Ohio: ALEC Says, "It Wasn't Me!"

The Cleveland Free Times takes a long, hard look at the American Legislative Exchange Council's (ALEC) operating methods in Ohio. As usual, it ain't pretty. The right-wing, corporate-funded network of state legislators is exposed quite thoroughly.

The usual facts about ALEC are all there: the fact that corporations pay tens of thousands of dollars for access to the organization, that the companies in question "includ[e] household names like Pfizer, Philip Morris Management Corp., Proctor & Gamble Co., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., United Parcel Service and Verizon Communications." The story even got a representative of the National Conference of State Legislatures to say that ALEC's policy is developed "with, and for, the business community," something that no publicly-backed legislative policy organization would think of doing.

One of ALEC's most telling aspects also gets revealed in this story: the extent to which they are willing to lie to avoid scrutiny. The bill that prompted this article was a bill written to ensnare mainstream conservation organizations under eco-terrorism laws.

Needless to say, activists were outraged. And they started digging. Like so many heinous bills, what they found with their research as an organization called ALEC.

They called out the sponsor of the legislation, State Senator Jeff Jacobson, "and made a public records request demanding the names of those who'd been given input." As a result, Jacobson told a local paper that the bill was ALEC legislation.

But the next day, Jacobson recanted. He should not have mentioned ALEC, he told the Daily News. Instead, he should have said that the provision was based on a measure introduced in Arizona. A little digging by SERC revealed that even the Arizona bill had ALEC fingerprints all over it � and had also surfaced in the state legislatures of New York, South Carolina and Washington.

In its promotional literature, ALEC claims to introduce hundreds of bills every year and get many of them passed. Oddly, asked for specific examples, the organization is reticent. And even in cases like this where the ALEC connection gets admitted, lawmakers get pressured to backslide.

ALEC's members, leaders, and corporate backers like to claim that it's just a normal public policy group. Normal public policy outfits don't hide from scrutiny.

More Resources

Private Prisons Steer Money to Influence Sentencing Laws

The Institute on Money in State Politics, a tireless group of people who compile campaign finance data for all fifty states and regularly report national trends, have a new report "Policy Lock-Down: Prison Interests Court Political Players" looking at the $3.3 million private prison companies have donated to state-level actors in the last two election cycles.

The report specifically notes:

Analysis of campaign contributions made to state-level candidates and political parties also reveals that private-prison interests: [...] Concentrated their giving on legislative candidates who, if elected, act on state budgets and sentencing laws. These candidates received almost half of the money given to candidates � slightly more than $1 million.

So the priority is budgets and people who determine sentencing? This will come as no shock to anyone who has studied the origin of strict sentencing laws in America. As Nathan Newman noted in "Governing the Nation From the Statehouses: ":

For two decades, ALEC has been a driving force in lobbying for legislation to hand over prisons to corporate management, with 95,000 inmates in at least 31 states or 6.5% of all prisoners in private prisons, two-thirds of them in prisons run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), one of ALEC's leading corporate sponsors. Seven states place more than one-fifth of their prison population in corporate-run prisons.

ALEC also pushed heavily for "tough on crime" legislation. Amazingly, ALEC's task force responsible for this legislation was chaired for a time by CCA. In other words, this private prison company steers big contributions to legislators responsible for budgetary and sentencing decisions and also lobbies hard for private prison legislation and harsher sentencing laws.

Ironically, after costs skyrocketed due to harsher sentencing laws (prisoners being held for longer=higher costs), companies like CCA take advantage of the situation by pushing privatization as the way to respond to the increased costs. When it comes to picking the pockets of the public for the purpose of private plunder, few had it down to as smooth of a science as CCA and their competitors in the private prison industry.

More Resources