6 ms·

>...The second quote which gives various numbers across multiple different years, including 1994 lobbing showing relatively small amounts in most years. I neve

by opo 6y ago

>...The second quote which gives various numbers across multiple different years, including 1994 lobbing showing relatively small amounts in most years. I never implied this was a total breakdown of their lobbying money. They spend an estimated 8 million a year on lobbying. As the wikipedia article says: >...Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_Officers_Association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_... >...You further misunderstood the first link the bar chart below lists 4.3 million in 2019 and 2.8 million in 2016. But, that’s a subset of total spending which very focused on their bottom line. Sorry, I was in a hurry and didn't notice they had a chart for Lobbying Totals, 1998-2019, that gives a better indication than just 2016. That shows a little over $4 million total political lobbying nationally by the private prison industry. That compares to $8 million alone in CA by the prison guard union. You originally said: >...They often brought up to deflect discussion, but simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale. This one union in one state spends more on lobbying than the private prison industry. And as the article says: >...“The formula is simple: more prisoners lead to more prisons; more prisons require more guards; more guards means more dues-paying members and fund-raising capability; and fund-raising, of course, translates into political influence.” The political contributions of the CA prison guard union are obviously not being done to lower the number of prison guard positions. It wasn't the private prison lobby that pushed through all that bad policy in CA. In reality, private prisons are often brought up to deflect discussion. The reality is private prisons house a small percentage of prisoners and are a tiny part of the prison industrial complex. CA getting rid of private prisons isn't going to help reform a broken prison system. >...Nationwide union spending has a vastly lower average. You haven't given any evidence that is true. Even if true, just because it costs less to influence policy in other states, doesn't mean they aren't trying to do it.

Retric 6y ago
> not being done to lower the number of prison guard positions. True, but number of guards and their salaries are surprisingly independent of the number of prisoners. https://www.scstatehouse.gov/CommitteeInfo/HouseLegislativeOversightCommittee/AgencyWebpages/Corrections/Inmate%20to%20Officer%20ratios.pdf https://www.scstatehouse.gov/CommitteeInfo/HouseLegislativeO... Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners. Private prisons on the other hand directly profit on a per inmate basis. As they need to look cost competitive with public prisons they thus need to lobby for more prisoners if they want increased profits. That’s either from more private prisons or more prisoners at existing prisons. Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE. https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/coronavirus/canaan-federal-prison-union-concerned-about-shortage-of-protective-gear-nyc-inmate-transfers-1.2611960 https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/coronavirus/canaan-federal-... So what I am saying is their don’t focus on increasing the prison population as a primary motivation, thus you need to look at the issues their spending money on. Ex: https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-guard-union-calls-curtailment-solitary-confinement-death-row/ https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-guard-union-calls... > You haven’t given any evidence that this is true CA: As of 2017, the union had 39,750 members Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum: https://mnlabor.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/prison-guards-vote-to-leave-wisconsin-state-employees-union/ https://mnlabor.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/prison-guards-vote-... The election makes WACLE the representative for about 5,900 state security and public safety workers, a big chunk of the 22,000 members who belonged to WSEU before Act 10 outlawed most state employee collective bargaining and made union membership voluntary. PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality.
- opo 6y ago
  >...Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners. Rather than coming up with hypotheticals of how you think they could operate, it is more useful to look at what they did: >...many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.” I don't know where private prisons spend their lobbying money, but in terms of a hypothetical private prison, they have such a small percentage of prisons, the best return for their money would probably be to lobby for privatization and bidding against government prisons. The only thing we really do know is that industry spends less nationally than the prison guard union in CA alone spends on lobbying. The prison problems in CA can't be blamed on private prisons and trying to do so is simple deflection. >...Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE. Yes health/safety issues are the things they should lobby for, the issue that they have so much money, they also lobby for lots of things they shouldn't be involved with. >Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum: Well there has been a backlash against public sector unions in Wisconsin and one group of prison guards has decided to leave AFSCME and form a new union with supposedly less interest in electoral politics. That doesn't tell us much about how much influence they had before this point. >PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality. Not really. Private prisons first started around 1987 and have a slow growth in the number of prisoners compared to public prisons. The last 10 years have been stagnant with little growth. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to_2014.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to... It is clear though that claiming that prison guard unions "simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale." is simply wrong. With the way they are currently regulated, it isn't clear if private prisons are much better than state run prisons, but to focus on them and ignore law enforcement public sector unions is a deflection. The current system is broken though. Those of us who care about prison reform, also care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles. >...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betting-guards-gunfire-and-death-for-the-gladiators-1310849.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti... After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corcoran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...

by opo 6y ago

Retric 6y ago

> not being done to lower the number of prison guard positions. True, but number of guards and their salaries are surprisingly independent of the number of prisoners. https://www.scstatehouse.gov/CommitteeInfo/HouseLegislativeOversightCommittee/AgencyWebpages/Corrections/Inmate%20to%20Officer%20ratios.pdf https://www.scstatehouse.gov/CommitteeInfo/HouseLegislativeO... Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners. Private prisons on the other hand directly profit on a per inmate basis. As they need to look cost competitive with public prisons they thus need to lobby for more prisoners if they want increased profits. That’s either from more private prisons or more prisoners at existing prisons. Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE. https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/coronavirus/canaan-federal-prison-union-concerned-about-shortage-of-protective-gear-nyc-inmate-transfers-1.2611960 https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/coronavirus/canaan-federal-... So what I am saying is their don’t focus on increasing the prison population as a primary motivation, thus you need to look at the issues their spending money on. Ex: https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-guard-union-calls-curtailment-solitary-confinement-death-row/ https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-guard-union-calls... > You haven’t given any evidence that this is true CA: As of 2017, the union had 39,750 members Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum: https://mnlabor.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/prison-guards-vote-to-leave-wisconsin-state-employees-union/ https://mnlabor.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/prison-guards-vote-... The election makes WACLE the representative for about 5,900 state security and public safety workers, a big chunk of the 22,000 members who belonged to WSEU before Act 10 outlawed most state employee collective bargaining and made union membership voluntary. PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality.

opo 6y ago
>...Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners. Rather than coming up with hypotheticals of how you think they could operate, it is more useful to look at what they did: >...many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.” I don't know where private prisons spend their lobbying money, but in terms of a hypothetical private prison, they have such a small percentage of prisons, the best return for their money would probably be to lobby for privatization and bidding against government prisons. The only thing we really do know is that industry spends less nationally than the prison guard union in CA alone spends on lobbying. The prison problems in CA can't be blamed on private prisons and trying to do so is simple deflection. >...Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE. Yes health/safety issues are the things they should lobby for, the issue that they have so much money, they also lobby for lots of things they shouldn't be involved with. >Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum: Well there has been a backlash against public sector unions in Wisconsin and one group of prison guards has decided to leave AFSCME and form a new union with supposedly less interest in electoral politics. That doesn't tell us much about how much influence they had before this point. >PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality. Not really. Private prisons first started around 1987 and have a slow growth in the number of prisoners compared to public prisons. The last 10 years have been stagnant with little growth. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to_2014.html https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to... It is clear though that claiming that prison guard unions "simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale." is simply wrong. With the way they are currently regulated, it isn't clear if private prisons are much better than state run prisons, but to focus on them and ignore law enforcement public sector unions is a deflection. The current system is broken though. Those of us who care about prison reform, also care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles. >...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betting-guards-gunfire-and-death-for-the-gladiators-1310849.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti... After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corcoran https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...