The Politics of Public Opinion

excerpted from the book

The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

How America Profits From Crime

by Joel Dyer

Westview Press, 2001, paper

 


p115
Republican Party, Contract with America, 1994
[We promise to pass] [a]n anti-crime package including stronger truth-in-sentencing, "goodfaith" exclusionary rule exemptions, effective death penalty provisions, and cuts in social spending from this summer's "crime" bill to fund prison construction and additional law enforcement to keep people secure in their neighborhoods and kids safe in their schools.

p119
Peter Carlson, director, U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, described this new and powerful force to his peers - the Keeper's Voice, 1998, , a publication aimed at corrections employees,

"What is new and remarkable is how much weight public opinion has gained within this new freewheeling style, decisively influencing the political machinery of government. It is important to recognize in today's fast-moving, information-based society, the citizens viewpoint has taken on new relevance for individuals in public service. We live in an age in which the public demands responsiveness from government institutions and elected leaders."

119
The New Rulers
Consultants have been a part of America's political landscape for as long as anyone can remember. Early on, consultants tended to be lawyers assigned to a candidate by the party to handle the day-to-day managerial tasks of a campaign. Although they may have had some input into the decisionmaking process, it was quite limited compared to that of the candidates themselves or the party. But this would change to some degree in the 1930s. The following walk through the history of the political consultants relies heavily on the work of Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia's Department of Government and Foreign Affairs as published in his 1981 book, The Rise of the Political Consultant.

In 1933, the California legislature passed a bill known as the Central Valley Project. The bill was adamantly opposed by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, which considered the legislation to be a threat to private power. In an effort to overturn the bill, PG&E threw its weight behind a citizens' initiative that would overturn the legislature's decision. Sensing that the initiative would be successful, supporters of the Central Valley Project turned to two men for help, a press agent and newsman named Clem Whitacker and a public relations wiz named Leone Smith Baxter. The two used a paltry $39,000 radio and newspaper campaign to defeat PG&E's initiative. The age of the political consultant was born, and as a premonition of the way this new age would operate, PG&E quickly hired the two men who had defeated its initiative to handle its future political affairs.

By the 1950s, political consultants were playing an increasing role in the election process. Even at this early stage in their rise to dominance, some observers could see the writing on the wall. Neil Staebler, the chairman of Michigan's Democratic Party in the 1950s, observed that "elections will increasingly become contests, not between candidates but between great advertising firms." Nostradamus clearly had nothing on Staebler.

The coming of the television age increased the power of political consultants exponentially. In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower hired an ad agency to consult on his campaign. It would prove to be a shrewd move. After stumbling and bumbling his way through media coverage during the campaign, Ike's hopes for winning looked grim. But his ad agency decided to try something new. They hired the Gallup company to conduct a series of polls and used the information gathered to create themes for a series of television commercials. The ad agency believed that in a controlled environment, they could create an image of a relaxed and articulate Eisenhower to counterbalance the less-than-eloquent Ike being portrayed in news coverage. The TV spots did far more than counterbalance the news; they skyrocketed Eisenhower's popularity and thereby changed the face of electoral politics forever.

By the time Ronald Reagan ran his 1966 California gubernatorial campaign, political consultants had moved from their role of image makers into the realm of political strategists. Reagan's early attempts at campaigning were floundering. In response, his consulting firm, Spencer-Roberts, decided to make a bold move. They hired the aptly named firm Behavioral Science Corporation to research the issues that were deemed to be the most important to Californians. More significant than that, they also asked the firm to provide suggested solutions that would appeal to the electorate. Taking advantage of Reagan's training as an actor, his consultants wrote the problems and solutions on a set of index cards and had Reagan memorize the information as he would the lines in a Hollywood production. The rest is history. The modern age of political consulting-an age where the pollsters, a.k.a. consultants, decide what issues are discussed and in what fashion-had arrived.

