon Bauman, vice president of the Texas Patriots PAC of The Woodlands, says the first correctional facility in the county -- which was constructed with $45 million in tax-exempt bonds -- ended up being primarily run as a federal institution rather than holding county inmates, as originally promised.

“This idea that they were building a jail for us was bogus, it was a fraud” he said. “They weren’t building a jail for us, they were building a jail for an industry.”

GEO Group is becoming familiar with rejection: earlier this year, for example, its effort to spend $6 million for naming rights on a Florida Atlantic University stadium was met with protests from students and faculty, causing the company to withdraw its [5] offer.

Other private prison operators are also feeling the heat. Kentucky is not renewing its contract [6] with Corrections Corporation of America, ending its three decade experiment on letting outside companies incarcerate inmates for the state. This is the fifth contract cancellation for CCA in a month.

In Fresno, "The People's Voice is Being Heard"

In Fresno, voters this month rejected an effort [7] backed by[8]Mayor Ashley Swearengin to outsource trash service for the city's 500,000 residents to a private company (and cut pay for its workers), in order to make up for budget shortfalls. Lawmakers narrowly passed the privatization plan in December, but it was sent to voters for approval after opponents collected 40,000 petition signatures.

Pro-privatization forces outspent opponents nearly 3-to-1 [9], but voters nonetheless voted to reject the Mayor's plan and keep trash collection in public hands.

Council Member Sal Quinterosaid of the vote [10]:

"The people's voice (against privatization) is being heard."

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/06/12153/pushback-against-privatization-across-country

OMGWTF: http://reason.org/areas/topic/307.html

New at Reason: Privatization Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

May 6, 2013, 3:55pm

Leonard Gilroy

The rollout of Reason Foundation's Annual Privatization Report 2013 continues today with the release of the Criminal Justice and Corrections section, which which provides an overview of the latest on privatization and public-private partnerships in criminal justice and corrections.

Read Full Column
* * *

Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

Annual Privatization Report 2013 examines criminal justice and corrections trends

May 6, 2013

Leonard Gilroy, Harris Kenny, Alexander Volokh, Andrew Livingston

This section of Reason Foundation's *Annual Privatization Report 2013* provides an overview of the latest on privatization and public-private partnerships in criminal justice and corrections. Topics include:

A. 2012 Corrections Privatization Overview

B. State and International Corrections Privatization Update

C. State and Local Correctional Healthcare Privatization Update

D. ANALYSIS: Recent Developments in the Federal Civil-Rights Liability of Federal Private Prisons

E. FOCUS: The Emergence of Social Impact Bonds: Paying for Success in Social Service Innovation

F. FOCUS: Colorado, Washington State Vote to Tax and Regulate Recreational Marijuana for Adults

» Return to *Annual Privatization Report 2013* homepage

Read Full Column

hodad: One such piece of ALEC “model legislation” was the ALEC “No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act,” which was based on Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce’s controversial immigration enforcement bill, SB 1070. Pearce had been a longstanding member of the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force (which ALEC claims to have disbanded in April of 2012, following public outcry and loss of corporate sponsorship due to reporting on the task force’s role in disseminating “Stand Your Ground” and “Voter ID” model legislation) when, during the December, 2009 ALEC States and Nation Policy Summit, he introduced an early draft of what would become SB 1070 for adoption as a piece of ALEC “model legislation.” Interestingly, the nation’s largest for-profit prison/immigrant detention center operator, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), was a member of the Public Safety and Elections Task Force at the time the task force voted to adopt the Pearce “model legislation.”

Records obtained by DBA/CMD, as well as Arizona lobby records, also show that the nation’s second and third largest for-profit prison/immigrant detention center operators-- Geo Group and Management and Training Corporation (MTC), respectively-- were also active in Arizona ALEC operations at this time.

It is not clear what, if any, input CCA (or other private immigrant detention center operators) had in the formation of the “No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act”/SB 1070 (as the bill would be titled at the time of its introduction in the Arizona Legislature in January, 2010), but this much is clear: thanks to the financial support of these corporations, the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force was successful in promoting this “model legislation” for introduction in several states throughout the nation during 2010-2011. And, as the bill would essentially mandate that all law enforcement personnel-- municipal, county and state police-- assume the responsibilities of immigration enforcement officers, this legislation would likely result in a substantial increase in the arrests and detention of illegal immigrants. The detention of undocumented immigrants has largely been farmed out by federal agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), to private contractors, such as CCA, Geo Group and MTC-- all of whom generate revenue exclusively through per diem, per prisoner rates paid out by such public sector clients for the detention of immigrants and other prisoners.

Furthermore, as reported by DBA/CMD (“Brownskins and Greenbacks”, a truncated version of which was initially published by Hodai with In These Times, June, 2010) private prison/immigrant detention center contractors-- especially CCA-- had established deep ties within the office of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer. Most notably, at the time of Brewer’s signing of SB 1070 into law in April of 2010, the governor’s Director of Communications was Paul Senseman, who had worked as a longtime CCA lobbyist, from 2005 until the time of his appointment by Brewer in January of 2009. Additionally, Senseman’s wife, Kathryn Senseman remained a CCA lobbyist during her husband’s employment at the Governor’s office.

Perhaps the most notable tie between the Brewer administration and CCA was Brewer’s longtime campaign manager and advisor, Chuck Coughlin. Coughlin is founder and president of HighGround Public Affairs Consultants, a lobby firm that had been hired by CCA in January of 2010, shortly following the introduction of SB 1070 in the Arizona Legislature [Note: CCA discontinued this partnership with HighGround in July of 2012]. According to records obtained by DBA/CMD, HighGround also has a substantial history of involvement in ALEC.

[Note: in September, 2011, a CCA spokesman told Bob Ortega of the Arizona Republic that the corporation had left ALEC at an undisclosed time in 2010. Records obtained by DBA/CMD indicate that CCA likely remained active in ALEC through December of 2010.]

Given this history, activists in Arizona-- including members of Occupy Phoenix, immigrants’ rights groups, indigenous rights groups, faith-based groups, anarchists and other concerned citizens-- met ALEC with protests held outside the gates of the Westin Kierland Resort and Spa (located on the border of Phoenix and Scottsdale), the site of ALEC’s 2011 States and Nation Policy Summit (SNPS), held ..through December 2, 2011.

The largest of these protests was held on the morning of the first full day of the SNPS, November 30, outside the Westin Kierland’s east gate. Protestors, numbering in the hundreds, marched to the gate as ALEC member lawmakers, lobbyists, corporate executives, and right-wing ‘think tank’ luminaries were ushered into the resort through security check points. Arizona Governor Brewer was to be the keynote speaker at the day’s ALEC luncheon, held in one...hodad

Daniel McGowan Released After Lawyers Confirm He Was Jailed For HuffPost Blog

Posted: 04/05/2013 1:02 pm EDT | Updated: 04/05/2013 5:25 pm EDT

UPDATE: 5:25 p.m. -- Lawyers for environmental activist Daniel McGowan said in a statement Friday afternoon that he had been returned to his halfway house in Brooklyn. They added that they had confirmed McGowan was jailed by federal marshals on Thursday for his Huffington Post blog post -- on the basis of a prison regulation that was declared unconstitutional by a judge in 2007.

Their statement read:

Daniel McGowan has been released from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn where he was taken into custody yesterday and is back at the halfway house where he has been residing since his release from prison in December. Yesterday, Daniel was given an "incident report" indicating that his Huffington Post blog post, “Court Documents Prove I Was Sent to Communication Management Units (CMU) for My Political Speech," violated a BOP regulation prohibiting inmates from "publishing under a byline." The BOP regulation in question was declared unconstitutional by a federal court in 2007, and eliminated by the BOP in 2010. After we brought this to the BOP's attention, the incident report was expunged.

The Bureau of Prisons did not immediately return a request for comment.

The earlier story ...

NEW YORK -- The jailing of environmental activist Daniel McGowan is under review, a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) official said Friday morning.

McGowan, who pleaded guilty to arson linked to the Earth Liberation Front in 2006, was serving out the final months of his seven-year sentence in a Brooklyn halfway house when he was jailed by federal marshals Thursday morning, allegedly for writing a commentary on The Huffington Post critical of a harshly restricted federal prison unit in which he had spent time.

Tracy Rivers, a residential reentry manager for the BOP in New York, told HuffPost Friday morning, "We are reviewing this case to determine if the actions that were taken were appropriate."

Rivers declined to say more about why McGowan was moved to the Metropolitan Detention Center, citing privacy issues. But she noted that a determination would be made in McGowan's case by the end of Friday.

In general, Rivers said, prisoners can be punished for violating a BOP rule that prohibits giving interviews to the news media without official approval. But that rule says nothing about prisoners writing blog posts.

McGowan's wife, Jenny Synan, told HuffPost that neither he, his lawyers nor a BOP official she talked to about the case had heard of a regulation prohibiting prisoners from writing blog posts.

In a statement Thursday, McGowan's lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "If this is indeed a case of retaliation for writing an article about the BOP retaliating against his free speech while he was in prison, it is more than ironic, it is an outrage."

UPDATE: 1:25 p.m. -- Daniel McGowan may soon leave jail. His attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Rachel Meeropol, told HuffPost Friday afternoon, "We have been told by the BOP that he will be sent back to the halfway house today."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/05/daniel-mcgowan-jailing_n_3021613.html?view=print&comm_ref=false

http://www.propublica.org/article/criminal-injustice-the-best-reporting-on-wrongful-convictions

drug law history http://www.alternet.org/print/drugs/retired-judge-reveals-surprising-rationale-americas-extremist-drug-laws

pjt censored 2012:

The US comprises less than 5 percent of the world��s population, yet US prisons hold more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned globally. Many of these prisoners labor at twenty-three cents per hour, or similar wages, in federal prisons contracted by the Bureau of Prisons’ UNICOR, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation, which is the US government’s thirty-ninth largest contractor. As incarceration rates explode in the US, thousands are placed in solitary confinement, often for having committed minor disciplinary infractions within prison.

Censored News Cluster: The Police State and Civil Liberties

Sara Flounders, “The Pentagon and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons,”Workers World, June 6, 2011,http://www.workers.org/2011/us/pentagon_0609.

James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, “Cruel and Usual: US Solitary Confinement,�� Al Jazeera English, March 19, 2011,http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/03/201137125936219469.html.

:{:{http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/11/07/prison-slavery-in-today’s-u-s-a/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:transparent"):}::(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:transparent"):}:

:{:{http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/04/04/solitary-confinement-in-the-us-cruel-and-usual-punishment/:(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:transparent"):}::(style="margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-color:transparent"):}:

Student Researchers: Leta Frolli and Taylor Wright (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluators: Sheila Katz and Patrick Jackson (Sonoma State University)

Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

Mike Elk and Bob Sloan | August 1, 2011

This article is part of aNationseries exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy.John Nichols introduces [1] the series.

The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises [2] (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are ��designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”

Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program [3]). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.

Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act [4] was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An *In These Times* investigation [5] last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.

That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.

This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.

This Prison Industries Act as printed in ALEC’s 1995 state legislation sourcebook, “provides for the employment of inmate labor in state correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain products under specific conditions.” These conditions, defined by the PIE program, are supposed to include requirements that “inmates must be paid at the prevailing wage rate” and that the ��any room and board deductions��are reasonable and are used to defray the costs of inmate incarceration.” (Some states charge prisoners for room and board, ostensibly to offset the cost of prisons for taxpayers. In Florida, for example, prisoners are paid minimum wage for PIE-certified labor, but 40 percent is taken out of their accounts for this purpose.)

The Prison Industries Act sought to change this, inventing the “private sector prison industry expansion account,” to absorb such deductions, and stipulating that the money should be used to, among other things: “construct work facilities, recruit corporations to participate as private sector industries programs, and pay costs of the authority and department in implementing [these programs].” Thus, money that was taken from inmate wages to offset the costs of incarceration would increasingly go to expanding prison industries. In 2000, Florida passed a law that mirrored the Prison Industries Act and created the Prison Industries Trust Fund, its own version of the private sector prison industry expansion account, deliberately designed to help expand prison labor for private industries.

The Prison Industries Act was also written to exploit a critical PIE loophole that seemed to suggest that its rules did not apply to prisoner-made goods that were not shipped across state lines. It allowed a third-party company to set up a local address in a state that makes prison goods, buy goods from a prison factory, sell those products locally or surreptitiously ship them across state borders. It helped that by 1995 oversight of the PIE program had been effectively squashed, transferred from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance [6] to the National Correctional Industries Association [7] (NCIA), a private trade organization that happened to be represented by Allen’s lobbying firm, Service House, Inc. In 2003, Allen became the Texas House Chairman of the Corrections Committee and began peddling the Prison Industries Act and other legislation beneficial to CCA and Geo Group, like the Private Correctional Facilities Act [8]. Soon thereafter he became Chairman of ALEC’s Criminal Justice (now Public Safety and Elections) Task Force. He resigned from the state legislature in 2006 while under investigation for his unethical lobbying practices. He was hired soon after as a lobbyist for Geo Group.

Today’s chair of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task force is state Representative Jerry Madden of Texas, where the Prison Industries Act originated eighteen years ago. According to a 2010 report from NCIA, as of last summer there were "thirty jurisdictions with active [PIE] operations." These included such states as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and twelve more. Four more states are now looking to get involved as well; Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania have introduced legislation and New Hampshire is in the process of applying for PIE certification. Today these state’s legislation are based upon an updated version of the Prison Industries Act [9], which ALEC amended in 2004.

Prison labor has already started to undercut the business of corporations that don’t use it. In Florida, PRIDE has become one of the largest printing corporations in the state, its cheap labor having a significant impact upon smaller local printers. This scenario is playing out in states across the country. In addition to Florida's forty-one prison industries, California alone has sixty. Another 100 or so are scattered throughout other states. What's more, several states are looking to replace public sector workers with prison labor. In Wisconsin Governor Walker’s recent assault on collective bargaining opened the door to the use of prisoners in public sector jobs in Racine, where inmates are now doing landscaping, painting, and other maintenance work. According to the Capitol Times, “inmates are not paid for their work, but receive time off their sentences.” The same is occurring in Virginia, Ohio, New Jersey, Florida and Georgia, all states with GOP Assembly majorities and Republican governors. Much of ALEC��s proposed labor legislation, implemented state by state is allowing replacement of public workers with prisoners.

“It’s bad enough that our companies have to compete with exploited and forced labor in China,” says Scott Paul Executive Director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a coalition of business and unions. “They shouldn’t have to compete against prison labor here at home. The goal should be for other nations to aspire to the quality of life that Americans enjoy, not to discard our efforts through a downward competitive spiral.”

Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, says prison labor is part of a “confluence of similar interests” among politicians and corporations, long referred to as the “prison industrial complex.” As decades of model legislation reveals, ALEC has been at the center of this confluence. “This has been ongoing for decades, with prison privatization contributing to the escalation of incarceration rates in the US,” Friedmann says. Just as mass incarceration has burdened American taxpayers in major prison states, so is the use of inmate labor contributing to lost jobs, unemployment and decreased wages among workers—while corporate profits soar.

Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor

Links:

[1] http://www.thenation.com/article/161978/alec-exposed

[2] http://www.pride-enterprises.org/

[3] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/grant/piecp.html

[4] http://alecexposed.org/w/images/1/19/7D11-Truth_in_Sentencing_Act_Exposed.pdf

[5] http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6084/corporate_con_game/

[6] http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/BJA/

[7] http://www.nationalcia.org/

[8] http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/6263.pdf

[9] http://alecexposed.org/w/images/4/4d/7N4-Prison_Industries_Act_Exposed.pdf

...

The BJS finds that at yearend 2011 there were “6.98 million offenders under the supervision of the adult corrections system.” This represents a decrease of more than 98,900 offenders—roughly 1.4 percent—during the year. The BJS defines the adult corrections system population as those “offenders…under the authority of probation or parole agencies and those held in the custody of state and federal prisons or local jails.” The slight downtick in last year’s correctional population represents the third consecutive year of decline. BJS researchers attribute the majority of the reduction��83 percent—to the decrease in the aggregate probation population. The presence of roughly 80,000 fewer probationers reflects the passage of more sensible probation policies that do not criminalize minor, first-time violations. For instance, three states in 2011 passed legislation reducing the scope of their probation statutes.

The reduction of inmates in custody (-1.3), that is, those actually behind bars, mirrors the declension in total corrections population (-1.4). When data is disaggregated by institutional type, however, the story becomes a bit less simplistic. Though the population of state prisons decreased by 1.9 percent, from 1,314,446 to 1,289,376, and the population of local jails decreased by 1.8 percent, from 748,728 to 735,601, total federal prisoners increased by 3.8 percent, from 206,968 to 214,774.

Help us speak truth to power. Donate what you can afford to support NationofChange.

And data on the fluctuation of inmates held in facilities contracted by private, for-profit companies are even more mixed. Whereas those held in privately-operated state facilities decreased by 1.8 percent last year, from 94,115 to 92,395, those held in privately-operated federal facilities ballooned by 18.2 percent, from 25,201 to 29,776. Though disturbing, this trend isn’t particularly novel. The privately- operated federal facility population has grown by nearly 200 percent since the year 2000.

...

And according to a report recently published by The Sentencing Project, the number of privately-held Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Marshal Service (USMS) detainees has grown at a faster rate than privately-held state or federal prisoners in the last decade. “Between 2002 and 2010,” the report finds, “privately-held ICE and USMS detainees increased by 206 percent and 322 percent, respectively. In contrast there was respective growth of 28 percent and 67 percent in the number of state and federal prisoners held in private facilities. As a result, the combined population of privately-held ICE and USMS detainees nearly equaled the number of federal prisoners in private facilities in 2010.”

Most of this growth is attributable to the enactment of Operation Streamline in 2005, a zero-tolerance “immigration” program that requires the federal criminal prosecution and imprisonment of all unlawful border crossers. In 2011, for instance, over 400,000 undocumented immigrants passed through the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) immigrant detention system, a rate nearly double that of 2005.

The program, which primarily targets migrant workers of color with no criminal history, has resulted in burgeoning caseloads in many federal district courts along the border.

http://www.nationofchange.org/total-prison-population-down-despite-growth-private-detention-industry-1354288827

cmd 2012; http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/9-prison-slavery-in-todays-usa/

---

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/24-alabama-farmers-look-to-replace-migrants-with-prisoners/

http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/20-stealing-from-public-education-to-feed-the-prison-industrial-complex/

===

AZ ALEC

Private Prison Companies Behind the Scenes of Arizona’s Immigration Law

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/displayArticle.aspx?articleid=22734&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1

by Beau Hodai

“Beside my brothers and my sisters, I’ll proudly take a stand. When liberty’s in jeopardy, I’ll always do what’s right. I’m out here on the frontline, sleep in peace tonight. American soldier, I’m an American soldier...”

So goes the ringtone on Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce’s phone—as performed by Toby “’cause we put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way” Keith. Seconds into any conversation with Pearce on the issue of illegal immigration, you’ll find the song fits. Pearce is—in his mind—the “American soldier.” What’s more, just as he sees himself a soldier, Pearce envisions his home to be none less than the front in a war which threatens the very fiber of the nation.

“There’s been 133 nations identified crossing that border. Not just Mexicans, not just Hondurans, not just El Salvadorians, but 133 nations. Many of those are nations of interest, which means that they either harbor, aid and abet, or are somehow connected to terrorist activities,” said Pearce. “And yet they continue to cross that border. We’ve got prayer rugs that have been found down there, other things that have been found down there—and yet they [the federal government] continue to do nothing.”

Pearce is the primary sponsor of Arizona’s controversial Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB 1070 / HB 2162), which was signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer in April 2010.

The most controversial part of SB 1070 is a requirement that state and local law enforcement officials must try to determine the immigration status of people they come into “lawful contact” with whom they have reasonable suspicion to believe are in the U.S. illegally. This has led to claims the law will be enforced through racial profiling of Hispanics.

The bill has resulted in numerous legal challenges from human rights and civil liberties groups, and has been something of a black eye for Arizona’s national image. Some cities, such as Los Angeles and the People’s Republic of Berkeley, have gone so far as to enact economic contract non-renewal boycotts against businesses based in the state.

Nonetheless, all rhetoric and election year posturing aside, the fact is that some backers of the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (dubbed the “Breathing While Brown” law by critics) are wrapping themselves in the flag all the way to the bank.

Some of these proponents are seemingly as dedicated to grandstanding on border politics as they are to promoting the fortunes of private prison corporations, members of the multi-billion dollar immigrant detention industry which stand to reap substantial profits as more undocumented aliens are run through the nation’s immigration, detention and deportation mill.

The Machinations of a War  on Illegal Immigration

In early December 2009—a full month and a half before SB 1070 was introduced to the Arizona Senate and nearly two months before its counterpart was first read in the House—Pearce formally submitted a version of his proposed legislation to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization to which he and 35 other Arizona legislators are members.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, ALEC bills itself as “the nation’s largest bipartisan, individual membership association of state legislators” and as a public-private legislative partnership. As such, ALEC claims more than 2,000 state lawmakers (a full third of the nation’s state legislators) plus more than 200 corporate and special interest groups as members.

The organization’s current corporate roster includes Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, the nation’s largest private jailer), GEO Group (the nation��s second largest private jailer), Sodexho Marriott (the nation’s leading food services provider to private correctional institutions), the Koch Foundation, Exxon Mobil, Blue Cross and Blue Shield, Pfizer, Boeing, Bank of America, Wal-Mart, Inc. and News Corporation, to name a few.

Despite the fact that federal tax law explicitly forbids 501(c)(3) organizations such as ALEC from taking part in the formation of legislation, ALEC is comprised of nine task forces, each responsible for developing “model legislation” that ALEC member lawmakers then carry back to their home states and introduce as their own.

