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@ that entire story. This is Glen Beck level paranoia.
All you jackaninnies that support this bill can't thank popular support for the genesis of this bill. You can thank corporate interests for it though.
When large businesses are allowed to set public policy, you have to be VERY skeptical as to whether such policies are actually in the public good or not.
Generally what is good for businesses has a lot of positive effects in terms of overall standards of living, but in this case, I have to wonder. I think the push by the right over the last 20 years to privatize functions of government has led to a LOT of corruption, and private prisons have consistantly proven to be very corrosive to democracy and public good, IMO.--RG
Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law
by Laura Sullivan
Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.
Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.
"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."
But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?
"They talked like they didn't have any doubt they could fill it," Nichols said.
That's because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona's immigration law.
Behind-The-Scenes Effort To Draft, Pass The Law
The law is being challenged in the courts. But if it's upheld, it requires police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally.
When it was passed in April, it ignited a fire storm. Protesters chanted about racial profiling. Businesses threatened to boycott the state.
Supporters were equally passionate, calling it a bold positive step to curb illegal immigration.
But while the debate raged, few people were aware of how the law came about.
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying do ents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.
Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce says the bill was his idea. He says it's not about prisons. It's about what's best for the country.
"Enough is enough," Pearce said in his office, sitting under a banner reading "Let Freedom Reign." "People need to focus on the cost of not enforcing our laws and securing our border. It is the Trojan horse destroying our country and a republic cannot survive as a lawless nation."
But instead of taking his idea to the Arizona statehouse floor, Pearce first took it to a hotel conference room.
It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.
It's a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.
It was there that Pearce's idea took shape.
"I did a presentation," Pearce said. "I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, 'Yeah.'"
Drafting The Bill
The 50 or so people in the room included officials of the Corrections Corporation of America, according to two sources who were there.
Pearce and the Corrections Corporation of America have been coming to these meetings for years. Both have seats on one of several of ALEC's boards.
And this bill was an important one for the company. According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in "a significant portion of our revenues" from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.
In the conference room, the group decided they would turn the immigration idea into a model bill. They discussed and debated language. Then, they voted on it.
"There were no 'no' votes," Pearce said. "I never had one person speak up in objection to this model legislation."
Four months later, that model legislation became, almost word for word, Arizona's immigration law.
They even named it. They called it the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act."
"ALEC is the conservative, free-market orientated, limited-government group," said Michael Hough, who was staff director of the meeting.
Hough works for ALEC, but he's also running for state delegate in Maryland, and if elected says he plans to support a similar bill to Arizona's law.
Asked if the private companies usually get to write model bills for the legislators, Hough said, "Yeah, that's the way it's set up. It's a public-private partnership. We believe both sides, businesses and lawmakers should be at the same table, together."
Nothing about this is illegal. Pearce's immigration plan became a prospective bill and Pearce took it home to Arizona.
Campaign Donations
Pearce said he is not concerned that it could appear private prison companies have an opportunity to lobby for legislation at the ALEC meetings.
"I don't go there to meet with them," he said. "I go there to meet with other legislators."
Pearce may go there to meet with other legislators, but 200 private companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to meet with legislators like him.
As soon as Pearce's bill hit the Arizona statehouse floor in January, there were signs of ALEC's influence. Thirty-six co-sponsors jumped on, a number almost unheard of in the capitol. According to records obtained by NPR, two-thirds of them either went to that December meeting or are ALEC members.
That same week, the Corrections Corporation of America hired a powerful new lobbyist to work the capitol.
The prison company declined requests for an interview. In a statement, a spokesman said the Corrections Corporation of America, "unequivocally has not at any time lobbied — nor have we had any outside consultants lobby – on immigration law."
At the state Capitol, campaign donations started to appear.
Thirty of the 36 co-sponsors received donations over the next six months, from prison lobbyists or prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation and The Geo Group.
By April, the bill was on Gov. Jan Brewer's desk.
Brewer has her own connections to private prison companies. State lobbying records show two of her top advisers — her spokesman Paul Senseman and her campaign manager Chuck Coughlin — are former lobbyists for private prison companies. Brewer signed the bill — with the name of the legislation Pearce, the Corrections Corporation of America and the others in the Hyatt conference room came up with — in four days.
Brewer and her spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
In May, The Geo Group had a conference call with investors. When asked about the bill, company executives made light of it, asking, "Did they have some legislation on immigration?"
After company officials laughed, the company's president, Wayne Calabrese, cut in.
"This is Wayne," he said. "I can only believe the opportunities at the federal level are going to continue apace as a result of what's happening. Those people coming across the border and getting caught are going to have to be detained and that for me, at least I think, there's going to be enhanced opportunities for what we do."
Opportunities that prison companies helped create.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=130833741
Lobbies from time to time write laws for legislators. Doesn't seem paranoid in the least to me. The prison lobby was in the room, only at the time, it wasn't lobbying for anything. Just working on a model bill with legislators.
It's not paranoia.
It's facts. Always Follow The Money.
PIC corps are calling the shots on AZ immigration policies to increase their prison population and suck wealth out of the taxpayers. War on Illegal Immigrants, like War on Drugs and War on Terror, is a business, and businesses buy politicians to pass regulations, rules, polices to enrich their businesses.
Only tea bagger bubbas like DarrinS and JackS believe this crap is about the law or principles or the Cons ution.
Funny, I think that about a lot of your threads as well. I guess we are even.
To be clear:
I do NOT think that the legislators were outright bribed to vote the way they did.
I do think that the money enabled it, and I don't think the bill would really have come to pass without the industry funding of the meetings.
I think it is a way for business interests to get together with legislators, and pick things out of the idea pot that, for overall good or ill, suit their interests. Then you get the "if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" bull going on.
Yes or no Darrin, is business money like this corrosive to good government?
Its not paranoia. Why does the United States incarcerate so many people? The simple answer is because prisoners are now a commodity and those who benefit from that commodity are seeking ways to expand their resource. Its simply the way capitalism is expected to work and it does so in our country.
As much as people think about pharmaceuticals when it comes to fighting for strong drug legislation I'd be willing to bet the prison lobby fights harder for "strong" drug laws.
The simple reason the US incarcerates so many people is because keeping repeat criminals locked up is the next best option after killing them.
In a nation with 40 million or so black people, your choices are either lots of prisons or lots of crime.
I'm just glad abortion is legal or else we'd have another 40 million niglets running around to rob, stab, and rape.
lame trolling attempt.
try harder
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
Yeah, the Arizona law is all about creating a prison labor camp for illegal women and children.
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