By the end of the 1970s, the biggest and best of the political consulting firms were actually turning away potential candidate clients left and right. The consultants, who now fully believed-and to a large extent, rightfully so-that through the tools of polling and television they could determine the outcomes of elections, were now picking and choosing their clientele based largely upon a candidate's perceived malleability to their ideas. If they thought that a candidate was too set in his or her ways, unwilling to follow the script that the consultants would write based upon their own interpretations of public opinion, the firm would simply choose to work with a different candidate. After all, the firms' reputations were based upon one criterion-winning elections. Taking on a client who might adopt unpopular political positions-the "maverick" politician-was a recipe for long-term financial failure for any consultant.

With the rise in importance of the consultants, it became clear that any political wannabe who spurned the use of the media-savvy pollsters during the election process was all but doomed to defeat. More important, the opposite was also true; any candidate rejected by the established consultants had little chance of reaching office. As a result, virtually every candidate running for office since the late 1970s has done so with the aid of these new rulers of the political system and has been more or less willing to follow their instructions.

In the late 1970s, when Larry Sabato was completing the research for The Rise of the Political Consultant, it was not only clear that these masters of the media had become the true driving force of America's electoral process but that they had also become a powerful force in postelection policy decisions as well.

It became commonplace that after winning an election for their political client, the consultant would be retained on staff, presumably to help maintain a politico's popularity until the next round of elections. What this meant was that consultants were now advising those in office about which of their policies were popular and would translate into future votes and which might make reelection more difficult. As a result of this political evolution, public opinion began to take on an increasingly important role in policy decisions and not just in campaign rhetoric.

Stuart Spencer described his role as consultant for President Gerald Ford in 1976 in disturbingly candid terms:

When I'm working with a client I try to get him to do things that I think are politically wise. I went to President Ford in 1976 when [Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger had trips scheduled to Africa just before the Georgia and Alabama primaries. I went to the President and I said, "Mr. President, you can t let him go to Africa before these two primaries. There are too many racial overtones in the South." But he looked me in the eye and said, "You're probably right, Stu, but I'm doing the right thing for the country. Well, I don't argue with that. I made my point, and he said no . . . I did get him to change sides on the common situs picketing bill. [The bill, strongly favored by labor, was vetoed by Ford after he'd promised to support it.] I don't even care about common situs picketing, but a lot of people on the right in the Republican party did, and it became a cause celebre.

Gerald Ford is widely regarded as a man of great integrity, an oldtime politician who desired doing what was right even more than being reelected. If Ford could be controlled to such an extent by his hired handlers, I shudder to think of the influence that consultants wield in this age of TV politicians like Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Along these lines, Sabato has written:

Consultants have emphasized personality and gimmickry over issues, often exploiting emotional or negative themes rather than encouraging rational discussion. They have sought candidates who fit their technologies more than the requirements of office and have given an extra boost to candidates that are more skilled at electioneering than governing. They have encouraged candidates' own worst instincts to blow with the prevailing winds of public opinion.

One would assume that the consultants would try to dispute such allegations regarding their effect on the political process, but for reasons that must surely stem from vanity, they seldom do. In fact, Dick Morris,

President Clinton's consultant until he fell from grace amid a sex scandal of his own, has written two books describing his role in the Clinton administration, a role that fits perfectly with Sabato's observations.

In Behind the Oval Office and The New Prince, Morris proudly tells his readers how he developed a three-pronged approach to politics that is responsible for Clinton's rise to power. First, Morris claims that he convinced the president to use "triangulation," a process that has been described as developing a platform to include the most popular elements from both parties, thus eliminating the usual Democrat-Republican conflicts. It's sort of an "all things to all people" approach.

Next, Morris turned public opinion polling on nearly every conceivable position into a daily, sometimes hourly, activity at the White House. Then, as more than one observer has noted, Morris convinced Clinton to change his stated political positions to fit the polls. And finally, Morris takes credit for developing the political tool known as the "never-ending campaign." In effect, this tool dictates that even though a candidate has been elected, he or she never quits running for office, the centerpiece of this philosophy being that governing is made subordinate to winning reelection.