Although ALEC’s legislative members far outnumber corporate members, a look at the group’s finances illustrates not only the price corporations are willing to pay for a seat at the table with state lawmakers, but where the organization’s loyalties likely lie. According to ALEC’s most recent tax records, in 2008 the group reported a total of $6.9 million in revenue—$93,387 of which was brought in through legislative membership dues (a two-year membership is available to lawmakers for $100, or four years at $200). On the other hand, ALEC received $5.6 million (all but $1.3 million of the group’s annual budget) in contributions from its corporate and special-interest members.

According to ALEC promotional material, each year member legislators carry an average of 1,000 pieces of model legislation back to their home states—20 percent of which are passed into law.

As a testament to ALEC’s efficacy as a pipeline for corporate-backed legislation, since the passage of the federal healthcare overhaul package in late March 2010, legislators in at least 38 states have introduced the ALEC-crafted Freedom of Choice Health Care Act (Health Care Act), which, according to an ALEC press release, was modeled after an Arizona proposal defeated on the ballot in 2008. Ironically, given the fetish Pearce and other ALEC lawmakers have for adherence to federal immigration laws, the Health Care Act is marketed as an assertion of states’ sovereignty under the Tenth Amendment.

Pearce is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force. Private sector executive members of this task force include CCA, the American Bail Coalition (which is comprised of nine of the nation’s top bail bond insurer/bounty hunter associations), the National Beer Wholesalers Association, the Wine and Spirit Wholesalers Association, the National Pawn Brokers Association and Prison Fellowship Ministries. The private sector chair of the task force is currently the National Rifle Association (NRA).

According to Michael Hough, director of the Public Safety and Elections Task Force, every bill introduced by any member legislator or corporation must go through a 30-day review process for approval by both public and private sector ALEC members before it can become model legislation. This process, Hough says, was set in motion for Pearce’s immigration bill when he submitted it to his fellow members of the task force during the group’s December 2009 meeting at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C.

Pearce denies that he submitted the bill to ALEC for any other purpose other than to gain their endorsement and to strengthen its ability to weather legal challenges both in Arizona and in other states.

According to Hough, however, ALEC does not issue endorsements, but rather works with lawmakers on the formation and dissemination of model legislation. And Hough says the model legislation, the “No Sanctuary Cities for Illegal Immigrants Act” (Sanctuary Cities Act), that emerged from the Public Safety and Elections Task Force in early January 2010 is virtually identical to the bill introduced by Pearce in the Arizona legislature later that month.

Pearce says he anticipated that the Arizona law would be challenged by groups supporting “lawbreakers over lawkeepers,” such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Therefore, as Pearce tells it, he turned to the “brightest minds in the nation” and scoured more than 25 years of legislation to help draft his magnum opus immigration omnibus bill. The result, he says, is a law specifically designed to sustain the challenges of the political left.

One of the “brightest minds” that Pearce sought out was Kris Kobach. Kobach served as an advisor to former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, helping to implement the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System that called for the monitoring of individuals from Middle Eastern nations. Kobach is currently running for Kansas secretary of state and proudly bills himself on his campaign website as an attorney who “litigates against the ACLU in courts across the country.��

Kobach is also the “national expert on constitutional law” at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), a subsidiary organization of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). IRLI and FAIR are both funded in part by the Pioneer Fund, an organization that unabashedly studies the ��science’ of eugenics. Consequently, the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated both IRLI and FAIR “nativist hate groups”—a designation that Pearce has no qualms in dismissing.

“The Center for Poverty [sic] is the closest thing you can get to a Communist organization in America,” says Pearce. “They are absolutely a hate-based organization that hates Americans who stand up for the rule of law.” For his part, Kobach says that being labeled as a racist, a nativist or a member of any hate group is ��absurd and hurtful.”

According to both Pearce and Kobach, SB 1070, Arizona’s immigration bill, was not the brainchild of IRLI or FAIR as many media reports have claimed.

“The initial first draft of the bill was done by the legislators in the Arizona legislature who were coming up with a broad template of what they wanted to achieve. I was brought in at that point to advise on what was possible and what wasn’t possible, and to refine the language to make sure it stands up in court,” says Kobach.

Indeed, most of the provisions contained in the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act had existed in one form or another in legislative sessions prior to the bill’s introduction in the Arizona legislature this year—though Kobach does claim credit for the provision which outlaws “sanctuary city” policies, previously passed by the Missouri legislature in 2008. As a matter of fact, a bill containing language very similar to the Support Our Law Enforcement Act was passed by the Arizona legislature in 2006, only to be vetoed by then-Governor Janet Napolitano. That bill, HB 2577, was the first substantive introduction of the trespassing and “breathing while brown” provisions to the Arizona legislature.

“Breathing While Brown”

All Arizona is seeking to do, says Pearce, is to enforce federal immigration policy—which he says is deliberately barred by liberal lawmakers and “loudmouth anarchist” leftist groups in so-called “sanctuary cites.”

“It’s illegal to have sanctuary policies in this state under federal law, but we have them all over this country. I mean, L.A. and San Francisco being��if you will—the poster cities of what’s wrong with America,” says Pearce. “I mean, in Arizona, the crime—number two in the world in kidnappings; the home invasions, carjackings—identity theft capitol of the nation. The killings, the maimings—we can go through the list of officers that have been killed in the city of Phoenix. In fact, in the last ten years, 87 percent of the officers killed in the city of Phoenix were killed by illegal aliens.”

To remedy this situation, the ALEC Sanctuary Cities Act model legislation and Pearce’s Arizona bill both feature anti-“sanctuary cities” provisions which prohibit any municipal, county or state policy that might hamper the ability of any government agency from complying with federal immigration law. Both bills also include sanctions aimed at those who employ illegal immigrants and tougher penalties for human smugglers.

The provision of SB 1070 which has drawn the most fire from critics across the nation is the so-called “Breathing While Brown” provision. Under this section, law enforcement personnel may arrest anyone in their presence without a warrant, provided that the officer has probable cause to believe that the arrestee has committed a crime.

While the ability of a cop to make an arrest without a warrant is nothing new, one of the new crimes a law enforcement officer may cite as grounds for arrest based on probable cause is. The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act establishes state level offenses that mirror existing federal offenses under United States Alien and Nationality Code, sections 1304(e) and 1306(a).

Section 1304(e) states, ��every alien, eighteen years of age and over, shall at all times carry with him and have in his personal possession any certificate of alien registration or alien registration receipt.��

Violation of this section under federal law is a misdemeanor and carries a sentence of up to 30 days incarceration.

Section 1306(a) states, “any alien required to apply for registration and to be fingerprinted in the United States who willfully fails or refuses to make such application or to be fingerprinted, and any parent or legal guardian required to apply for the registration of any alien who willfully fails or refuses to file application for the registration of such alien shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined not to exceed $1,000 or be imprisoned not more than six months, or both.”

Once the Arizona immigration law goes into effect, any person found to be in violation of either of these federal laws in the state of Arizona��after their immigration/residency status has been determined by an agent of the federal government—will be charged with the new state crime of “willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document,” a subsection of the state’s criminal trespass statute. These state offenses carry a maximum fine of $100, along with restitution of jail costs and up to 20 days in jail. A second or subsequent offense carries a term of up to 30 days in jail.

By creating these state-level offenses, the law essentially converts every state, county and municipal law enforcement officer into an enforcer of federal immigration law.

“Basically, you have a mandate for all of the law enforcement in Arizona to question everyone about their immigration status,” said Linton Joaquin, general counsel for the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), a group seeking a federal injunction against the law. “I think it’s inevitably going to be a matter of racial profiling. You have them determining who they have reasonable suspicion as being undocumented ... clearly one factor is race, appearance and ethnicity. You can’t separate that in practice or in reality.”

While the wording of the bill expressly prohibits racial profiling as a means of determining immigration status, Joaquin says the letter of the law will do little to dissuade enforcement through the underlying color of the law.

“[Probable cause] can be incredibly easy to find. If a person looks away, then they are ‘averting their glance.’ If they look right at you, then they’re exhibiting ‘studied nonchalance.’ We see all these terms used to create a sense that there is a basis of suspicion.”

Pearce does not agree with that assessment.

“That’s another lie. They are absolutely not worried about racial profiling. It’s the boogie man thing. It��s like with children, once they believe there’s a boogie man, they have to sleep with the light on—even though there’s no real boogie man,” said Pearce. “It’s fear mongering and they are simply intellectually dishonest.”

According to Hough, one of the differences between the final version of the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act as signed into law in Arizona and the Sanctuary Cities Act, as promoted by ALEC on the floors of other state legislatures, is that the ALEC legislation carries more stringent penalties under the criminal trespass section.

Under the Sanctuary Cities Act, first offenses under the trespassing provision are still classified as a class 1 misdemeanor; however, there is no 20 to 30-day cap on incarceration as the final version of the Arizona law provides. Additionally, where the Support Our Law Enforcement Act classifies subsequent offenses as misdemeanors, the Sanctuary Cities Act classifies repeat offenses as felonies, which carry lengthier terms of incarceration.

Meet the New War,  Same as the Old War

Questions of justice aside, the net effect of the Arizona law and the ALEC-modeled legislation passed in other states will be to greatly increase the numbers of undocumented aliens arrested and jailed, by effectively converting each state and county law enforcement officer into an enforcer of federal immigration law.

The immigration dragnet created by the Support Our Law Enforcement Act in Arizona and the Sanctuary Cities Act as disseminated by ALEC is a win-win situation for private prison companies, and this war on immigration is not the first time corporate-backed legislation has filled the prisons and bank accounts of entities such as CCA and GEO Group.

In the early 1990’s, while the ALEC Public Safety (then Criminal Justice) Task Force was co-chaired by CCA, another task force member and current private sector chair, the NRA, began an aggressive campaign to introduce variants of two pieces of ALEC-backed legislation at the state and federal level: the so-called “truth-in-sentencing” and “three-strikes” laws.

Truth-in-sentencing called for all violent offenders to serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for release.

Three strikes called for mandatory life imprisonment for a third felony conviction. In some states this was interpreted as life imprisonment for a third violent offense conviction, while in others, such as California, the law was enacted in such a way as to include those convicted of petty offenses such as shoplifting. [PLN was the first media to report the instrumental role the NRA played in bankrolling Washington’s Three Strikes law in 1993 (the first in the nation) and Washington State’s “Hard Time for Armed Crime” initiative in 1995.]

The NRA campaign, dubbed ��CrimeStrike,” headed by victim’s rights advocate and former Arizona Chief Assistant Attorney General Steve Twist, was seen by many as a reactionary strike at the Clinton administration’s gun control efforts when it moved into high gear in 1993. CrimeStrike was the campaign which set forth the precept that “guns don��t kill people, people kill people.” As such, CrimeStrike promoted state and federal tough-on-crime legislation and derided any lawmaker backing gun control as being “soft on crime.”

