California Governor Brown's Budget Cuts Private Prison Spending

This year's California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget assumes $410 million paid to for profit private prisons for housing California inmates. Next year the expenditure would drop to $224 million.

Out-of-state private prison costs, the most expensive line item in the CDCR contracted facilities budget, would go from $272 million in the current year to $148 million in 2011-12.

Click here to see details of the CDCR budget.

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Utah's Management & Training Corporation's (MTC) role in Ariz. immigration law

Tougher immigration laws mean more detentions and bigger contracts for prison companies.
By Jesse Fruhwirth

Many people suspect that backroom deals and corporate interests influence public policy, and rarely are those backroom negotiations exposed to the public. But investigators from In These Times magazine, NPR and others have unlocked one such backroom where Arizona’s controversial immigration law was hashed out, and discovered Utah connections in the process.

A private group of conservative state lawmakers and private-prison-industry representatives discussed and revised Arizona’s controversial immigration bill—both hailed and decried as the toughest in the nation—before it became law. Not only was a Utah lawmaker the chair of that private committee that discussed the bill, but new research also shows that a Utah company—the nation’s third-largest private-corrections company— made campaign donations to the sponsor of Arizona’s law four times in recent years. Immigrants are detained in prisons prior to deportation, so private jailers have a financial interest in tougher immigration laws.

Most news about corporate interests influencing Arizona’s immigration law has focused on Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private-prison company.