Private Prisons: The More Americans They Put Behind Bars The More Money They Make

by Michael Snyder

How would you describe an industry that wants to put more Americans in prison and keep them there longer so that it can make more money?? In America today, approximately 130,000 people are locked up in private prisons that are being run by for-profit companies, and that number is growing very rapidly.? Overall, the U.S. has approximately 25 percent of the entire global prison population even though it only has 5 percent of the total global population.? The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the entire globe by far, and no nation in the history of the world has ever locked up more of its own citizens than we have.? Are we really such a cesspool of filth and decay that we need to lock up so many of our own people?? Or are there some other factors at work?? Could part of the problem be that we have allowed companies to lock up men and women in cages for profit?? The two largest private prison companies combined to bring in close to $3,000,000,000 in revenue in 2010, and the largest private prison companies have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade.? Putting Americans behind bars has become very big business, and those companies have been given a perverse incentive to push for even more Americans to be locked up.? It is a system that is absolutely teeming with corruption, and it is going to get a lot worse unless someone does something about it.

One of the keys to success in the private prison business it to get politicians to vote your way.? That is why the big private prison companies spend so much money on lobbying and campaign contributions.? The following is an excerpt from a report put out by the Justice Policy Institute entitled "Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies"...

For-profit private prison companies primarily use three strategies to influence policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and building relationships, networks, and associations.

Over the years, these political strategies have allowed private prison companies to promote policies that lead to higher rates of incarceration and thus greater profit margins for their company. In particular, private prison companies have had either influence over or helped to draft model legislation such as "three-strikes" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws, both of which have driven up incarceration rates and ultimately created more opportunities for private prison companies to bid on contracts to increase revenues.

If you can believe it, three of the largest private prison companies have spent approximately $45,000,000 combined on lobbying and campaign contributions over the past decade.

Would they be spending so much money if those companies did not believe that it was getting results?

Just look at what has happened to the U.S. prison population over the past several decades.? Prior to 1980, there were virtually no private prisons in the United States.? But since that time, we have seen the overall prison population and the private prison population absolutely explode.

For example, between 1990 and 2009 the number of Americans in private prisons grew by about?1600 percent.

Overall, the U.S. prison population more than quadrupled between 1980 and 2007.

So something has definitely changed.

Not that it is wrong to put people in prison when they commit crimes.? Of course not.? And right now violent crime is rapidly rising in many of our largest cities.? When people commit violent crimes they need to be removed from the streets.

But when you put those criminals into the hands of private companies that are just in it to make a buck, the potential for abuse is enormous.

For example, when auditors visited one private prison in Texas, they "got so much fecal matter on their shoes they had to wipe their feet on the grass outside."

The prisoners were literally living in their own manure.

How would you feel if a member of your own family was locked up in such a facility?

And the truth is that there seem to be endless stories of abuse in private prisons.? One private prison company reportedly charges inmates $5.00 a minute to make phone calls but only pays them $1.00 a day to work...

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers' money to run immigration detention centers. Their largest facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds, and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison's phones to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates' need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

Speaking of work, private prisons have found that exploiting their inmates as a source of slave labor can be extraordinarily profitable.? Today, private prisons are stealing jobs from ordinary American workers in a whole host of industries.? The following is from an article by Vicky Pelaez...

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

And many of the largest corporations in America have rushed in to take advantage of this pool of very cheap slave labor.? Just check out some of the big names that have been exploiting prison labor...

At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom's, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.

But of course some of the biggest profits for private prisons come from detaining young people.? Today, private prison companies operate more than 50 percent of all "youth correctional facilities" in the United States.

And sometimes judges have even been bribed by these companies to sentence kids to very harsh sentences and to send them to their facilities.? The following is?from a report about two judges in Pennsylvania that were recently convicted for taking money to send kids to private prisons...