With memories of the Willie Horton disaster of the failed 1988 Michael Dukakis presidential campaign still fresh in the minds of most American legislators, this accusation invariably hit a raw nerve among Democrats and elicited kneejerk support of the laws.

While the NRA was busy pushing these laws through CrimeStrike, ALEC was pushing its agenda in Pennsylvania with the help of former Herbert-Walker Bush U.S. Attorney General William Barr and ALEC member, then-Pennsylvania governor, and future director of the Department of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.

In 1995, the Pennsylvania legislature passed several tough-on-crime bills based on ALEC proposals and model legislation. In 2005, while serving as Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, state Rep. John Perzel, an ALEC member and Pennsylvania House Majority Leader from 1995 to 2003, joined GEO Group’s board of directors.

In November 2009, Perzel resigned from the corporation’s board following an indictment handed down that same month for his alleged role in a scandal involving several of his staffers and other lawmakers charged with using taxpayer dollars to fund their campaign activities. Only days before his indictment, Perzel exercised his option as a board member to purchase 5,000 shares of GEO stock, valued at that time in excess of $100,000. According to a GEO Group statement, Perzel left on good terms with the company. [See: PLN, Sept. 2010, p.34].

Incidentally, Pennsylvania was one of the first states to introduce legislation strikingly similar to the Support Our Law Enforcement/Sanctuary Cities Acts, legislators having introduced their own “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” in May 2010.

By 1996, CrimeStrike claimed responsibility for the passage of “three strikes” laws in Washington, California, Georgia, Delaware and North Carolina, as well as truth-in-sentencing laws in Arizona, Mississippi and Virginia.

A contributing factor to the spread of truth-in-sentencing laws was the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The Act provided millions of federal dollars under the Violent Offender Incarceration and Truth-In-Sentencing (VOI/TIS) Incentive Grant Program to states to build new prisons or contract out beds with private corporations if the states adopted truth-in-sentencing laws for violent offenders.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, by 1998, 27 states and the District of Columbia had adopted federal truth-in-sentencing guidelines and were receiving VOI/TIS funding for corrections expansion. Eleven states had adopted versions of the “three-strikes” legislation.

Several states exceeded the VOI/TIS requirements and imposed broader sentencing guidelines, beyond the realm of violent offenses. Arizona, for example, amended its sentencing laws in a way which would require all prisoners to serve their entire sentences, except that they may be eligible for earned release credits for up to a 15 percent sentence reduction. From 1996 to 2001, Arizona received $57,923,000 in VOI/TIS grants for much-needed prison expansion and operational expenses under the state’s new sentencing guidelines.

According to the Department of Justice, the federal government disbursed $2.7 billion in VOI/TIS grants nationwide during the same five-year period to states that had adopted the guidelines. However, the program was discontinued following fiscal year 2001, leaving states with rapidly-swelling prison populations to foot the bill.

In late 2009 through the first quarter of 2010, several states which had previously espoused the “tough-on-crime” stance promoted through ALEC and CrimeStrike reconsidered and rolled back some of those tough sentencing guidelines in order to slacken the demands wrought on their budgets by overburdened criminal justice systems in the face of massive shortfalls. This, however, has not been the prevailing attitude among Arizona lawmakers—struggling with one of the most severe budgetary crises in the nation��who have stuck by their guns and, instead of revisiting sentencing guidelines, opened nearly their entire prison system to operation by private corrections contractors.

Gov. Brewer signed the Criminal Justice Budget Reconciliation Act (Criminal Justice Act) into law in September 2009. The law required the state to issue requests for proposals (RFPs) for the private operation of up to nine of the state’s 10 prison complexes. This provision of the Criminal Justice Act was quietly repealed by the legislature in March 2010, due primarily to lawmaker concerns that private prison companies were not equipped to handle maximum security facilities. However, the Criminal Justice Act also required the Arizona Department of Corrections to issue RFPs for 5,000 new private medium to minimum-security beds. [Ed. Note: The RFPs for 5,000 additional private prison beds were cancelled by the Department of Corrections in September 2010, though they will be reissued; see: PLN, Sept. 2010, p.42].

The bid for privatization in Arizona was unprecedented. The only other instances of a state legislature even considering opening the state’s entire prison system to private contractors were the Corrections Corporation of America’s failed bids in the mid-80��s and mid-90’s to take over the entire prison system in its home state of Tennessee. During the second bid, CCA projected an additional $100 million annually in state revenues as a result of privatization. Upon review, however, the Tennessee legislature realized that the projections were far from accurate. Interestingly enough, the same $100 million figure was cited by the Arizona state legislature in the Criminal Justice Budget Reconciliation Act—the primary engines of which were Senate President and Arizona State ALEC Chair Bob Burns, as well as Senator Pearce.

Shower in the Desert:  It’s Raining Money

Over the past decade, the private prison industry has increasingly shifted its attention to the burgeoning fields of undocumented and criminal alien detention.

For example, from January 2008 to April 2010, CCA spent $4.4 million lobbying the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the Office of Budget Management, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both houses of Congress. Of the 43 lobbying disclosure reports filed by CCA during this period, only five do not expressly state intent to monitor or influence immigration reform policy or gain Homeland Security or ICE appropriations.

To illustrate the lucrative payoff this activity has had for CCA, the private jailer reported$1.7 billion in gross revenue for 2009, attributing about 40 percent of this business to its federal clients ICE, the BOP and the U.S. Marshals Service, all of which house immigrant detainee populations.

And, according to the story the numbers tell, it is easy to see why the private prison industry is eager to expand its stake in the immigrant detainee market. According to ICE Public Affairs Officer Gillian Brigham, in fiscal year 2009, ICE detained 383,524 individuals with an average daily prisoner population of 32,098 spread across the nation’s 270 immigrant detention centers.

Due to the rising numbers of immigrant detentions in recent years, coupled with the rising tide of economic shortfalls at both the state and federal level (ICE reported a $140 million budget shortfall for fiscal year 2010), ICE has farmed the operations of many of these facilities out to either county operators under inter-governmental service agreements or to private prison contractors that operate the facilities on a per diem, per inmate basis.

Currently, according to Brigham, seven of these facilities are “contract detention facilities” (CDFs) owned and operated by either CCA or GEO Group. However, says Brigham, there are several types of facilities utilized by ICE for immigrant detention which may be operated by private contractors, including facilities such as county or state-owned jails and prisons contracted out by ICE under “inter-government service agreements” (IGSAs), or other “service processing centers,” which are facilities operated by both federal and private detention staff.

An example of one of these IGSA facilities would be the nation’s largest immigrant detention “tent city” facility, the Willacy County Processing Center in Raymondville, TX. This prison, though owned by the county, is operated by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), a private prison firm based in Utah.

Willacy County’s “tent city�� facility, consisting of several massive dome-like structures near the Gulf of Mexico, has the capacity to warehouse in excess of 3,000 immigrant detainees awaiting deportation at any given time. [See: PLN, Sept. 2007, p.1].

Unfortunately, according to Brigham, ICE does not keep tabs on who is operating these detention centers at the state or county levels through IGSAs, so it is difficult to assess how many of those prisons are run by private firms.

However, as an indication of what they see to be bountiful times to come, GEO Group and CCA report plans to expand operations or fill thousands of existing immigrant detention bed “inventory surpluses” in Arizona, California, Oklahoma, Texas, Michigan and South Carolina in response to what the corporations refer to as “organic growth opportunities,” chief of which is an anticipated increase in immigrant detentions, coupled with the increased inability of the federal and state governments to meet detention needs due to budgetary constraints.

In May 2010, during the GEO Group’s first quarter investor conference call, an investor asked GEO CEO George Zoley what impact Arizona’s immigration law might have on business.

Zoley responded with levity: “What, they have some new legislation? I never heard about it. I think I’m increasingly convinced of their need for 5,000 new beds.”

Wayne Calabrese, GEO Group’s vice chair and chief operating officer, offered a more straightforward appraisal.

“I can only believe that the opportunities at the federal level are going to continue at pace as a result of what’s happening. I think people understand there is still a relatively low threshold of tolerance for people coming across the border and those laws not being enforced,” said Calabrese. “And that to me at least suggests there are going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do.”

The Ties that Bind

Whether or not private prison companies influenced the drafting of the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act during the month that ALEC’s Public Safety Task Force had to review the bill prior to its introduction to the Arizona legislature may be a moot point.

The private corrections/immigrant detention industry has had ample opportunity—and obvious intent—in recent years to influence the drafting of and smooth the way toward passage of this and similar legislation.

According to Pearce, Kobach and Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman, the Support Our Law Enforcement Act went through a lengthy edit and review process from the months before its introduction at the legislature to the day it was signed by the Governor. This review process—aside from the numerous hearings held in both houses of the state legislature—took place predominantly within the office of the Maricopa County Attorney and in the office of Governor Brewer.

A little over a week after Pearce introduced the Support Our Law Enforcement Act on the floor of the state Senate as SB 1070, CCA enlisted Highground Consulting, one of the most influential lobbying firms in Phoenix, to represent its interests in the state.

Lobby disclosure forms filed with the Arizona Secretary of State indicate that Maricopa County also employed the consulting firm during the time of the bill’s formation.

Highground’s influence extends into Governor Brewer’s office. The firm’s owner and principal is Charles “Chuck” Coughlin, Brewer’s top advisor and campaign manager.

In addition to Coughlin, CCA has further ties to the office of the Governor. State lobby reports reveal that Gov. Brewer’s current spokesman, Senseman, had been lobbying Arizona lawmakers as CCA��s chief lobbyist in the state as an employee of Policy Development Group, Inc., yet another influential Phoenix consulting firm, from 2005 to late 2008. Senseman was appointed as Brewer’s spokesman in January 2009—fresh off the job with CCA. Senseman’s wife, Kathryn, remains employed by Policy Development Group, which still lobbies the state on behalf of CCA.

So, in 2005 and 2006, while Arizona lawmakers—many of them ALEC members—were drafting provisions of what would eventually become the “Breathing While Brown” law (incorporated in HB 2577), Governor Brewer’s current director of communications was lobbying on behalf of the largest private prison company and operator of immigrant detention facilities in the nation.

Additionally, Brewer’s Chief Policy Advisor, Richard Bark—a man mentioned by Senseman, Pearce and Kobach as being directly involved in the drafting of the Support Our Law Enforcement Act—remains listed with the Office of the Secretary of State as an active lobbyist for the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI). CCA is a “board level” member of ACCI and is the top employer in Pinal County, located just south of Maricopa County, where CCA operates five detention facilities for both state prisoners and immigrant detainees.

Meanwhile, GEO Group employs Public Policy Partners, a consulting firm which, like Highground, also provides consultation and lobbying services to Maricopa County.

While Public Policy Partners, an Arizona-based company, has over 30 clients in the state, it is worth noting that the firm has only two clients at the federal level: GEO Group (based in Florida) and Ron Sachs Communications, a Florida-based public relations firm which, according to lobby records, promotes issues related to prison privatization. Public Policy Partners, as a firm, also appears to be an advocate for expanded use of private prisons.

