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Highlights
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trap people in prison for lengthy terms, ripping apart communities and exacerbating racial and socioeconomic inequality — while enriching the private firms that manage prisons and their shareholders.
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Since 2022, lawmakers in Tennessee have fought to enact a slate of harsh sentencing laws that are expected to increase the state’s spending on incarceration by tens of millions of dollars annually. The key power brokers behind the legislation are also some of the top recipients of private prison company cash
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the law does have at least one key beneficiary: Tennessee’s private prison contractor, CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the world’s largest prison companies, which will almost certainly see new profits as a direct result of the legislation. The company, which spends millions of dollars a year lobbying both in states and on a federal level, has begun telling its investors that harsh sentencing laws across the country will soon translate to bigger profits from the seventy-plus prisons it runs nationwide.
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Since 2009, the company has spent $3.9 million on lobbying and campaign donations in the state
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Tennessee’s current governor has received the most money from the private prison company of any politician in the nation: $65,400 over the last two election cycles, including donations from company executives, making the company one of his largest donors.
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prison contracts, including in Tennessee, are paid on a “per inmate, per day” basis, meaning that these fluctuations in prison populations directly impact the company’s bottom line.
✏️ I feel this is an issue of bad regulation. When you monitor a private company doing a public good based on something like this, you’re rewarding the socially bad thing.. More prisoners. 👓 Regulations 🔗 View Highlight