Michael Conahan, a former jurist in Luzerne County, was sentenced on Friday to 210 months in custody by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Edwin M. Kosik II. Conahan was also ordered to pay $874,000 in restitution. [...] As Main Justice reported in August, Ciavarella, former president judge of the Court of Common Pleas and former judge of the Juvenile Court for Luzerne County, was sentenced to 28 years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $965,930. [...]

Conahan's role in the "cash for kids" scheme was to order the closing of a county-run detention center, clearing the way for Ciavarella, once known as a strict "law and order" judge, to send young offenders to private facilities. This arrangement worked out well for Ciavarella and Conahan, as well as the builder of the facilities and a developer, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges.

The arrangement didn't work out so well for the young offenders, some of them sent away for offenses that were little more than pranks and would have merited probation, or perhaps just scoldings, if the judges had tried to live up to their oaths.

Are you starting to see why private prisons are such a problem?

Hundreds of kids had their lives permanently altered by those corrupt judges.

When you allow people to make money by locking other people up in cages, you are just asking for trouble.

The more Americans they put behind bars, the more money these private prisons make.? It is a system that needs to be brought to an end.

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Assuming that all victimless crimes are banned and prisons are only a means for providing restitution to victims and families of the victim, aren't private prisons a good thing? I would rather see one of those "Harlem Shake" idiots above behind bars than a drug dealer. Getting restitution (money) for victims families is not justice. Money doesn't bring someone back from the dead. At the end of the day everyone is in it for themselves thats why private prisons are flourishing. There is no justice in this world the only thing you can do is pray and read the bible. This is one of the reasons justice should be kept pure of such perverting influences as personal benefit.

Those who enthuse over the idea of "private justice" should take heed: If government justice is perverted by profit motive, then how much more perverted would be a justice operated by private citizens or companies given the power to grind the axe of their profit motives?

The only answer is less private involvement in justice: Not a perfect answer, but better than the alternative.

Private justice doesn't necessarily mean throwing people in cages, it'd probably revolve around restitution and making victims whole, rather than robbing them and victimizing them a second time by forcing them to pay for their abuser's imprisonment.

"Government justice" is a contradiction in terms.

Oh, yes, probably not in cages. But ... such justice would tend to be in the hands of the motivated. So, as an example, RIAA would want to be in charge of private justice related to copyright infringement; and would have you making restitution for songs you didn't steal (because it's profitable to make you do false restitution), based on a claim that they can only be made whole by that false restitution.

In fact, it's because of RIAA and similar groups that you can be charged $150,000 for a song you accidentally shared. Private justice? Not a bit.

And, really, if you think these prison corporations would go away and give up on having their cages filled...well, their cages would still be filled. Their motivation for profit doesn't go away just because they're in charge of justice...

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Private Murders versus Government Murders

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The December 14 murder of 20 children and 6 women at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, has garnered vast media attention and caused countless people with no connection to the victims to grieve for them. This is not a new phenomenon: nearly all mass murders carried out by civilians generate the same type of coverage and response.

But what of the far more numerous incidents of government murder of innocents? Most of them hardly make the news at all; fewer still produce widespread outpourings of sympathy.

One does not need to look any further than 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. to observe the contrast. Barack Obama was quick to offer an expression of sympathy for the families of the Newtown victims. Yet that very day his administration asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit over the drone assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki that Obama ordered in 2011. Both al-Awlakis were American citizens; Abdulrahman, the son of Anwar, was just 16 at the time of his death.

The lawsuit was filed by the father of Anwar al-Awlaki and the mother of Khan -- parents who grieve over the loss of their children (and grandson) no less than the parents of Newtown. To Obama, however, these killings were justified on the basis of that nebulous concept "national security," and the grieving relatives do not even deserve their day in court.

