The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies \u201cworking to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.\u201d<\/p>\n
The report\u2019s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly.<\/p>\n
Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies \u2014 Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group \u2014 made over $2.9 billion in revenue.<\/p>\n
JPI claims the private industry hasn\u2019t merely responded to the nation\u2019s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.<\/p>\n
According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking.<\/p>\n
The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies \u201cworking to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.\u201d The report\u2019s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8022\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}