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  • 2016-04-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Drug Law Lobbying by Corrections Corporation of America (en)
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  • An image meme that spread via social media in March 2016 held that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a company that owns and manages private prisons and detention centers, spends $1 million a year in lobbying efforts to oppose the legalization of marijuana because fewer people being sent to jail on drug charges would negatively affect their bottom line: The clear message was that laws prohibiting the possession and use of marijuana (and other drugs) are less about curbing the dangers such drug use might pose to the public than they are about a privatized incarceration system that has a strong incentive to ensure prison populations remain high enough to maintain profit levels. Missing from the widely circulated graphic were any sources, citations, date, or context for the purported statement from the CCA about changes to drug laws. The image meme's overall viewpoint, however, was elucidated in an April 2015 Washington Post item critical of privatized prisons in general and CCA in particular: A portion of that item included the source which was presumably the one paraphrased in the meme, attributed to a 2014 CCA annual report: A January 2013 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) piece provided both the quote and a link to its source CCA's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Form 10-K filings, dated 25 February 2011. However, it's important to note the purpose of those mandatory 10-K filings, which include a comprehensive overview of the company's business and financial condition. As SEC Chair Mary Jo White noted in 2013, a key aspect of those reports is disclosure of risk to shareholders and potential investors: In CCA's February 2011 Form 10-K filing, therefore, the company was not strategizing about how to prevent changes to existing laws that might adversely affect their profits, but rather listing a number of potential risks to profitability outside the company's control that shareholders and investors should be aware of: More recent SEC filings from CCA, such as a document for the year ending 31 December 2015, reflect similar stated risks to investors. That filing also included a statement from CCA that, as a matter of policy, the company does not lobby for or against policies or legislation that would determine the basis for, or duration of, an individual’s incarceration or detention: Nonetheless, the image meme also alleges that the company spends approximately a million dollars per year fighting cannabis legalization. The Center for Responsive Politics' Open Secrets site (a watchdog organization that tracks lobbying efforts) maintains a profile for CCA that places its total expenditures on all lobbying efforts in 2015 at exactly $1,000,000 (and $1,020,000 in2014). However, the opacity surrounding lobbying makes it difficult to determine precisely how much (if anything) CCA might spend for the purpose of influencing marijuana laws. According to the ACLU 2013 piece referenced above, the company's lobbying efforts were spread across numerous political interests: The breakdown of the $1,020,000 spent on lobbying by CCA in 2014 as presented on Open Secrets wasn't broken down in detail. CCA's top lobbying expenditures were listed as Homeland Security and Government Issues, with Law Enforcement & Crime at number three. Apparently the meme cited the total amount of money CCA spends on lobbying and inaccurately framed all of those expenditures as targeting cannabis legalization. H.R.4903 (a bill appropriating funds for immigration security in 2013-2014) was listed on Open Secrets as a top interest for which CCA lobbied, which dovetails with CCA disclosures mentioning the jailing of undocumented immigrants. Open Secrets simply listed CCA among agencies possessing an interest in the continued criminalization of marijuana, without providing any details about monies those agencies might expend along those lines: ProPublica found much the same in an investigation pertaining partly to CCA: while that entity reported CCA spent $17.4 million in a ten-year period on general lobbying, they included no marijuana-specific findings. In short, the quotation about marijuana laws attributed by the original meme to CCA is accurate, but its source and context was an SEC-required disclosure of risks to shareholders, not a company memo advocating opposition to the legalization of marijuana. (en)
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