Federal lobby records from the first quarter of 2010 show Public Policy Partners’ owner, John Kaites, lobbying on behalf of the firm on issues pertaining to “private correctional detention management.”

CCA has also shown special interest in Arizona through several recent choices in its corporate structuring.

In 2007, CCA hired Brad Regens as “vice president of state partnership relations” for the purpose of cultivating new contracts in Arizona and California. In the two years immediately prior to his employment at CCA, Regens had worked in the Arizona House of Representatives as director of fiscal policy. Before his appointment as director of fiscal policy, Regens spent nine years working in the Arizona legislature in various roles, including assistant director of the Arizona Joint Legislative Budget Committee.

Further, after hiring Regens, CCA elected former U.S. Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini to its board of directors in February 2008.

Subsequent Events

Since this article’s initial publication in the July 2010 issue of In These Times, several developments have unfolded in the case of Arizona’s controversial “Breathing While Brown” law.

On July 6, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a challenge to the constitutionality of SB 1070 in the U.S. District Court for Arizona. The DOJ’s primary assertion, as stated in a press release, was that the law “unconstitutionally interferes with the federal government’s authority to set and enforce immigration policy.” As such, the DOJ urged the court to issue an injunction before the law, through its implementation, caused “irreparable harm” to the functions of both local and federal law enforcement and immigration efforts.

Numerous chiefs of Arizona law enforcement agencies submitted briefs in support of the DOJ challenge, stating that SB 1070 would cause undue burden on their officers and hamper their ability to perform their jobs by alienating a significant portion of the communities they serve. A Tucson police officer, Martin Escobar, had filed a separate lawsuit in April 2010 challenging SB 1070, claiming that he could be held liable for violating people’s civil rights if he was required to enforce the law. His suit was eventually dismissed due to lack of standing.

On July 28, the day before SB 1070 was set to take effect, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton issued a temporary injunction in the DOJ’s suit, suspending several of the statute’s more controversial provisions, among them the requirement that law enforcement officers check an individual’s immigration status if they are suspected of being in the country illegally. See: United States v. State of Arizona, U.S.D.C. (D. Ariz.), Case No. 2:10-cv-01413-NVW.

On September 2, 2010, the DOJ filed another federal lawsuit, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his agency, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO), to gain access to documents that Arpaio repeatedly failed to produce. The DOJ had requested records detailing how, or if, federal funds received by MSCO had been used to further alleged discriminatory policing practices that targeted Hispanics—such as racial profiling and discrimination against jail prisoners.

According to the complaint in that suit, the DOJ had been seeking Arpaio’s cooperation since March 2009. Ironically, given the fact that “the federal government has failed us!” is the rallying cry of Arizona lawmakers backing SB 1070 and other “tough-on-immigration” policies, the DOJ’s complaint states that Maricopa County (and through it, MCSO) had received nearly $16 million in federal law enforcement and border security grants in 2009 alone.

Where that money went, Sheriff Arpaio won’t say—at least not without a court fight. According to pleadings in the case filed in late September 2010, MCSO denied withholding records from DOJ investigators. Yet according to DOJ documents, MCSO wrote the department as recently as August 27, stating it refused to cooperate fully with the federal investigation. The suit remains pending. See: United States v. Maricopa County, U.S.D.C. (D. Ariz.), Case No. 2:10-cv-01878-GMS.

In regard to the private prison industry connection to SB 1070, it has been learned that private prison executives turned out their checkbooks to show their appreciation to Arizona House Speaker and SB 1070 sponsor Kirk Adams. According to data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, GEO Group founder and CEO George Zoley, along with GEO President and Chief Operating Officer Wayne Calabrese, his wife Rhonda Calabrese and GEO Senior Vice President John Hurley, all wrote checks to Rep. Adams for $410 (the maximum contribution allowed under state law) on the same day in December 2009.

An abbreviated version of this article was first published by In These Times; this expanded and updated version is reprinted with permission from the author.

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Look for a 3 volume book being released Sept 30, 2012 by Byron Price and John Morris on this subject,

http://www.amazon.com/Prison-Privatization-volumes-Controversial-Industry/dp/0313395713/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340223538&sr=1-2

propublica

The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.

As a Huffington Post investigation pointed out last month, nearly half of all immigrant detainees are now held in privately run detention facilities. Just this week, the New York Times delved into lax oversight at industrial-sized but privately run halfway houses in New Jersey.

We’ve taken a look at some of the numbers associated with the billion-dollar and wide-ranging for-profit detention industry—and the two companies that dominate the market:

General Statistics:

1.6 million: Total number of state and federal prisoners in the United States as of December 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics

128,195: Number of state and federal prisoners housed in private facilities as of December 2010

37: percent by which number of prisoners in private facilities increased between 2002 and 2009

217,690: Total federal inmate population as of May 2012, according to the Bureau of Prisons

27,970: Number of federal inmates in privately managed facilities within the Bureau of Prisons

33,330: Estimated size of detained immigrant population as of 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Corrections Corporation of America

66: number of facilities owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest private prison company based on number of facilities

91,000: number of beds available in CCA facilities across 20 states and the District of Columbia

$1.7 billion: total revenue recorded by CCA in 2011

$17.4 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics

$1.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics

$3.7 million: executive compensation for CEO Damon T. Hininger in 2011

132: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at CCA-run Idaho Correctional Center between Sept. 2007 and Sept. 2008

42: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at the state-run Idaho State Correctional Institution in the same time frame (both prisons at the time held about 1,500 inmates)

The Geo Group, Inc., the U.S.’s second largest private detention company

$1.6 billion: total revenue in year 2011, according to its annual report

65: number of domestic correctional facilities owned and operated by Geo Group, Inc.

65,716: number of beds available in Geo Group, Inc.’s domestic correctional facilities

$2.5 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 8 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics

$2.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics

$5.7 million: executive compensation for CEO George C. Zoley in 2011

$6.5 million: damages awarded in a wrongful death lawsuit against the company last June for the beating death of an inmate by his cellmate at a GEO Group-run Oklahoma prison. An appeal has been filed and is pending.

$1.1 million: fine levied against the company in November 2011 by the New Mexico Department of Corrections for inadequate staffing at one of its prisons

===

alternet prison gauchi cervantes kpfa letters politics 6/4

geo group and CCA both lose $ bc crime rates down, so went for immigrants

geo guantanamo, us marchall, doj, ICE, bur of prison contracts, rx, trans, also states and local, also build prisons in fla, Ga, NJ, iowa, maybe along cdn border

big lobby SB 1070 Az

Fidelity, Vanguard, Black Rock

houst chron and homeland found rape rampant

��

How Wall St profits from the criminalization of "

http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/148442

How Wall Street Profits from the Criminalization of Immigrants and Lobbies for More To Be Locked Up

By Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, AlterNet

Posted on October 9, 2010, Printed on June 4, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/148442/how_wall_street_profits_from_the_criminalization_of_immigrants_and_lobbies_for_more_to_be_locked_up

Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.

These facilities are run by two Wall Street-backed companies that actively promote the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants in the United States -the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group.

The T. Don Hutto immigrant detention facility in Taylor, Texas provides a now well-known example of the abuses that take place within private prisons for immigrants. Beginning in May 2006,the Don Hutto prison was used to house children and their parents who were on a path to deportation. Reports began to surface of widespread abusive treatment of immigrant children by staff of Corrections Corporation of America. An ACLU lawsuit filed on the basis of documented cases of abuse finally led to the closing of the Don Hutto facility for housing families in 2008. After the children were excluded, the Don Hutto only held women detainees. But the abuses continued. Evidence has surfaced that a number of women were sexually abused over the past two years in Don Hutto by CCA staff. Sexual abuse, including rape, has been documented in several detention centers.

The other large private prison corporation contracted by the federal government to run immigrant prisons is the GEO Group. The GEO detention facilities have also racked up many reports and complaints of abusive treatment of immigrant detainees and corrupt staff practices that violate the basic human rights of prisoners. Last month we spoke with the sibling of a detainee in a GEO-run facility who was denied basic medical attention for lack of funds to pay. The detainee��s family had to raise funds to get their relative medical attention in the facility from GEO. Other GEOdetainees have died from a lack of medical attention.

Another relative of a GEO detainee told us that prisoners who avoid getting on the wrong side of GEO guards could aspire, at most, to a job in the prison that pays 17 cents an hour for doing office work.

GEO recently agreed to pay restitution for its employees’ physical abuse of prisoners who were strip searched in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Texas, and New Mexico. In another case, GEO was ordered to pay $40 million in the wrongful death of a prisoner in its custody in Raymondville, Texas. GEO has also been sued by seven children who were sexually assaulted by a guard while being held in a GEO facility.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), based in Nashville, Tennessee, and the GEO Group, a global corporation based in Boca Raton, Florida are the nation’s two largest prison companies. They run highly integrated operations to design, build, finance and operate prisons. GEO rakes in $1.17 billion in annual revenue, and CCA tops that at $1.69 billion. Together these companies are principal moving forces in the behind-the-scenes organization of the current wave of anti-immigrant legislative efforts, which, if successful, would dramatically increase the number of immigrant prisoners in over 20 states.

Following the Money

GEO CEO, George Zoley, was a Bush “Pioneer” who bundled more than $100,000 in contributions for the Bush-Cheney campaigns in 2000 and 2004. In October 2003, GEO was successful in securing the contract to run the Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp, in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

GEO hired the services of lobbyists who had held influential positions in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Prisons, Office of the Attorney General, and the office of then-Senate Majority Leader, George Mitchell, to lobby their former employers and Congress. Throughout 2005 and leading up to the largest immigration raid in U.S. history in December 2006, GEO and CCA spent a combined total of over $6 million on lobbying efforts.

On May 1, 2006, while millions of people marched in favor of immigrant rights in 102 cities across the country, GEO and CCA were lobbying the federal government for more business. The marchers, despite their historic turnout and broad citizen base, could not block the growing wave of government support of GEO’s and CCA’s business plans.

The December 2006 raid, in which over a thousand men and women employed at Swift meat-packing plants in several states were detained, marked a change in the federal government’s enforcement of the 1995 immigration law. For the first time, many of those picked up were charged with crimes such as falsifying identity documents or identity theft that carry long prison sentences, rather than misuse of a social security number, a misdemeanor.

This single change in enforcement of existing law created a potential “market” of over 10 million new felons almost overnight, multiplying the lucrative incarceration market for the private prison industry and sending a shock wave through immigrant-related communities across the country. At the time of the Swift raid, USA Today quoted the Reverend Clarence Sandoval of St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church in Logan, Utah, as saying, “They are taking mothers and fathers and we’re really concerned about the children. I’m getting calls from mothers saying they don’t know where their husband was taken.”

Through this change in how federal law is enforced, CCA and GEO suddenly had a huge pool of captive clients, and began to rake in millions of dollars in public funds to house, transport, feed and control immigrants.