A couple of days later, a "suspected U.S. drone strike killed five suspected militants in Pakistan's tribal region," according to CNN. The Obama administration, which maintains a secret "kill list" from which the president can order assassinations, "counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants," the New York Times reported, so those "five suspected militants" might well have been persons who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, much like the children at Sandy Hook. Obama has yet to express any remorse for these deaths, and hardly any Americans are aware of them, let alone care.

Those five deaths are on top of the 2,500 people estimated to have been killed by the CIA and the U.S. military in the course of more than 300 drone strikes on Obama's watch. Among the innocent people killed by U.S. drones during Obama's presidency are at least 64 children -- more than three times as many as were killed at Sandy Hook -- according to a report from the law schools of Stanford University and New York University. Thus far, the president has not wiped away tears in the course of eloquent speeches on the lives snuffed out by his drones, and they have received very little press coverage. Americans who do know about them will, as often as not, shrug them off as "collateral damage."

And while Obama praised "the first responders who raced to the scene" in Newtown, his administration's policy abroad is to strike the same area multiple times with drone-fired missiles, with the second and later strikes invariably killing first responders attempting to help those injured in the first attack. "The secondary strikes," noted the Stanford-New York report, "have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another's rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers."

Such policies, of course, did not originate with Obama. George W. Bush launched wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have together taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. During his presidency U.S. drones attacked a religious school in Pakistan, killing as many as 80 civilians, including 69 children ranging in age from 7 to 17. It being a CIA operation, it was kept under wraps as long as possible, and even now few Americans are aware of this unconscionable action that was performed in their name. Bush certainly did not apologize for it or express solidarity with the grieving relatives of his victims.

The George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations deliberately sabotaged Iraq's sanitation systems and prevented their repair through sanctions. That, too, was not widely reported, and neither president apologized for it. Quite the opposite: Clinton's secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, told a reporter that "the price" -- half a million dead Iraqi children -- was "worth it" to oust Saddam Hussein from power, an objective the bombings and sanctions manifestly failed to achieve.

Under Clinton, too, federal agencies laid siege to the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, and in the name of saving children from abuse killed 17 kids and another 59 adults inside the compound.

No government employees were ever brought to account for that incident, though some of the surviving Davidians were tried and convicted for daring to resist the feds' assault on their home.

Going back even further, one could point to Harry Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Allies' firebombing of German and Japanese cities, which also targeted first responders, under both Truman and his predecessor, Franklin Roosevelt. Even today those actions are justified by many Americans on the basis that "all's fair in love and war"; and besides, they "saved American lives" -- the only ones, apparently, that count.

The U.S. government, of course, is not alone in murdering innocent people. One thinks immediately of the great evils of Adolf Hitler's National Socialists, who killed perhaps 11 million people, or the communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere, responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 million. All told, governments killed more than 262 million people in the 20th century outside of wars, according to University of Hawaii political science professor R.J. Rummel. Add to that the war dead, also the responsibility of governments, and the figure becomes astronomical. The vast majority of instances of death by government are unknown to all except researchers such as Rummel. Those that are more widely known often have their apologists.

No sane person sticks up for the perpetrator of the Sandy Hook massacre. Likewise, it's about time people stopped sticking up for governments that perpetrate far worse killings -- and started prosecuting the people who order them and carry them out.
_
Michael Tennant is a software developer and freelance writer in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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The So-Called Private Economy

by Jeffrey Tucker

"The private economy is doing fine."

Those were the words of President Obama that unleashed a torrent of political hysteria. The Romney campaign immediately blasted him for suggesting that things are just hunky-dory, and he was right to do so, given the terrible slog we've been through and given that there seems to be no end in sight.

But the Romney response also missed the really telling point of Obama's remarks. The revealing thing about Obama's comment was not the comment as such but what he said immediately following:

"Where we?re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government ? oftentimes, cuts initiated by governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don?t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in."

The Wall Street Journal editorial page noticed this and pointed out that he implies that the key to economic growth is expanding the government, through stimulus and shoring up the finances of state and local government itself. Again, that is a fine criticism, but even that does not capture the essential nature of the problem here.

