I believe they're referring to the private prison industry, which makes a pretty penny off locking up non-violent drug offenders. Their trade organization listed liberalizing drug laws as a potential threat to their bottom line in their last annual report, so we can expect that they will fiercely lobby against anything happening at a federal level.
I feel like this situation is overstated a lot. Something like 8% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons, which could be a problem, but it's not the massive number that is often implied.
People do often overestimate how many prisoners are in privately-run prisons, but at the same time, if the US suddenly had 10% fewer prisoners, those privately-run prisons would likely be the first to go.
As far as lobbying, the other 92% of prisoners are guarded by very powerful public sector unions, whose incentives are the same.
It's absolutely massive when you consider that locking up humans in cages is perhaps not the sort of thing we ought to encourage by making the practice lucrative.
The existence of even a single for-profit prison provides a perverse incentive to put the marginal criminal into a private, profit-generating cage rather than a public, tax-draining, politically-risky rehabilitation or diversion program.
Furthermore, it is an invitation to corruption. Remember the judge that was sending juvenile defendants to a reform camp, often regardless of the merits of their cases, because he was getting kickbacks from the camp?
It's not just the privately run prison complexes, but also suppliers, consultancies, police equipment manufacturers, arms manufacturers, and so. That's the 'industrial' in prison industrial complex.
Something like 8% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons, which could be a problem, but it's not the massive number that is often implied.
Quick, off the top of your head: do you have any idea just how many people are incarcerated in this country, in both absolute and per-capita terms, and how those figures compare to, say, every other country on Earth?
8% of the US prison population is a HELL of a lot of people.
That's true, but 8% of anything in the US is a lot. There's roughly 2.2 million prisoners so maybe 200k of them are held in private prisons. And as someone points out upthread, when you add in all that prison-building, the firms that deliver services tot he corrections market and so on, it adds up to a lot of economic activity.
About 133,000 as of 2013. And two companies (CCA and GEO Group), both of whom are aggressively fighting for tougher laws as a matter of course have about 129,000 bed capacity.
That still means there are millionaires out there lobbying to keep drug laws as is so they can keep filling their prisons. And the other 92% of prisons probably have a ton of people behind bars due to drug laws because of the 8% of prisons that lobby for & profit from them.
As though the 92% isn't attempting to hold onto its massive profit system. There's vastly more money flowing into pockets in the 92% than in the 8%, that's logically obvious.
Jobs, graft, construction, maintenance, slave labor, etc. - huge sums of profit derived from the government prison system, far more than in the corporate system.
As though the 92% of that equation is looking to give up its jobs and tax dollars. Because we just know how much the government likes to give up its spending.
The government makes a lot more money locking people up than the private prison industry does.
It's 11 times larger. That's a lot of tax money to roll around in, and generates a ton of profit in the form of slave labor manufacturing, graft, jobs that politicians use as platforms, labor unions that get kickbacks and get to dole out well paying jobs.
What's the difference, when we're speaking of "profit" when it comes to whether the corporate prison generates a 7% margin, or whether that 7% goes to a union at a government prison? There is no real difference, it's just a matter of whose pocket the cash ends up in.
