How lawmakers and lobbyists keep a lock on the private prison business

The three largest private prison companies in the US
spent $45m on lobbying over the last decade.
Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

Private prison corporations say they don't lobby on custodial policy. They seem to find legislators with views aligne

• 
• • Sadhbh Walshe
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 27 September 2012 09.55 EDT 

America's three largest private prison companies ... spent in the region of $45m over the past 10 years in lobbying state and federal governments. During the same period, these companies saw their profits soar as they scored more government contracts. [Also] during the same period, various pieces of legislation got passed ensuring that immigrant detention, in particular, would remain a lucrative growth market.

Thanks to mandatory sentencing laws and the "war on drugs", the prison population has exploded over the past 30 years – to the point where it has become an untenable burden on state budgets. The private prison business [is] reliant on state and federal governments to provide them with their customer base: that is, bodies to fill their cells.

The companies maintain that their lobbying efforts have nothing to do with this expansion and insist that it is their policy to "expressly prohibit their lobbyists from working to pass or oppose immigration legislation", such as the Arizona immigration bill SB1070, which provides for the mandatory detention of immigrants who cannot produce papers on request. [Then] where are the private prison firms spending those millions of lobbying dollars?

A report compiled by the Justice Policy Institute issued in 2011 and using data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics found that between 2003 and 2010, the [Corrections Corporation of America] contributed a total of $1,552,350 to state election campaigns.

Approximately half was to candidates, more than a third was to party committees and around one tenth was spent on ballot measures. Note: For deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources on corruption in the prison/industrial complex, click here.

American Nazi Party registers first Washington lobbyist

The American Nazi Party offers downloads
of Hitler's Mein Kampf

The American Nazi Party has registered its first lobbyist in Washington DC.

John Bowles, 55, told US media he wanted to address political rights and ballot access and he expected congressmen would accept meetings.
Lobbying was something the party would "try out for the first time and see if it flies," Mr Bowles told ABC News. He registered as a lobbyist this week.
Lobbying is a common practice in US politics and lobby groups are required to disclose their interests in detail.

Mr Bowles' Capitol Hill registration also listed his lobbying interests as agriculture, clean air and water, civil rights, the constitution, healthcare, immigration, manufacturing, and retirement.

Mr Bowles said he would not be paid for his work on Capitol Hill and would take a "careful and objective" approach.

"I'm not going to go in and shove a swastika in their face," he said.    READ MORE

Wall Street Donated $41 Million to Supercommittee Members

Monday 26 September 2011
by: Mike Ludwig, Truthout | Report

Wall Street has given $41 million in campaign contributions to the members of the Congressional "supercommittee"charged with finding $1.5 trillion worth of deficit reduction measures, according to a report released today by two watchdog groups. The finance, insurance and real estate sector spent $3.7 billion on lobbying and campaign contributions from 1999 to 2008, according to the report,and the 12 members of the bipartisan Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction have all reaped the benefits.
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Will Ties to Pentagon Contractors Push 'Supercommittee' Democrats to Cut Entitlements?

Photo Credit: Department of Defense

AlterNet teams up with Salon and Brave New Foundation to document how Dems on the Congressional "supercommittee" get far more military campaign money and contracts than the GOP.

September 21, 2011

Arizona’s Republican Senator Jon Kyl wasted little time. A member of the bipartisan Congressional “supercommittee” charged with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, he did his best to forestall even discussion of cuts to the Pentagon’s budget. “When we had our first meeting the chairman asked, ‘Well what do we think about defense spending?’ and I said, ‘I’m off of the committee if we’re gonna talk about further defense spending,’” he told the audience at a recent forum sponsored by several conservative think tanks.

The Senate Minority Whip may be the most outspoken member of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction when it comes to the military budget, but the Democrats currently considering whether to cut the deficit via reductions in defense spending or programs like Medicare and Medicaid have received far more money from Pentagon contractors than Kyl or any of their Republican colleagues on the panel, according to an investigation by AlterNet, with assistance from the Brave New Foundation and Salon.com.

Since 2007, Democrats on the supercommittee have received more than $1 million in defense industry donations, while contributions to the Republicans added up to only $321,000. Panel co-chair Senator Patty Murray, for example, has received more defense industry dollars over that period than the combined total of the top four Republican recipients on the super committee. Even so, her haul from the Pentagon’s weapons-makers isn’t the largest by a panel Democrat, a distinction held by her colleague from South Carolina, John Clyburn. An analysis of official government data paints a disturbing picture of big money, cozy relationships and potential influence that, alongside a concerted lobbying effort by the Pentagon and its powerful defense contractors, makes substantial reductions to the Department of Defense’s budget improbable and steeper cuts to entitlement programs, like Medicare and Medicaid, more likely.
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