The core problem is that Obama, like most government officials, imagines the "economy" and the health of government are actually indistinguishable. The words are interchangeable. The problem is not that he is merely a Keynesian who believes in stimulus; the problem is that he views his job as primarily dedicated to serving his government and the spinoff governments at the state and local levels. This is and always has been his focus.

There is first an intellectual problem of which Obama is personally guilty. Long before he was president, I recall reading a very long and candid interview with him that revealed much about how he thinks the world works. It was intelligent, articulate and, in many ways, insightful. But what was completely missing from any of his remarks and, I assume, missing from any way that he thinks the world works, was a consciousness of the contribution that private industry makes to the world.

This isn't just a small oversight. The whole of our standard of living ? which has rocketed to heights unthinkable before the age of capitalism ? is completely due to what he and others brush off at the private economy. It is, in fact, not just a source of wealth; it is the only source of wealth, the font of every aspect of civilization that is connected to the material world, which in turn informs the way we think, what we do, who we are and what we can accomplish in the future. It is the sum total of what we refer to as civilization itself, built piece by piece by the private sector. Everything depends it: our health, our culture, our freedom and our opportunities.

Those who credit government with all these things are mistaking the parasite for the producer. Government has nothing on its own. It creates no wealth. It can only take from what others have already produced, draining away the surplus by force. Government is not the "thin blue line" between chaos and us; it is the vacuum suction that extracts the source of life from society and its members' capacity for managing their own lives.

The best way to understand this is through careful study of The Market for Liberty, a book released into the Laissez Faire Club. Here we have a comprehensive demonstration of the following: nothing the government does makes a net contribution to the well being of society, further, all essentials functions of government can be better provided through the private sector.

But people who do not understand this can become victims of propaganda. And the propaganda can be very intense. After all, what is called "the private economy" doesn't have a single spokesman to put a spin on every news event and explain to the public all the blessings that come our way because of private enterprise.

But government does have such a spokesman, many really. And the message is focused and relentless: Give money and power to the state, or else the world will fall apart. And these same people are always ready to blame everything on the market economy, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession.

The government sector, in many ways, is not actually part of the "economy" as we conventionally use that term. That's because its contribution is to reduce growth, wealth and innovation and to put barriers in the way of progress. It is no more part of the economy than a hurricane, a criminal hangout or a terrorist act is part of the economy. It is injurious to economy and to all the purposes of productive endeavor.

In other words, Obama has it exactly backward. But he is hardly alone in this view, and whether he holds a sound view of economics or not probably doesn't matter that much in the scheme of things. It's not as if he is solely responsible for the manner in which government policy is conducted. He is a temporary manager who plays mostly a ceremonial and political role.

The president in his person has far less control over government than the typical CEO has over a major corporation. It is also highly characteristic for the head of government to think of himself as primarily a champion of the apparatus he heads and the funding sources that pay him.

We are really dealing here with an ideological issue that is extremely pervasive on the left and the right.

I recently took the time to see the new movie ?Men in Black 3,? which imagines that there is some quasi-government agency that operates in secret to keep us protected from aliens. Using amazingly advanced technology, they blast away bad aliens and work with good aliens. They have been around for many decades, protecting us every day. They put a force field around the Earth to keep invasions at bay, and otherwise keep our streets safe, our food edible and our parks clean of horrible things.

If this scenario were even slightly true, it would be no secret. If government actually achieved even a tiny fraction of the feats in this movie, we would never hear the end of it. It would be advertised to us every single day. It would be used as the only excuse around for all the taxes, wars, regulations and controls on our lives. As they say, a crisis is a terrible thing for any government to waste.

If there were actually a dangerous gang of aliens threatening life on Earth, I'm quite sure that we would be left to fend for ourselves, just as we end up providing our own protection against criminals now through insurance, strong locks and, for many people, private firearms ownership. In every case I know of, the public sector's main tendency is to put barriers up to our ability to protect ourselves.

