Governor Bill Richardson (D-NM) has already
received more contributions from a private prison company than
any other politician campaigning for state office in the United
States.
While New Mexico’s landscape may make the state
the Land of Enchantment, its rapidly growing rates of incarceration
have been utterly disenchanting. What’s worse, New Mexico is at
the top of the nation’s list for privatizing prisons; nearly one-half
of the state’s prisons and jails are run by corporations.
Supposedly, states turn to private companies to
cope better with chronic overcrowding and for low-cost management.
However, a closer look suggests a different rationale. A recent
report from the Montana-based Institute on Money in State Politics
reveals that during the 2002 and 2004 election cycles, private
prison companies, directors, executives and lobbyists gave $3.3
million to candidates and state political parties across 44 states.
According to Edwin Bender, executive director of
the Institute on Money in State Politics, private prison companies
strongly favor giving to states with the toughest sentencing laws—in
essence, the ones that are more likely to come up with the bodies
to fill prison beds. Those states, adds Bender, are also the ones
most likely to have passed “three-strikes” laws. Those laws, first
passed by Washington state voters in 1993 and then California
voters in 1994, quickly swept the nation. They were largely based
on “cookie-cutter legislation” pushed by the American Legislative
Exchange Council (ALEC), some of whose members come from the ranks
of private prison companies.
Florida leads the pack in terms of private prison
dollars, with its candidates and political parties receiving almost
20 percent of their total contributions from private prison companies
and their affiliates. Florida already has five privately owned
and operated prisons, with a sixth on the way. It’s also privatized
the bulk of its juvenile detention system. Texas and New Jersey
are close behind.
But in Florida, some of the influence peddling finally
seems to be backfiring. Florida State Corrections Secretary James
McDonough
alarmed private prison companies with a comment during an Aug.
2 morning call-in radio show. “I actually think the state is better
at running the prisons,” McDonough told an interviewer. His comments
followed an internal audit last year by the state’s Department
of Management Services, which demonstrated that Florida overpaid
private prison operators by $1.3 million.
Things may no longer be quite as sunny as they once
were in Florida for the likes of Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA) and the former Wackenhut, now known
as the GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla. But with a little bit of
spiel-tinkering—and a shift of attention to other states—the prison
privatizers are likely to keep going.
The key shift, Bender explains, is that “the prison
industry has gone from a we-can-save-you-money pitch to an economic-development
model pitch.”
In other words, says Bender, “you need [their] prisons
for jobs.”
If political donations are any measure, economically
challenged and poverty-stricken states like New Mexico are a great
target. In this campaign cycle, Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson
has already received more contributions from a private prison
company than any other politician campaigning for state office
in the United States. The Institute of Money in State Politics,
which traced the donations, reported that GEO has contributed
$42,750 to Richardson since 2005—and another $8,000 to his running
mate, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish.
Another $30,000 went from GEO to the Richardson-headed
Democratic Governors Association this past March. Richardson’s
PAC, Moving America Forward, was another prominent recipient of
GEO donations. Now, its former head, prominent state capitol lobbyist
Joe Velasquez, is a registered lobbyist for GEO Care Inc., a healthcare
subsidiary that runs a hospital in New Mexico.
But don’t get the idea that GEO has any particular
love for Democrats: $95,000 from the corporation went to the Republican
Governors Association last year alone. What companies like GEO
do love are the millions of dollars rolling in from lucrative
New Mexico contracts to run the Lea County Correctional Facility
(operating budget: $25 million/year), and the Guadalupe County
Correctional Facility ($13 million/year), among others. CCA also
owns and operates the state’s only women’s facility in Grants
($11 million per year).
To make sure that those dollars keep flowing, GEO
and CCA have perfected the art of the “very tight revolving door,”
says Bender, which involves snapping up former corrections administrators,
PAC lobbyists and state officials to serve as consultants to private
prison companies.
In fact, the current New Mexico Corrections Department
Secretary Joe Williams was once on GEO’s payroll as their warden
of the Lea County Correctional Facility. Earlier this year, Williams
was placed on unpaid administrative leave after accusations surfaced
that he spent state travel and phone funds to pursue a very close
relationship with Ann Casey. Casey is a registered lobbyist in
New Mexico for Wexford Health Sources, which provides health care
for prisoners at Grants, and Aramark, which provides most of the
state’s inmate meals. In her non-lobbying hours, it turns out
that Casey is also an assistant warden at a state prison in Centralia,
Ill.
It appears that even for a prison industry enchanted
by public-private partnership, Williams and Casey may have gone
too far.
Silja J.A. Talvi is a senior editor at In
These Times, an investigative journalist and essayist with
credits in many dozens of newspapers and magazines nationwide,
including The Nation, Salon, Santa Fe Reporter, Utne, and the
Christian Science Monitor. She is at work on a book about women
in prison (Seal Press/Avalon). She can be reached via email at
[email protected].