The NRA spent millions pushing the largest prison construction boom everand harsh sentencing
An older article but good review of role of NRA in prison building are 3 strikes you are out. The US had started to make some progress on prison reform but with Trump Sessions we are going backwards again--following in the NRA's footsteps
The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built
The NRA spent millions in the 1990s pushing the largest prison construction boom ever—and harsh sentencing to keep them full.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/wayne-lapierre-crime-strike-three-strikes/?fb_action_ids=10151822272589768&fb_action_types=og.likes
Tim Murphy Feb. 8, 2013 11:11 AM
Prison overcrowding at the California Institution for Men in 2006 <a href="http://www.cdcr.ca.gov
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...........................LaPierre launched CrimeStrike that spring with $2 million in seed money from the parent organization and a simple platform: mandatory minimums, harsher parole standards, adult sentences for juveniles, and, critically, more prisons. “Our prisons are overcrowded. Our bail laws are atrocious. We’ll be the bad guy,” he announced.
The NRA took its case to the public. “Will you let criminals rape your rights?” asked a four-page ad in a 1994 issue of Field & Stream magazine. And the real culprit was in the White House: “The Clinton administration has already cut federal prison construction by $550 million in favor of ‘community placement’ and ‘criminal rehabilitation programs.'” This was reviving an old conservative talking point: Democrats were soft on crime. The ads featured LaPierre’s signature and bespectacled, stoic face at the bottom, alongside a 1-800 number interested volunteers could call. It was a membership hotline.
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A 1994 CrimeStrike ad. Google Books
Although the NRA lost on the assault weapons front, it got what it wanted in one respect: funding for prison construction increased threefold. T.......................... That was a driving force in what the Houston Chronicle described as “the biggest prison construction boom in U.S. history”—18 new state jails at a cost of $3 billion, in just five years. CrimeStrike lobbied successfully for similar construction projects in Mississippi and Virginia.
States needed prisons in part because the NRA was pushing a legislative agenda designed to keep them full. In 1993, CrimeStrike spent $90,000 to put on the ballot in Washington state a new kind of sentencing law called “Three strikes and you’re out,” in which third-term offenders would be given a mandatory life sentences, on the ballot. Voters in the state passed the measure. ..................................
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By the late 1990s, after attempting to block the Violence Against Women Act (over a provision that would have disarmed abusive spouses) and fighting to curtail prison weightlifting programs,.................................Thanks to stricter sentencing guidelines and increased capacity, the United States was locking up more people than at any point in its history, and for longer. Even as violent crime dropped across the country, incarceration rates continued to increase.
......................... The Golden State’s three-strikes law differed from most of the other 29 in that it applied to an exceedingly broad definition of what amounted to a “strike.” Under its guidelines, nonviolent crimes—including, in one famous case, the filching of a slice of pizza—were enough to put someone behind bars for life.
“There’s actual real-life academics who have studied this stuff, and there’s actually no evidence whatsoever it’s had an impact,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a criminal justice nonprofit.
But mandatory life sentences ensure that thousands of inmates will grow old behind bars, which is rather expensive. .............................
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All that’s left of the NRA’s prison-building arm 20 years later is a television show by the same name. Hosted by LaPierre, Crime Strike features weekly reenactments of gun owners defending their turf, with the mantra: “Take aim and fight back.” But the program’s legacy lives on in concrete ways.
...................It’s just a phenomenal cost, and what social cost is this causing?”