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Pardon my language, but this is fucking insane.
NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.
The article goes on to describe the process, whereby legislators from across the country meet each year at conferences and draft sample legislation, ostensibly a kind of state-house happy hour networking event, although private companies (like representatives form the private prison industry) spend tens of thousands to attend and get in on the action, going as far as to suggestion what legislation to draft.
The draft language proposed in Arizona matched, to the letter, a draft bill proposed at one of these conferences.