Predictably, costs to taxpayers skyrocketed. From 2006 to the present, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) budget for the identification, custody, transportation, detention and removal of immigrants has increased 51%. The U.S. Marshall budget for the custody and transportation of immigrants over the same period has increased 15%, and the Bureau of Prisons budget for detention of immigrants over the same period has gone up 9%. The billions of dollars in increased expenditures have provided the primary source for the billions in increased revenue for CCA and GEO.

In addition, currently 625 state, county and municipality law enforcement agencies are providing identification, custody, transportation and detention of immigrants through agreements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

According to a federal Government Accounting Office study conducted last year the cost of this program to local taxpayers is unknown because 60% of state and local governments do not keep data on their personnel, equipment, supplies and other costs related to these agreements, and therefore are not reimbursed for those costs. Whatever the exact cost, local taxpayers will feel the pinch as this program is expected to expand to all 3,100 state, county and municipal detention jurisdictions in the nation by the end of 2011. Consequently CCA and GEO can expect to increase their revenues as states and counties increasingly subcontract incarceration responsibilities to these companies.

Last year Seeking Alpha, a website of actionable stock market opinion and analysis popular on Wall Street, reported that GEO’s income from prison health care services ending in March of 2009 topped $1.0 billion, a 5.8% profit. Seeking Alpha also stated that CCA’s profit for the same period in 19 states was over $1.6 billion, with a profit margin of 9.4%. In an article entitled “Where Delinquencies Make for Good Business” the same publication noted, “Crime, unfortunately, is a growth industry and GEO Group has proven to be a successful player in the outsourcing trend for governments at many levels.” Pushing criminalization of immigrants to cast a wider net in society has been a key part of that “success.”

Soon after the Bush Administration implemented the change in law enforcement affecting immigrants, Wall Street advisors publically recommended buying stock in private prison companies like CCA and GEO. At the time, Vice President Dick Cheney was heavily invested in Vanguard, one of a handful of major shareholders in GEO.

The lobbying paid off for both companies, in huge revenue increases from government contracts to incarcerate immigrants. From 2005 through 2009, for every dollar that GEO spent lobbying the government, the company received a $662 return in taxpayer-funded contracts, for a total of $996.7 million. CCA received a $34 return in taxpayer-funded contracts for every dollar spent on lobbying the federal government, for a total of $330.4 million. In addition, both companies increased revenues over the same period from detention facility contracts with a number of states.

In 2007, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) conducted 30,407 immigration raids in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public gathering sites such as bus stops and commuter train platforms. The number of raids conducted that year was double the 2006 total. The number of immigrants placed behind bars, for what amounts to the crime of having been born in the wrong place, increased from 256,842 in 2006 to 311,169 in 2007.

As a result of fear induced by the raids and other factors, pro-immigrant May Day marches in 2007 were much smaller than those of the previous year. In mid-2007, while many activists and organizers were focused on legislative reform, public protests, eliminating the raids, and trying to help families and friends of those who had been taken away by ICE and other enforcement agencies, GEO and CCA shareholders reaped a huge profit. Both companies issued 2-for-1 stock splits that roughly doubled the value of their shareholders’ stake.

Although stockholders profited handsomely as revenues from prison contracts rose for both companies, the increase wasn’t large enough to satisfy some of their respective major shareholders. J.P. Morgan Chase, a major owner of GEO, dumped most of its stock and relinquished its leadership position in the company.

One problem for major investors seeking huge gains from the for-profit prison business was that revenue rates couldn’t keep rising because federal agencies didn’t have enough personnel to arrest and process more immigrants than the expanded number they were now handling. It became apparent that the only way to significantly raise revenue through increasing the numbers of people picked up, detained and incarcerated was to hire more law enforcement personnel.

The private prison industry now needed a new source of low-cost licensed law enforcement personnel. CCA and GEO then turned to state governments as the focus of business expansion. Both companies stepped up efforts to acquire contracts with state and local governments that were entering into lucrative agreements with the Department of Homeland Security to detain immigrants in state and local detention and correctional facilities.

The result of this shift in business focus is exemplified by CCA’s role in Arizona’s SB 1070 and both CCA’s and GEO’s roles in other legislative efforts aimed at dramatically increased numbers arrests of undocumented immigrants in over 20 states. Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer, who received substantial campaign financing from top CCA executives in Tennessee and employs two former CCA lobbyists Chuck Coughlin and Paul Sensman, as top aides, signed SB 1070 into law on April 23.

On Friday, July 30, 2010 the Republican Governors Association, which so far this year has received over $160,000 in contributions from CCA and GEO, and their respective lobbyists, sent out a nationwide solicitation written by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer requesting contributions to fund an appeal of the partial injunction issued by a judge against SB 1070.

In addition to funds raised by the partisan appeal, Brewer’s legal effort has been bolstered by supporting briefs filed with the appeals court by three states– Florida, Texas and Virginia–that have contracts with GEO or with both GEO and CCA. The two prison companies are currently ramping up their political involvement in these states and in several others that have anti-immigrant bills moving through their respective legislatures. In all, twenty states are considering SB 1070-inspired bills, which have been endorsed by their respective Republican gubernatorial candidates, financed in large part by the Republican Governor’s Association.

Last November, CCA’s top management in Tennessee contributed the largest block of out-of-state campaign contributions received by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer.[1] CCA, which already has several detention facilities in Arizona and hopes of expanding its immigrant prison business in that state, is expected to gain a huge increase in revenues with the implementation of SB 1070. Currently, Latinos driving out of the city of Tucson in any direction are being stopped at checkpoints, where they are asked to show their papers.

GEO and CCA are now heavily involved in the governor and state legislative races in states where they plan to expand their respective shares of the prison and incarceration market. GEO, for example, backed first-term Republican Governor, Bob McDonnell, in Virginia last year, and has contributed heavily to the Republican Governor’s Association and to the Florida Republican Party. In addition to Jan Brewer in Arizona, CCA is contributing to the campaigns of both, Republican Meg Whitman, and Democrat Jerry Brown, for governor in California. CCA is also giving money to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, even though Jindal isn’t currently facing an election, and to the Republican Governors Association, which has contributed over $1.5 million to state races this year.[2]

Since the change of administration in Washington D.C., GEO has expanded its presence there by adding the services of lobbyists who formerly served in high positions in the Obama presidential campaign, the Clinton White House, and the Senate and House Appropriations committees. Currently, GEO retains the services of three Washington D.C. lobbyists who also work for Wells Fargo, GEO’s top shareholder. One of GEO’s Washington D.C. lobbyists, Barbara Comstock, is also a member of the Virginia state legislature. CCA relies on its officers to do its lobbying in Washington DC,[3] where some board members, such as former Arizona U.S. Senator Dennis DeConcini, are well-connected.

CCA’s and GEO’s share of the taxpayer-funded immigrant incarceration business has grown substantially since 2006. Today, for example, in California, anyone picked up by ICE in Los Angeles is sent to a CCA facility in San Diego, while those picked up by ICE in Seattle or Portland, OR, are sent to a GEO facility in Tacoma, Washington, because detention facilities owned and operated by the federal government are at 137% capacity, with no room to house more prisoners.

Wall Street’s Role

CCA and GEO are owned by major Wall Street institutions, which profit from the immigrant incarceration business as major shareholders.

The most influential investor in CCA is a hedge fund, Pershing Square, which is run by Wall Street investment guru activist investor, Bill Ackman. Ackman also plays a powerful role in Target Corporation and Kraft Foods. Wells Fargo is the most powerful investor in GEO.

Other major investors with the power to influence management in one or the other of the two companies are Vanguard, Lazard, Scopia, Wellington Management, FMR (Fidelity), BlackRock and Bank of America. Each of these major owners is sensitive to public opinion in one way or another. These major investors do not need to rely on either CCA or GEO to make money, since most of their money is invested in enterprises unrelated to private prisons.

By almost any measure, the increased number of deportations of immigrants has not had the desired effects on anyone other than the private prison industry. Unemployment among native-born citizens in the U.S. has skyrocketed as the number of immigrants being deported has risen to over 400,000 a year.

The United States now has more people in prison than any other country on earth. At over 2 million, the U.S. has a half million more people behind bars than China, which has the second highest number of prisoners.

One would like to think that bringing this information to Congress’s attention would be enough to compel them to abandon policies that criminalize immigrants. However, that is not likely to happen soon.

This probable reluctance on the part of Congress to act isn’t merely because of the substantial campaign contributions that Senators and members of Congress receive from the private prison industry. Most members of Congress have personal investments in one or more of CCA’s or GEO’s major shareholders.

While it is true that many people are invested in CCA or GEO through their pensions without knowing it, reports on the personal finances of some key members of Congress suggest some of them have more than a casual interest in the fortunes of CCA or GEO.

One example of a Washington DC powerhouse with a substantial financial interest in CCA is Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi, one of a small group of investors in Pershing Square, a hedge fund that holds the most stock in CCA of any of the company’s shareholders. Senator Enzi, a senior Republican who sits on the Senate Budget Committee, was awarded a 100% approval rating by U.S. Border Control (USBC), which describes itself as “a non-profit, tax-exempt, citizen’s lobby. USBC is dedicated to ending illegal immigration by securing our nation’s borders and reforming our immigration policies.��

As Congress is currently tasked with finding ways to reduce the burgeoning deficit and alleviate the suffering caused by the economic crisis, shifting priorities from programs that benefit prison companies to much-needed programs that benefit taxpayers only makes sense. Compelling Congress to abandon immigrant criminalization policies is probably going to require, among other things, that citizens convince some combination of our pension funds, Wells Fargo, and a key hedge fund or two, to pull out of the private prison industry and to go elsewhere to make money.

We should be able accomplish this. IBM and Ford, when challenged, found themselves unable to justify their investments in apartheid in South Africa. As a result of a swelling movement of students, faith-based organizations, unions and shareholders, these companies divested in 1986, contributing to the fall of the racist apartheid system and a transition to democracy.

Similarly, Wells Fargo, Pershing Square, and other financial giants shall be hard-pressed to justify investments in the massive suffering caused by the criminalization of immigrants, as a movement comes together to expose the harm done to the public good by their current investments in the immigrant prison industry.

Who knows? Some of these financial institutions might even see the wisdom in investing in companies that produce family-wage jobs.

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is the Director of Enlace, a Portland, OR based organization focused on strategic organizing, campaigns, and training in organizational development around workers’ struggles, and the impacts of multinational corporations in the lives of people in all sectors of society. Peter has been a labor activist since 1965, starting as a young farm worker in Southern California. He is a frequent contributor to the Americas Programwww.cipamericas.org.

Resources:

[1]��Arizona campaign contribution reports compiled by the National Institute On Money in State Politics show that CCA’s CEO Damon Hininger, CFO Todd Mullenger, CDO Anthony Grande, and then General Counsel, Gus Puryear, contributed to Jan Brewer’s campaign.

