It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow.
It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.
It is crony capitalism, plain and simple.
But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...
This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.
Also, private companies now house nearly half of immigrant detainees including a $1 Billion facility the Obama administration purchased to hold Central American women and children seeking asylum in the US.
Specific examples of lobbying are easy enough to google. I might suggest starting with the "Kids for Cash" scandal where two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to their facilities.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...
Then you aren't paying attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
>Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers.