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Burying the Money
GEO also set up an in-state PAC in Florida for this last election cycle (you know, the one in which they donated $800,000+ to Florida politicians, who then decided to privatize the prisons in 18 effing counties). The in-state PAC is not allowed to donate as much money as a federal PAC, but that didn’t stop the GEO Group from using it to funnel campaign contributions only permissible for federal PACs to make. The company claims it didn’t know there was a difference. Bullshit.
But what bothers me most of all is that the Florida GEOPAC, ostensibly used to spread influence to Floridian politicians, donated to candidates all across the country. They donated to people in places like Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. All places which, coincidentally enough, have a lot of private prisons.
People worried last election cycle about foreign investors donating to American politicians and corrupting them. I fear we have an even more treacherous movement afoot here in the US, where prison companies are now using such unscrupulous tactics to try to hide the money they use to influence politicians into trying to lock us all up.
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This is an issue that needs much more attention. Apparently there are more people locked up in the United States than in any other country. Why is that?
simply put, because there’s money to be made in locking people up. We have some of the toughest and longest criminal sentences on the planet. Sentences that were developed by, and passed at the behest of, private prison companies and the politicians and stakeholders that invest in them.
Case in point, look at our immigration detention system, which has grown exponentially since 9/11 (even though Mexicans didn’t attack us). ICE’s detained population has exploded as private prison companies lobbied the federal government to build more prisons and helped pass laws to crack down on immigrants.
There is also evidence to support the notion that our prison system, and really the whole CJS, is just a new version of Jim Crow, or a way to exert social control over brown people. in many jurisdictions, african-americans comprise nearly 50% of the prison population, while they only represent 13% of the general population. Prisons are an effective means of silencing and disempowering and entire minority population, especially as laws restricting the rights of felons to vote prevent millions of black men and women from ever regaining the ability to fully exercise the democratic process.
I think that is what makes me the most crazed about this. A function of the state as important as the depriving of liberty of some of its citizens should never, ever, have a profit motive attached. Bad incentives, bad policy.
I couldn’t possibly agree more, Bill. Every effort to privatize prisons has failed in all aspects; they don’t save money, they aren’t more efficient than the government, and private prisons are more prone to violence, assaults, escapes, and human rights abuses that government-run ones.
But they keep peddling their money around, and continue to get contracts despite 30 years of failing to live up to promises. As I linked to in the article, the GEO Group alone spent more than $800,000 just in Florida, in the last election cycle. That’s a tremendous amount of money for any one company to spend in one election cycle, especially one that has effectively no counter-lobby. There’s no industry or business lobbying to lock up less people, in contrast to say oil companies, whose lobbying efforts are in constant competition with those of environmental groups. So the money that the private prison industry spends becomes that much more effective.
There’s really no way to know if there are more people locked up in the US than in any other country. There are countries that no one really knows how many people they have locked up.
in terms of reported numbers, the US has about 700-800 thousand more people in prison than China in real numbers. We lead the world in reported rate and real numbers of incarceration. I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think China’s hiding 800,000 prisoners. A few hundred, maybe thousand. But not nearly a million people. We’ve got more than anyone else.
you are a contrarian apparently. Do you find that an appropriate percentage of Americans are locked up? What’s your stance on prisons for profit? What’s your take on that judge who was found to be selling children into private prisons for a price? What’s your point anyway?
Private prisons do not have Union labor either…
The same reason we went to for profit hospitals all over the country under H W Bush
and research shows the more hospitals you have the higher the number of hospital bed days you have per person in that area – all the while the folks in that area do not have better health care results than those in areas with fewer hospital beds (hospitals) per person.
Got to love the capitalist system maximizing our living standard.
But are they on the stock market? Hell looks like good deal to me since they have cash to buy off demodogs and repugs. What sick country that does this to it’s own people. That’s not counting who nows how many in private cia prison round the world.
yes, the two biggest companies, CCA and the GEO Group, are both publicly traded. LCS Correctional Services and MTC (the next two biggest, which combined make up no more than like 20% of the market) are not.
As to the type of country, that would be a country overrun by the desire and drive for ever-expanding wealth, a country in which political leaders and influential people idolize the likes of Ayn Rand, and allow for corporations to run roughshod over its laws and values as long as they make money in the process.
Oh yeah, and Palli – good point. They don’t hire union. in fact, CCA is pretty involved with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which is the group behind all the anti-union movements sweeping state legislatures.
what’s that they always love to say, “a rising tide lifts all boats”? Yeah, that’s all well and good until people start drowning