So no, the private economy is not doing fine, and the main reason is that the private economy is not being permitted to function as it should, precisely because the public sector is making it difficult to impossible. Until we can get this straight in our heads, we will never find ourselves on track to rebuild the prosperity that seems to be slipping away from us.
__
Jeffrey Tucker, publisher and executive editor of Laissez-Faire Books, is author of Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo and It's a Jetsons World. You can write him directly here.

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This Investor Presentation For A Private Prison Is One Of The Creepiest Presentations We've Ever Seen

Joe Weisenthal


This morning we came across a rather interesting piece of research.

It was from Barclays' analyst Manav Patnaik, and it was on the private prisons business.

Specifically, it was a "virtual tour" of the Metro Davidson County Detention Facility, which is managed by Corrections Corp of America (CXW) one of two companies that that has a "duopoly" on the private prisons business.

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ISPs Will Start Acting As Hollywood's Private Online Security Guards By July

by Mike Masnick

Last July, we wrote about how the major ISPs had agreed to a "voluntary" "six strikes" plan (really five strikes, but everyone calls it six...) to start acting as Hollywood's private online security guards. And, by "voluntary" we mean without any input from the actual stake holders (customers) and with significant pressure being applied by the Obama administration. Since then, nothing has been heard, but the RIAA's Cary Sherman has now said that the ISPs involved will roll out their plans by July of this year, a year after the agreement went into place.

Sherman says that the plan had always been to give them a year to deal with the technical aspects of setting up the plan:

"Each isp has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."

Funny how, now that the plan is in place, the RIAA has no problem admitting that it required significant infrastructure changes. Somehow I doubt the RIAA is paying for this... meaning that you and I are paying for it with higher fees.

Of course, the real question is what this means for the non-major ISPs who have not agreed to take part in this anti-consumer plan. Will the RIAA and MPAA now start assuming that this is a requirement, despite it not being in the law? That's what they've been doing with content filtering on user-generated content sites now. Multiple lawsuits have pointed out that because YouTube and others have installed upload filters, everyone should have to. I'd imagine it won't be long until they start making the argument that ISPs that don't implement such a plan are "inducing" infringement somehow.

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Justice Department Wants $5 Million To Bolster Its Efforts As Hollywood's Private Police Force

by Mike Masnick

While the proposed Obama 2013 budget for the federal government is supposed to be about cutting extraneous expenditures, one area where it's seeking more money is to expand the Justice Department's copyright enforcement efforts. You see, this is what happens when you hand the Justice Department over to the RIAA and MPAA. DOJ is seeking an extra $5 million to focus on these kinds of efforts, to hire 14 new employees, including nine lawyers, claiming that it's "had an increase in the number of cases that we're dealing with in IP." Oh really? You mean like the case of Dajaz1? The site that the DOJ illegally held and censored for over a year? Perhaps if they had a few more lawyers on staff, someone would have taken the time to realize that they were supposed to give the domain back within a specified time frame. Or perhaps they could have used those people to realize that the site was posting music sent by the copyright holders. Of course, that's not what would happen. Instead, they'd just focus on seizing more sites and creating more collateral damage. The real question, of course, should be why are we allowing the government to be Hollywood's private police force?

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The Private Fireworks Show Of My Dreams

Chris | InformationLiberation

I just witnessed the private fireworks show of my dreams. At 10:00PM here in Ocean City, Maryland the government put their old boring taxpayer extravaganza money burning fireworks show on. It was 10 minutes of blas? fireworks being launched straight up into the sky. The finale was at least nice, they launched about 1,000 fireworks within a minute or so. Nonetheless, there was little excitement and little variety, it was just another typical "orderly" fireworks show at taxpayers expense.

