When Donald Trump won the presidency, the flailing private prison industry immediately started to rebound. Then, a month after he took office as president, the Justice Department reversed the previous administration’s decision to phase out the use of private prisons. In just the four months after Election Day 2016, private prison stocks jumped up almost 100 percent. With the recent migrant crisis at the border, they have jumped again—making it clear that harsher immigration policy is a boon for the prison industry. But how does the influence private prison companies have on immigration policy flow from the communities in which they operate to Congress?
A new study out of the University of California, Riverside, takes a stab at that question, and finds that members of Congress hailing from districts with private immigrant jails are more likely to push for harsh federal immigration laws.
“The worry from a democratic standpoint is that if we're making policy not because it is the best policy, but because it makes some companies money, then maybe that's not in Americans’ interests, let alone immigrant interests,” says Loren Collingwood, a political scientist at UCR and co-author of the research.
[For more on this story by TANVI MISRA, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...grant-prison/564716/]
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