I just read this roughly two-week-old NPR story about private prison lobbying for the Arizona immigration law. The idea is this: “NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents 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.”
I take an interest in this, since my 2008 Stanford Law Review article, Privatization and the Law and Economics of Political Advocacy, took a look at the argument that private prison firms will lobby in favor of measures that increase incarceration. I argued there that there was no clear theoretical reason why private prison firms would do this (essentially, they would, under plausible assumptions, prefer to free-ride off of the advocacy expenditures of the larger public-sector actors interested in incarceration, for instance the prison guards’ unions), and very little empirical evidence that they’ve done it. So if this NPR article is right, then this is potentially an important piece of empirical evidence going the other way.
Trouble is, the NPR story is very short and low on details. So if anyone knows more, I’d be happy to know.
First, the story explains how the Arizona legislator who thought up the idea ran it through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative organization that writes model legislation. Various corporations, including private prison firms, are members of ALEC. Private prison firms are also members of ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force, which worked on this legislation. But this is ambiguous evidence of private prison involvement in pro-incarceration issues, since the Criminal Justice Task Force also deals with prison privatization, where we’d fully expect private prison companies to be involved. So I don’t take the reported ALEC activity to be any kind of smoking gun.
(By the way, for what it’s worth, CCA says it “doesn’t participate in or lobby for stricter sentencing”, though that’s vague enough to not rule out participating in a process that increases legal penalties for certain activities. Also, in 2006, a CCA executive told me that CCA hadn’t participated in, voted on, or endorsed any stand on model legislation for sentencing or crime policies within ALEC. Not that we should necessarily take the corporation’s statements at face value; just know that this is what they say.)
Later in the article, it says that some of Governor Brewer’s advisors are former private prison lobbyists. I don’t take this to be a smoking gun for private prison influence either: (1) it’s not surprising that private prison lobbyists would have common ideological ground with Republicans (note, though, that private prison companies give to both Republicans and Democrats), and (2) Republican support for privatization is sufficient to explain most contacts between Republican officials and the private prison industry.
But here’s an interesting set of claims:
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.
If there really was a significant spike in lobbying activity, specifically by private prison companies, right at the time when the immigration bill was being considered, that would be interesting.
Does anyone know where I can find more details on this?
To summarize: Behind every non-tape-recorded contact between a politician and the private prison industry, there may be advocacy not only of privatization but also of greater incarceration. Who knows. I’m just saying is that there’s almost no hard evidence of it. I’d like to find evidence if there is some, but I’ve looked at most of the claimed instances and found them to be mostly innuendo. Put the lack of evidence together with the theoretical model of free-riding (which I discuss at the beginning of my Stanford Law Review article), and it looks likely that there’s no there there.
But, as I’ve said, I’m interested in getting to the bottom of this incident to see if this is really a good piece of evidence on the other side.