When we got back into our condo, we heard huge bangs going on out on the beach. We went outside onto our back balcony, and that's where we had a front row view of the most spectacular fireworks show I've ever seen. There was seemingly two private citizens who were launching many of the same fireworks the government just shot, they must have spent thousands of dollars and been professional pyrotechnics, they launched literally thousands of them, yet they actually had even more fancy fireworks mixed in! There was people lighting paper lanterns and launching them off into sky, tons of people lighting roman candles, people shooting simple rockets, there was even a series of highly dangerous "screwy" fireworks which shot off one after another, many going directly in the direction of people's condos! The danger was palpable, the explosions were huge and directly before us, at one point I even ducked for cover! All this went on for easily an hour straight! Needless to say, the government would never grant a permit for such a spectacular show!

I said in my last article on July 4th, I'd only be happy when the fireworks shows were put on by private citizens. I just witnessed such a show, it was absolutely spectacular!

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so... you want charity.

"please sir, can we have some more fireworks"

"sir, your fireworks burned my house down, what do you mean you don't have insurance for that?"

no doubt his ever growing group of spectators will pick up the trash when they are done, and they will completely respect private property. or maybe that private citizen will also pay to clean up the mess that all those people leave?

i can't believe you're crying about the taxes spent on a fireworks show, one that you attended, then complain when not enough money is spent on it.

Welcome to the
Koch Brothers
4th of July Be thankful the small Easter Shore city of OC could have fireworks. They pulled off what Chicago, Tampa, and many other larger cities could not provide their citizens. You know what it's like to show up with a few hundred people and there be no fireworks? It leaves you with an "America has Died" feeling.

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MPAA Directly Lobbies Law Enforcement To Be Its Own Private Police Force

by Mike Masnick, Techdirt

For years, we've discussed how questionable it is that federal law enforcement, including the Justice Department and Homeland Security, often acts as the private police force of the entertainment industry. At times there's been a bit of a revolving door, with the RIAA/MPAA hiring former federal law enforcement officials to head up their "anti-piracy" efforts, and the existing federal groups sometimes seem to return the favor by taking on cases that clearly should be civil matters between the private companies in the entertainment business and those it feels infringed on their rights.

Over the last few years, the fact that the feds have effectively been working as the entertainment industry's private police force has grown more and more obvious. No one from Homeland Security seems willing to explain (and trust me, I've asked multiple times) why it is that when ICE did its domain seizures, it relied solely on claims from the industry and (even more ridiculous) announced the first round of seizures from Disney headquarters. Can you imagine how people would react if the FTC announced it was filing antitrust charges against Google... from Microsoft's offices? Or if the FCC announced it was blocking the AT&T-T-Mobile merger from Sprint's offices? Such scenarios seem preposterous, but ICE doesn't seem to recognize the clear conflict of interest in acting as the private police force for an industry, rather than actually doing its job.

Perhaps part of that is because the entertainment industry is spending a ton of money lobbying law enforcement agencies directly. Most of the time when you think about lobbying activities, you think about talking to politicians to try to get them to pass certain laws, or talking to regulators to have them adjust or change certain rules and regulations. You don't tend to think of lobbying law enforcement directly in order to convince them to do your private bidding. But, the MPAA does.

According to a disclosure report, the MPAA spent $400,000 lobbying a wide range of US government departments in the first quarter of 2011 including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Vice President?s Office. Issues on the table include so-called ?rogue sites? including RapidShare, streaming, graduated response (3 strikes) and domain seizures.

There are no real surprises in the content covered. It's the same stuff the MPAA has been pushing for a while now. But the fact that they're directly lobbying the FBI, the Justice Department, Homeland Security and ICE should raise some eyebrows. Law enforcement should not be influenced by the desires of private companies -- especially ones with a long history of failing to adapt to changing technologies and trying to get those technologies declared illegal. Imagine if, rather than a civil lawsuit, when the VCR was introduced, the movie industry could have just had the FBI declare the things illegal?

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