[2] National Institute on Money in State Politics.

[3] Center for Responsive Politics, Open Secrets.org

��

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi is the director of the Enlace Institute.

----

**Up Front**

Hosted by Brian Edwards-Tiekert and Sonali Kolhatkar pvt prisons fastest growing segment, new report No Bargain kids abused in cf SPLC http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/news/groundbreaking-settlement-in-splc-case-protects-incarcerated-children-from-abuse-i

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/04/29/1086699/-Billion-dollar-GEO-prison-for-profit-group-abandons-its-Mississippi-cesspool-?detail=hide

Take a look at the money.

The CEO of GEO George C. Zoley earned a salary of $1,145,000, got a bonus of $1,334,498 and with other compensations like stock options, the total for him is $5,734,949. The company he heads up, the GEO Group, is raking in the blood money by the barrel full.

This isn't the first investigation into the private for-profit prison empire, and it won't be the last. SPLC has sent an open letter of appeal to the Louisiana legislature regarding House Bill 850, which would allow the state to accept offers for the private purchase and operation of the Avoyelles Correctional Center.

(Abandoned) Cell at Camp H

Angola Prison (Lee Honeycutt, Wikimedia)

Louisiana has 12 adult state prisons including Angola, which is the largest maximum security prison in the U.S., and conditions in them will worsen if the mega-hucksters move in.

SPLC documents the ugly recent histories of for-profit prison cesspits:

Examples of violence and human rights abuses at CCA and GEO facilities include the following:

In 2011, our neighbors in Mississippi were sued because of deficiencies in the GEO Group's administration of Walnut Grove Correctional Facility, a 1,500-bed facility plagued with dangerous conditions due to the private operator's cost-saving measures. Countless youth sustained serious injury, and one child will live with permanent brain damage as a result of the deficiencies in care there. Because of ensuing litigation, the State of Mississippi now must take costly remedial measures to bring the facility back in line with correctional standards. We in Louisiana cannot afford this type of crisis in our prisons.

In October 2011, prisoner fights in several locations throughout a CCA prison in Oklahoma left 46 prisoners injured and required 16 inmates to be sent to the hospital, some of them in critical condition.

Between October 2011 and February 2012 five preventable deaths occurred in the GEO-operated East Mississippi Correctional Facility, a prison for people living with mental illness.

At least eight people died between 2005 and 2009 at the GEO Group-operated George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the state's only privately run jail. In January 2009, GEO pulled out of operations at this facility, citing "underperformance and frequent litigations" as the reasons.

...

GEO is not the largest private for-profit prison group. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is. It owns and manages over 60 facilities here in the U.S. and rakes in the cash while doing so. These corporations and their officers are part of the 1 percent. Damon T. Hininger, CEO of CCA, will certainly never have to worry about being poor.

Check to see if your mutual or pension fund owns stock in any of them. They are openly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. They have a massive well-funded lobby.

Read about the efforts being made by one shareholder to stop rape in for profit prisons.

Stop ALEC. They fund voter suppression and voter incarceration. If they can't stop us from voting while on the outside, they want us locked up to ensure we can't vote, and in many cases will never be able to vote.

Other resources:

Just Detention International

The Engaged Zen Foundation

===

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

Posted on April 29, 2012, Printed on May 6, 2012

http://www.alternet.org/story/155199/private_prison_corporations_are_modern_day_slave_traders

The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.

The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale. The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader. Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line. Dangers to profitability include “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." The corporation spells it out: “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." At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

But, there is something even more horrifying than the moral turpitude of the prison capitalists. If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them. Many of the same politicians that created the system of mass Black incarceration over the past 40 years, would gladly hand over to private parties all responsibility for the human rights of inmates. The question of inmates' rights is hardly raised in the debate over prison privatization. This is a dialogue steeped in slavery and racial oppression. Just as the old slave markets were abolished, so must the Black American Gulag be dismantled – with no compensation to those who traffic in human beings.

Read more of Glen Ford's work at Black Agenda Report.

---

ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Stand Your Ground, Voter ID, Prison Privatization, AZ's SB 1070

by Brendan Fischer — April 17, 2012 - 3:38pm

Topics: Corporations

Projects: ALEC Exposed, Wisconsin Protests

Under growing public pressure and the departure of multiple corporate members, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has announced it is disbanding the Task Force that has been responsible for some of the organization's most controversial pieces of legislation. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker introduced several bills approved by that Task Force when he was a legislator in the 1990s and early 2000s.

For at least three decades, the corporations, special interest groups, and legislators on the ALEC Public Safety & Elections Task Force (known as the Criminal Justice Task Force until 2009) have approved model bills that promote for-profit prisons and lengthen prison sentences, criminalize immigrants, expand the "war on drugs," thwart evidence-based pre-trial release programs in favor of for-profit bail-bonding, and many other policies.

In recent weeks, ALEC has been under increasing scrutiny for that Task Force's role in advancing laws that promote voter suppression, and for adopting the so-called Stand Your Ground law, which in Florida had been cited to prevent the prosecution of the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

Corporate Exodus Leads to Disbanding Task Force

As the result of a campaign by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), Color of Change, Common Cause, People for the American Way, CREDO, and others, a stampede of ALEC member corporations have announced they are severing their ties from the organization.

ALEC had been replying to the campaign with a series of increasingly frantic press releases, bemoaning what they called an "intimidation campaign."

As Mark Schmitt of the Roosevelt Institute notes in the New Republic, "[f]ar from 'intimidation,' what the boycott threat did was force the companies to make a more careful, deliberate choice about what kind of political speech it actually wanted to support and put its reputation behind." And companies like McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and others apparently do not want to be associated with policies like those coming out of the Public Safety & Elections Task Force.

ALEC's responses to the campaign also claimed that "ALEC policies promote 'economic vitality.'" But many noted that it was hard to see how policies like Stand Your Ground and voter suppression promoted "economic vitality."

Apparently in response to the corporate exodus, and to the contradictions between ALEC's stated mission and its policies, the organization issued a press release today stating they are "eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force that dealt with non-economic issues" and that they would be "redoubling our efforts on the economic front."

CMD's Executive Director Lisa Graves said:

ALEC's announcement is a partial victory for the power of grassroots citizen action, but for Americans concerned about brand-name corporations underwriting ALEC's extreme agenda to make it more difficult for American citizens to vote and to protect armed vigilantes, ALEC's PR maneuver to try to distance itself from its record of extremism is an empty gesture unless it and the corporations that have bankrolled its operations work to repeal ALEC-backed laws that have advanced the NRA's agenda and that will impede citizens from voting in the coming elections.

Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force

As CMD has reported, the NRA conceived the so-called Stand Your Ground law in Florida, promoted its passage, then brought it to the ALEC in 2005, where the legislators and corporate lobbyists on the Criminal Justice Task Force voted unanimously to adopt it as a "model bill." At the time, Wal-Mart was the Task Force co-chair, and the NRA led the Task Force in subsequent years. Since becoming an ALEC model it has become law in dozens of other states, and the number of homicides classified as "justifiable" has dramatically increased in many states (and jumped 300 percent in Florida). In 2009, members of the same Task Force approved the model "Voter ID Act", versions of which were introduced in a majority of states in 2011.

While these bills have attracted the most attention in recent weeks, the Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force has been advancing a variety of other controversial policies since the late 1980s.

Members of the Task Force have included for-profit prison providers like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which has also served as the co-chair. The ALEC Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force has created model bills that lengthen sentences, which have dramatically increased incarceration rates, and bills that privatize prisons, putting more of those inmates under the control of for-profit corporations, as well as many other policies.

Walker's Ties to ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force

Scott Walker was a proud ALEC member when he was in the state legislature, and introduced several ALEC bills approved by the Criminal Justice Task Force. Since becoming governor, he has continued to push these ALEC-supported "criminal justice" efforts.

In 1997, then-Representative Walker introduced (and the legislature passed) the ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force - approved "Truth in Sentencing" act, which requires inmates to serve their full sentence without options for parole or supervised release. The law takes away incentives for prisoners to reduce prison time through good behavior and participation in counseling, and eliminates the ability for judges and parole boards to decide that the financial and social costs of keeping a particular person incarcerated no longer furthers public safety goals.

The state estimated that the first 21 months after the law took effect would cost taxpayers an extra $41 million, as 990 inmates would have to be incarcerated for an additional 18,384 months. Wisconsin's prison population increased 14 percent in the seven years after the law took effect, with no correlative public safety benefit or additional decline in crime rates. The annual budget for the state prison system jumped from $700 million in 1999 to $1.2 billion in 2009, becoming the third-largest expenditure in the 2009-2011 state budget.

During this period of growing prison populations, then-Representative Scott Walker introduced several bills between 1997 and 1999 that would allow private prisons in Wisconsin, including one to privatize state prison operations (see the ALEC bill here), and another allowing private corrections companies to open prisons in Wisconsin to house inmates from other states (see the ALEC bill here). Walker noted in 1998 that CCA wanted to expand into Wisconsin. While those bills did not pass, some inmates were contracted-out to private prisons in other states, and CCA has registered lobbyists in the state ever since.

"Clearly ALEC had proposed model legislation," Walker told American Radio Works in 2002 (although there was no reference to ALEC when the legislature was considering the bill). "And probably more important than just the model legislation, [ALEC] had actually put together reports and such that showed the benefits of Truth-in-Sentencing and showed the successes in other states. And those sorts of statistics were very helpful to us when we pushed it through, when we passed the final legislation," Walker said.

Those statistics, though, were critiqued by criminologists as unreliable and intended to persuade rather than educate: Walker said that he and fellow ALEC members relied on an ALEC report crediting Virginia's Truth-in-Sentencing law with a five-year drop in crime, but crime dropped in ALL states in the 1990s, regardless of whether a state passed a tough-on-crime law like Truth-in-Sentencing.

(See this graphic from American Radio Works explaining the CCA-ALEC-Wisconsin sentencing law connection).

The Wisconsin state legislature apparently recognized the folly of Truth in Sentencing and rolled-back aspects of the law between 2001 and 2009. When Scott Walker became governor, he reversed this progress and pushed for legislation fully restoring the ALEC Truth in Sentencing, despite the costs to taxpayers and despite claiming Wisconsin was "broke." In early July, Governor Walker's office released a statement supporting expanded use of prison labor, another idea promoted in ALEC bills approved by the ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force.

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America’s Gulag: The Money (in Politics) Behind Prison Privatization

Nick Penniman 2.15.2012

Republic Report’s Suzanne Merkelson contributed writing and research to this article.

The Huffington Post published an excellent piece yesterday by reporter Chris Kirkham describing how the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) wants to buy up state prisons, all under the guise of helping state governments deal with their budget shortfalls.

