This week President Obama launched a major push to fix the country’s criminal justice system and end mass incarceration. The reform talk is coming from both sides of the aisle and unlikely partnerships are being forged between big business interests like the Koch brothers and vocal liberals. But big business is tied to the carceral state, so how can they be part of the solution to end it?

Van Jones, the liberal political commentator, and a Koch representative named Mark Holden recently appeared on Democracy Now where they harmoniously backed Obama’s reform plans. Holden stated that “Charles Koch and David Koch are classical liberals who believe in expansive individual liberties in the Bill of Rights and limited government.” He went on to say:

What worked 20 or 30 years ago doesn’t work today. And we have to have the intellectual honesty and courage and humility to correct that. In our businesses, we do that all the time when things aren’t working … what we’re seeing happen in the states is really a template for what should happen at the federal level.

This language reinforces the idea that the prison system in the United States is a business. The Koch Brothers have been connected to the conservative, corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, for some time. In 2011, the Koch brothers donated $24 million to various conservative organizations and think tanks including ALEC, through four foundations they run. ALEC received funding from the brothers to help finance meetings where “model” legislation would ultimately be drafted.

That relationship is enough to doubt Koch Brothers’ commitment to prison reform. Consider that, in 2009 ALEC has helped draft repressive immigration legislation and has had a longstanding comfortable relationship with the private prison industry. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest prison company in the country, once chaired ALEC’s now defunct “Criminal Justice Task Force.” The origins of mandatory minimum sentences, three strikes laws and truth-in-sentencing which create higher prison populations have origins in ALEC’s model legislation.

So what’s motivating the corporate elite’s interest on this social justice issue? One likely answer is that there are special interests who see prison reform as an opportunity to push for privatization, and make money. Private prisons have been a growing trend in recent years and between 2000 and 2010 their number doubled in the United States.

One of the first rules of capitalism is: increase profits. That’s why it must be assumed that increasing big business’s power over the criminal justice system could only make things worse. We have seen how with other important reform efforts, like education reform, privatization motives often sneak in the back door. Another risk is that their involvement could lead to cosmetic changes to the prison industry that shift attention away from the primary problems. Consider the empty nature of many of the administration’s NSA reforms or the police weapons ban reform that took away weapons police were no longer accumulating.

It’s important for liberals to scrutinize the alliance between progressive groups and big business, especially as it is growing rapidly. The Gates foundation, for example, has invested in private prisons like the GEO Group. And Thurgood Marshall Jr, son of the first black supreme court justice, who also served in the Clinton administration, is on the board of private prison company CCA, as well as the board of trustees for the Ford Foundation. Both of these foundations support and fund nonprofits that are likely to take up the cause of prison reform, if they are not already doing work to circumvent the expansion of the prison industrial complex.

Re-imagining the prison system with the private sector is problematic and it’s a liability that we shouldn’t easily disregard.

There are many important issues where progressives and corporate giants will likely not see eye to eye, such as abolishing bail. The American Bail Association was once a sitting member on ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force (previously known as the Criminal Justice Task Force) before ALEC shut it down because of public pressure. According to the Justice Policy Institute: “a 2007 brief by ALEC recommended releasing people early from prison with conditional release bonds, similar to bail bonds, effectively setting up bonding companies as private parole agencies.” Those who have long been fighting to end mass incarceration know abolishing bail is vital, but groups like ALEC have worked to obstruct real progress on issues like this in the past by pushing towards privatization.



If we allow big business to co-opt the movement to end mass incarceration, we risk diluting real change. Another empty corporate led “reform” movement where big business has too many seats at the table is not the systemic change it will present itself to be. Those who have been misused by the prison system in this country are more than bullet points in nice speeches. They are real people who have suffered and are still suffering. We must ensure that we work in the interests of those who have been hurt by this crisis, not the private interests who helped create it.



