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A comment on Legalize It All. Parent comment

Re:Legalize It All by SwellJoe on Monday March 21, 2016 @03:57PM (#11331342)
Look at how much money CCA spends on lobbying and supporting candidates that are friendly to their business. It is vastly larger per dollar of revenue than Apple (or Walmart). So much so, that it's one of the things people talk about when taking about whether Hillary Clinton (for example) is influenced by the money coming from the prison industrial complex. Nobody is accusing Hillary of being bought by Apple. Though there are concerns about Walmart, due to Hillary's long history with that company, but not because of exorbitant expenditures on lobbying and legalized bribery.

One (of many) articles about how CCA spends money to get the results that suit its bottom line. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/06/23/251363/cca-geogr...

It's downright evil, frankly.

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Re:Legalize It All by hjhgjtyhgdfi on Monday March 21, 2016 @04:18PM (#11331550)
Teachers unions spent $20 million on the 2012 election alone, no doubt funding candidates who were friendly to their pensions. I can go down the line and list off several more trade unions and their political spending.

http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=l1300

Why is there seemingly not a peep about this from those who oppose the private prison complex?

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Re:Legalize It All by SwellJoe on Monday March 21, 2016 @04:59PM (#11331980)
I'm curious: Do you believe teachers asking for more funding is ethically comparable to prisons demanding more prisoners?
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Re:Legalize It All by stvswn on Monday March 21, 2016 @05:21PM (#11332181)
I think it hinges on whether the private prison industry is lobbying for more funding per prisoner or tougher laws that result in more prisoners (or longer sentences). If they argue for safer prisons, better rehabilitation programs, more security for guards -- the public should be skeptical but open. If they want to just lock more people up and then bill the government -- that would be somehow like teachers' unions lobbying for less birth control to influence the birth rate and therefore create more demand for teaching jobs. It seems perverse.

In other words, we need prisons just like we need schools, even if people like schools more we shouldn't vilify corrections officers just because they work in an industry we don't care to interact with. It's all about their conduct, which has been terrible. Teachers unions are also self-serving, but they at least pretend to have the child's interest at heart.

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Re:Legalize It All by zo1 on Monday March 21, 2016 @07:17PM (#11332991)
Perhaps he's more pointing out the hypocrisy of attaching a scale/range of ethical values to something he determines to be an unethical act entirely, regardless of the ethical value of the reasons behind it.
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Re:Legalize It All by maldusiecle on Monday March 21, 2016 @05:05PM (#11332035)
Most people have more ethical qualms about profiting off of incarceration than about possibly paying too much money to people who educate our children. This is not surprising.
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Re:Legalize It All by DanBC on Monday March 21, 2016 @04:26PM (#11331639)
Be fair: teachers unions often get talked in very negative terms on HN.
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