What Morris has done for the Democratic president he has also done for powerful Republicans, including Jesse Helms and Trent Lott. All in all, it seems that Dick Morris is quite proud of the fact that consultants like him are now running the show in Washington. But such a reality has major implications for the rest of us.

One can only shudder when wondering what America might look like today had Dick Morris and his poll-taking peers been working their antidemocratic magic earlier this century. For instance, what would have happened during the McCarthy era? When the "hard-on-communism" senator was at the height of his popularity, only 29 percent of Americans thought he was doing the wrong thing. With lopsided poll results like that, Morris and his pals would surely have pushed all of their candidate-clients onto the McCarthy bandwagon. As disturbing as this proposition sounds, I'm not sure it would have been any more terrifying than what's happening today. It seems inconceivable that even Joseph McCarthy and a bunch of poll-driven clones would have imprisoned 2 million people as a means of retaining political popularity.

The Role of the Modern Consultant

Today's political consultants have more or less taken over the tasks that once fell under the purview of the party and the candidate. They are hired to provide technical services such as direct-mail fund-raising, polling, public opinion surveys, and fund-raising from political action committees (PACs), corporations, and the donor class. They also serve as the "experts" in charge of managing the overall direction of the campaign. They orchestrate the press that turns to them nearly exclusively for their political information, a fact that accounts for the near-propaganda quality of much political reporting these days. And most significant, they play an important role in selecting which issues a candidate will concentrate on and increasingly what position the candidate will take on those issues.

Unlike Dick Morris, some consultants have actually expressed concern over their ability to control candidates. In 1979, well-known consultant Charles Guggenheim acknowledged, "We're the big experts from the outside; we are prophets from another country whose biggest problem is that they [politicians] defer to me too much. I want to get their reactions but they hold back. If I said, 'You've got to play that,' I'd be scared they'd do it unquestioningly.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sabato's research confirmed Guggenheim's worst fear. As Sabato said, "Consultants are having an increasingly greater voice in the setting of basic strategy and the selection of (and relative emphasis on) campaign issues." I suspect that consultant Guggenheim's fear stemmed from his understanding that the enthusiastically followed instructions he was issuing to his candidate clients, though helping to ensure their election, were not based on any pertinent facts concerning the issues but rather upon what words, according to the polls, would tickle the ears of the most voters.

Since consultants like Guggenheim have expressed apprehension about their role in politics, I would suggest that the rest of us should be wholly terrified. Understanding how these "prophets" of the election process go about determining a candidate's issues is no comfort at all- polling, polling, and more polling-or as this gauging of the public's desires is described by political writer Alan Baron, "the new holy writ of American politics."

Since the end of the 1970s, which marked the beginning of the modern era of polling, political consultants have primarily used five types of polling tools during the course of an election. First is the "benchmark" poll. This survey is taken in the early stages of a campaign. Its purpose is to determine the public's assessment of a candidate's strengths and weaknesses as well of those of his or her opponent. Originally, these surveys were conducted by going door to door, but as costs for such "in person" surveys have risen, most are now conducted over the phone.

Once the benchmark survey is analyzed, "follow-up" surveys are conducted. These surveys serve a couple of purposes. They help to gather more specific information about any areas of concern pointed out by the benchmark poll, or, if a candidate has adjusted the platform based upon the original benchmark poll, the follow-up survey can reflect whether the adjustment has had the desired effect on the public's opinion of the candidate.

Later in the election process, "panel" surveys are performed. These surveys involve recontacting a large percentage, usually more than half, of the people previously polled in the benchmark or follow-up surveys. This information is coupled with a new smaller survey of people not previously polled by the campaign. The purpose of the panel surveys is to determine any shifts that have occurred in public opinion during the course of the campaign-presumably to allow the candidate to shift views in accordance with public sentiment.

The next polling tool is known as the "tracking phase." This is a small, constant sampling of public opinion that goes on throughout the campaign. It usually consists of approximately 100 phone calls every night. These tracking polls are designed to question members of the public about issues that arise during the campaign. They also help the consultants gauge whether their TV commercials are proving effective. In addition, they pick up on any changes taking place in the general population's opinion about a candidate or the opponent. Although such a small sampling of opinion is relatively useless by itself, the cumulative effect of constantly acquiring such bits of information helps to map trends in public opinion.

