ProPublica also has a feature on ALEC –the Koch Brothers funded non-profit that wrote much the state legislation proposed around the country this year. And corporations are profiting from the model legislation being passed.
P
erhaps the most striking example of this process is the involvement of officials from the Corrections Corporation of America, the nation’s largest private prison company, in the creation of Arizona’s immigration law.
As NPR reported last year, officials from Corrections Corporation were in the room when Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce discussed his ideas about immigration at a 2009 ALEC conference.
Reports from Corrections Corporation reviewed by NPR indicated that their executives saw immigrant detention as their next big market, and that the company expected to bring in a “significant portion” of their revenue from Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.
What role the corporate officials played in the ALEC discussion is not known, but the “model legislation” that emerged from that session soon became the bill itself—”almost word for word,” according to NPR. The influence the private prison industry may have had on the law was not widely reported or discussed during the heated nationwide debate over the bill. (An “In These Times” reporter, whose early findings on the ALEC-Arizona connection were consistent with NPR’s later reporting, recently provided a more detailed look at the ALEC scholarships provided to Arizona legislators.)
Portions of the Arizona law are being challenged in federal court and have never been implemented. But, as NPR reported last year, similar bills were later introduced in eight other states.
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