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Wild accusation:

Follow the money. There are a lot of people making a lot of money off of private prisons, generally in red states.

Private prisons held only 8.2% of inmates in 2017, with many states having zero use at all. Looking at the map, it doesn't appear there is much of a divide between red and blue states in terms of likelihood to use private prisons, or the percentage of prisoners held in them.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

Alcohol manufactures have also dumped massive amounts of money in lobbying against marijuana decriminalization because they don't want the competition.

And before that they went after Absinthe >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe#History

Absinthe makes you crazy and criminal, provokes epilepsy and tuberculosis, and has killed thousands of French people. It makes a ferocious beast of man, a martyr of woman, and a degenerate of the infant, it disorganizes and ruins the family and menaces the future of the country.

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