Taking a page from Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has made privatizing the state's prison system that much easier.
In addition to allowing previously negotiated union contracts to be voided, Michigan’s new Emergency Manager law gives appointees the authority to privatize police services and jails.
Indeed, voiding labor contracts and outsourcing government services is a key aspect of how they are expected to balance the budgets of financially stressed towns.
“[C]ertain functions of police work, such as jails, can easily be privatized,” said Louis Schimmel, executive administrator for the city of Warren....
Privately run jails and prisons have created controversy around the country as they have become more common. A report from the Sentencing Project says that cost savings from privatization are illusory:
Research to date has concluded that there is little evidence that privatization of prisons results in significant public savings. In a 1996 General Accounting Office (GAO) review of several comparative studies on private versus public prisons, researchers acknowledged, “because the studies reported little difference and/or mixed results in comparing private and public facilities, we could not conclude whether privatization saved money.” A study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) released in 2001 had similar conclusions, stating that “rather than the projected 20-percent savings, the average saving from privatization was only 1 percent”8 and “the promises of 20-percent savings in operational costs have simply not materialized.”
Critics also argue that private jails and prisons have significantly more safety problems, including escape attempts and assaults on guards and other inmates.
It might not result in significant public savings, but it does result in putting more public employees out of work, making it that much easier to break those unions. And in the case of Brewer, it also makes lucrative political sense. And not surprisingly, the same major lobbying organization behind the blueprint for Arizona, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is behind Snyder. What is ALEC?
1. State legislators who pay $50 per year in dues and in exchange get junkets to luxury resorts, free or heavily subsidized vacations for their families, and other fringe benefits including free child-care and medical tests, Broadway shows, and dinners at expensive restaurants. ALEC's membership includes 2,400 state legislators, which is over 30% of all state lawmakers in the country.
2. Over 300 corporate sponsors who pay up to $50,000 per year in dues plus up to $5,000 to sit on industry-specific task forces in their areas of interest such as energy, healthcare, telecommunications and taxes. The task forces write and approve the model legislation that conforms to the business interests of their corporate members. Tax records indicate that corporations collectively pay as much as $6 million a year. The corporate executives and their lobbyists then get substantial face time with the state legislators at ALEC's retreats and other events.
According to its website, the corporate funders currently on ALEC's Private Enterprise board include Koch Industries, Altria, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKlein, Pfizer, Reynolds American Inc. (the parent company of cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds), Energy Future Holdings, Peabody Energy, PhRMA, AT&T, UPS, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., and State Farm Insurance.
Koch brothers, again. You gotta hand it to them. They've managed to get their fingers in just about every pie they could find. Pretty soon they're going to own not just the Congress, but most of the state houses.