Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

[Jackpine Radical]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130833741&sc=nl&cc=es-20101031


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 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.

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.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. A friend here in Kansas helped expose this

He's been working on prison reform for decades. And he's been on this crap in AZ for a couple years now. Glad to see his work paying off.

[Lasher]

2. Prison economics drive a lot of law enforcement.

And not just in Arizona.

When are we ever going to learn what a mistake it's been to privatize everything we possibly could?

[Jackpine Radical]

4. And it's not all due to privatization.

All across the country, prison guard unions have lobbied for things like harsher sentencing while opposing decriminalization of drugs, all in order to secure their jobs.

[Overseas]

3. K&R! Another glaring example of the corruption in privatization.

Yet the pro-private-sector propaganda is so strong that we haven't had a wide spread debate about just which public services should never be privatized.

Except a little bit when the fire department privatization hit the news.

It should be a national scandal that Brewer and her friends stand to benefit from more prisoners for profit.