(Leschnyhan/Dreamstime.com)
Tim Murphy at
Mother Jones looks into Rick Perry's promotion of prison privatization in Texas. Private prisons have been a growing industry for a while now, and Texas has participated enthusiastically in that trend under Perry, and the governor has taken aim at state agencies providing oversight of prisons:
Earlier, Perry’s office had floated another proposal that seemed designed to please the private-prison industry. It sought to eliminate the independence of the Texas Commission on Jail Standards and fold it, along with two other public-safety commissions, into a single agency.
[...]
In 2003, Perry signed a line-item veto eliminating the funding for the Texas Criminal Justice Policy Council, a state agency tasked with providing "objective analysis and assessment of state criminal justice programs and initiatives."
More recently, he's advanced a plan to privatize health care within the prisons:
Perry first floated the health care privatization proposal in his 2011 budget, which noted: "The Governor’s budget recommends canceling necessary contracts early to explore private sector delivery options, or instructing the state-supported institution to provide correctional care according to the constitutional minimum level." Mike Ward of the Austin American-Statesman reported that Perry adviser Mike Morrissey held a closed-door meeting in March to discuss the privatization proposal with potential vendors—but not, pointedly, the state-university-operated facilities that currently run things.
At the same time, he's been raking in huge amounts of campaign cash from private prison executives and lobbyists. No doubt coincidentally, Michael Toomey, Perry's former chief of staff, is currently a lobbyist for Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison contractor in the country. Also no doubt coincidentally, Toomey was a lobbyist for Merck at the time Perry tried to require all Texas girls to get an HPV vaccination, manufactured by Merck.
I guess if Perry became president, we'd only have to know who Michael Toomey was working for to know what companies would benefit from new federal regulations or from legislation advanced by the White House.