Called the Corrections Investment Initiative (sounds so positive, right?), it’s a sickening display of exploitive behavior – perhaps best underscored by the fact that the CCA stipulates in its “investment” overture that, as part of the deal, the states need to keep the prisons packed. Their language for it: “An assurance by the agency partner [the state] that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90 percent occupancy rate over the term of the contract.��

It reminded me of a recent article in the New Yorker by the game-changing journalist Adam Gopnik:

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850… Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

Yet the one major element that is missing from both Gopnik’s and Kirkham’s coverage of private prisons is the very element that is at the core of the prison industry’s power (and so much of our country’s dysfunction) – money’s domination of politics.

Private prisons are a booming business. Over the past ten years, the two largest prison companies (CCA and GEO Group) saw their annual revenue double. The best way to drive up revenue, of course is to keep incarceration rates climbing. From CCA’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission:

“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,” the company’s most recent annual filing noted. “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.”

The private prison companies that comprise this new American Gulag thus have a clear economic incentive to maintain the status quo. So how do they keep the demand for their services rising?

Click more to continue reading

http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor ALEC

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After Taking Nearly $100K From Private Prison Industry, Rick Perry Pushed Prison Health Privatization

By Ian Millhiser on Sep 1, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Last year, when Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) ran for re-election, the private prisons industry gave Perry tens of thousands of dollars in campaign donations. Perhaps that explains why he suddenly developed a passionate desire to privatize Texas’ state prison health system after his campaign was over:

[Corrections Corporation of America lobbyist Michael] Toomey, who had not contributed directly to any of the Governor’s previous gubernatorial campaigns, opened up his wallet for two separate $10,000 donations to Perry two months before Election Day in 2010. Thomas Beasley, the founder of CCA, has given $17,000 to Perry’s campaigns over the last decade. Another private prison firm, the GEO Group, poured $15,000 into Perry’s 2010 reelection effort in 2010 through its eponymous political action committee. Luis Gonzalez, a GEO Group lobbyist, meanwhile, gave $50,000 to Perry’s reelection bid.

Perry first floated the health care privatization proposal in his 2011 budget, which noted: “The Governor��s budget recommends canceling necessary contracts early to explore private sector delivery options, or instructing the state-supported institution to provide correctional care according to the constitutional minimum level.” Mike Ward of the Austin American-Statesman reported that Perry adviser Mike Morrissey held a closed-door meeting in March to discuss the privatization proposal with potential vendors—but not, pointedly, the state university-operated facilities that currently run things.

Perry��s privatization plan eventually died in Texas’ overwhelmingly Republican state legislature because, in the words of Republican State Rep. Jerry Madden “[t]here was no evidence that it could be done cheaper.”

Despite this fact, Perry is just one of several right-wing state governors with cozy ties to the prisons-for-profit industry.

Two of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s (R) most senior aides are current or former lobbyists for private prisons, and this industry stands to earn a windfall off the anti-immigrant SB 1070 law that Brewer recently signed.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) turned over $600 million in corrections funding to the private prison industry after one private prisons company doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Scott and the Florida GOP.

And Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) plans to sell five of its prisons to a private company. Meanwhile, the private prisons industry has spent millions to lobby state lawmakers to make criminal laws harsher in order to drive up their profits.

Yet while private prisons are having no trouble getting the attention of GOP lawmakers, they aren’t actually very good at running correctional facilities. A study of Arizona’s prison system found that private prisons cost more than their government-run counterparts, despite the fact that they typically steer clear of the costliest inmates.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/09/01/309831/rick-perry-pay-to-play-private-prisons/

cf UC talk c8 fellow

http://morallowground.com/2011/04/18/u-s-incarceration-rate-5-4-times-o-e-c-d-average-social-spending-9th-from-last/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison-industrial_complex

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex

The term Prison-industrial Complex refers to the privatization of correctional facilities. Prisons are both hugely expensive and at the same time very profitable, and as with military spending, the cost is public cost and the profits are private profits.

Writing for The Atlantic in December 1998, Eric Schlosser said that "The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass tough-on-crime legislation -- combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws -- has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties."^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-0)

...

Prisons and tobacco

Tobacco companies sell cigarettes to prisons and prison stores (referred to as the "Institution market" or the "prisoner base"), and sometimes have contracts for these sales.^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-1) Apparently prisoners have successfully rebelled to control the types of brands they are offered.^{[3]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-2) In 1978 in Florida, prisons actually manufactured and packaged cigarettes, which were handed out free to inmates.^{[4]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-3) A similar situation was exposed in 1990 when in The lllinois Correctional Department was investigated for possible violation of federal tax laws by selling prisoner-made cigarettes without collecting excise tax. Prisoners at the Menard State Prison in downstate Chester were making brands called "Southern Lights" and "Pyramid," which sold for 35 cents a pack. A prison representative said the program was to designed to teach inmates good work habits they could use after their release. Another explanation was that the effort was designed to flood the prison with cheap cigarettes to undermine the value of black market cigarettes inside the prison system. ^{[5]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-4)

In 1992, Lorillard Tobacco Company considered advertising cigarettes in a new magazine called "Prison Life." ^{[6]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-5) In 1995, Philip Morris had a plan to incent prison stores to carry its "Alpine" brand by offering a "high-value incentive" gift, like weight lifting equipment, after 6 months of sales.^{[7]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-6) For marketing purposes, tobacco companies estimate the incidence of smoking in prisons is double that in the general population, with an estimate around 50%.^{[8]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-7)^{[9]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-8)

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, runs over 60 prisons in about 20 U.S. states plus Washington, DC. CCA has contracts with federal, state, and local governments to run the prisons. The company owns most of the facilities and provides rehabilitation services for inmates. Begun in 1983, it is the largest prison corporation in the U.S. Only the federal government and three states have larger prison systems. The company trades on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol CXW. In 2006, revenue was $1.3 billion with profits of $105 million. ^{[1]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corrections_Corporation_of_America#cite_note-0) ^{[2]^}(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corrections_Corporation_of_America#cite_note-1)

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"Prison-industrial complex" (PIC) is a term used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies, analogous to the military industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his famous 1961 farewell address. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, and lobby groups that represent them. Activists have described the prison industrial complex as perpetuating a belief that imprisonment is a quick fix to underlying social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy.

The promotion of prison building as a job creator and the use of inmate labor are also cited as elements of the prison industrial complex. The term often implies a network of actors who are motivated by making profit rather than solely by punishing or rehabilitating criminals or reducing crime rates. Proponents of this view believe that the desire for monetary gain has led to the growth of the prison industry and the number of incarcerated individuals. These views are often shared by people who fear or condemn excessive use of power by government, particularly when related to law enforcement and military affairs.

USA incarceration timeline.

Contents[hide]

[edit] History

“The Prison Industrial Complex" is the title of a recorded 1997 speech by social activist Angela Davis, later released as an audio CD and serving as a basis for her book of that name. Davis also co-founded the prison abolition group, Critical Resistance, which held its first conference in 1998. She wrote an article entitled “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex,” published in the Fall 1998 issue of ColorLines. “Homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy are only a few of the problems that disappear from public view when the human beings contending with them are relegated to cages,” Davis says. “Taking into account the structural similarities of business-government linkages in the realms of military production and public punishment, the expanding penal system can now be characterized as a ‘prison industrial complex.’ “^{[1]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-0)

��

A few months later, Eric Schlosser wrote an article published in Atlantic Monthly in December 1998 stating that "The 'prison-industrial complex' (PIC) is not only a set of interest groups and institutions; it is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of safety and public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass tough-on-crime legislation — combined with their unwillingness to disclose the external and social costs of these laws — has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties."^{[2]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison-industrial_complex#cite_note-1) Though using the same title and working from many of the same themes, Schlosser did not cite Davis�� work in his Atlantic Monthly article. Compare: “Colored bodies constitute the main human raw material in this vast experiment to disappear the major social problems of our time.” – Davis. “The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a wide assortment of violent sociopaths.” – Schlosser.

Another leftist writer of the era who covered the expanding prison population and attacked “the prison industrial complex” was Christian Parenti, who later disavowed the term before the publication of his book, Lockdown America (2000). “How, then, should the left critique the prison buildup?” asked The Nation in 1999. “Not, Parenti stresses, by making slippery usage of concepts like the ‘prison-industrial complex.’ Simply put, the scale of spending on prisons, though growing rapidly, will never match the military budget; nor will prisons produce anywhere near the same ‘technological and industrial spin-off.’ “

Public speaker, musician and Green Party activist Jello Biafra talks about the Prison Industrial Complex on several of his spoken word CDs. He charges that it is a form of institutional racism and that most often the black community is the intended target of these prison developments. He compares the modern incarnation of the prison system to "The gulag of the red white and blue" and notes the lack of a prisoners right to free speech in California where former governor Pete Wilson barred prisoners from talking to the press.

Management and Training Corporation, Geo group

Prison Industrial Complex

Overview

The Psychological Effects of Incarceration

Studying the Supermax

Solitary Confinement and Social Deprivation

Social Psychology

Inmates Die in Droves After Governor Rick Scott Outsources Prison Healthcare

Governor Snyder Stands Behind Prison Privatization, Even After Maggots and Murder for Hire

Changing Criminal Justice Laws

Non-Violent Offenders Fill Jails in Prison Nation’s Worst State: Louisiana

5 Industries That Are Mercilessly Robbing the American People

PRISON LABOR

Prison labor in the federal prisons

Prison labor in the states

Footnotes

The Secret Behind New York's Alternative to a Prison Economy? Milk

By Von Diaz / ColorLines

Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There (with Bounty Hunters)

In the past year, at least 49 global corporations have dropped their ALEC membership, apparently recognizing that they don't want their brands publicly associated with an organization that pushes anti-union legislation and discriminatory voting laws.

Support for the American Legislative Exchange Council

ALEC and ABC's Legislative Agenda

Other ALEC Activities

Members

Reporting on ABC

Contact

Articles and resources

Related SourceWatch articles

External resources

External articles

References

Gov. Walker Vetoes Bail Bonds, Attack on Investigative Journalism

ALEC-Supported Bail Bonding Vetoed

Kringle is Now the Official State Pastry

Pushback Against Privatization Across the Country

New Jersey Could Curb Privatization Abuses

Tea Party and Others Raising Voices Against Private Prisons

In Fresno, "The People's Voice is Being Heard"

New at Reason: Privatization Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

Developments in Criminal Justice and Corrections

Annual Privatization Report 2013 examines criminal justice and corrections trends

Daniel McGowan Released After Lawyers Confirm He Was Jailed For HuffPost Blog

The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor

How Wall Street Profits from the Criminalization of Immigrants and Lobbies for More To Be Locked Up

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

ALEC Disbands Task Force Responsible for Stand Your Ground, Voter ID, Prison Privatization, AZ's SB 1070

Corporate Exodus Leads to Disbanding Task Force

Criminal Justice / Public Safety & Elections Task Force

Walker's Ties to ALEC Criminal Justice Task Force

America’s Gulag: The Money (in Politics) Behind Prison Privatization

After Taking Nearly $100K From Private Prison Industry, Rick Perry Pushed Prison Health Privatization

Prisons and tobacco

[edit] History

Attachments