And finally, consultants use what have come to be known as "focus groups." Small samplings of individuals are brought together in a room where they can be more or less used as human guinea pigs. Consultants often watch from behind one-way mirrors as the individuals are asked to respond to anything from campaign slogans to issue positions to individual words. These days, it is not uncommon for those who participate in focus groups to be hooked up to electronic monitors that reflect their emotional responses to every conceivable stimulus: the color of a candidate's tie, the meter of his or her voice, a candidate's believability. Pollsters have found that these electronically monitored emotional responses are a better gauge of true public opinion than the views voiced by the focus-group participants. Perhaps the best example in recent years of a politician effectively using focus groups is the case of Bill Clinton in 1998.

After Clinton finally admitted to his sexual indiscretion with Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office, it was time for damage control. Clinton's consultants used a focus group that determined that people grew angry every time Clinton used the word "truthful," but the group reacted favorably whenever he described his sexual liaisons as being a part of his "private" life. In response to the focus-group findings, Clinton went on national TV and in a well-scripted four-minute speech, he used the word "private" no less than six times, while steering clear of any subject matter having to do with "truthfulness." Support for Clinton shot up following the speech, which makes perfect sense when you consider that the speech had, for all intents and purposes, been written by the American people themselves, based upon what they wanted to hear.

 

Trim the Sails, Divide, and Conquer

What all of these polling tools have in common is that they are ultimately designed for two purposes. First, they allow politicians to adjust their political platform in a manner that reflects the public's opinion and will motivate a "targeted" segment of the electorate to go to the polls on election day. This is not to insinuate that all politicians are going to completely discard their personal views on an issue simply because the polls show them to be bucking public opinion-although this certainly can and does happen. In 1976, famed political consultant Robert Teeter voiced concern over the fact that many candidates are too willing to change their platform to fit the poll results. Teeter told the National Journal, "I've seen candidates who were far too flexible for my tastes in being willing to realign their positions."

Even so, I believe that polling is often used to assist a politician in trimming the sails on issues, as opposed to outright determining them. That is to say polling results tell politicians which parts of their platform to emphasize or exaggerate and which parts to avoid discussing publicly. In writing for the New York Times in 1992, Michael de Courcy Hinds described this dilemma in terms of crime. Hinds noted that both governors and other policymakers were well aware that they should be seeking alternatives to prisons because of the skyrocketing costs of incarceration. Yet after a number of interviews with elected leaders, Hinds concluded that the politicians believed that they had to ignore doing what was best for their constituents because they were uniformly afraid that supporting prison alternatives would allow them to be painted as "soft on crime" in future elections. Although such political positioning in-~ creases a politician's chances of reaching and maintaining office, in the ,,, long run it means that the election process has lost its ability to inform and thereby persuade the public to alter its position on important issues , such as crime when public opinion is out of touch with the facts.

The other purpose of polling is to help the consultants to assess the best way to shrink the electorate by encouraging the people composing the demographic groups that have not been targeted by television commercials and issue selection to stay home on election day. Designing a l campaign to encourage low voter turnout allows politicians of both par- | ties to avoid having to deal with issues such as crime in an operative manner. It also makes it possible for those seeking office to adopt a stance on an issue that will reward one group at the expense of another, for example, as in the hard-on-crime position, which offers a false promise of public safety to white suburbanites at the expense of low-income communities of color.

Voter apathy is disturbingly high in nearly all demographic groups, but it is the highest among the millions of Americans who live at the bottom of the economic food chain. This lack of political action by those with the most to lose is hard to understand unless you realize that apathy among the poor has long been cultivated by the powers that be. The "get out the vote" strategies of the 1960s have been replaced with technological trickery designed to "keep out the vote," when it comes to the poor.

p128
And just so you don't get the idea that I'm picking on conservatives here, let me assure you that most Democrats are equally desirous of minimal voter turnouts. In the 1998 elections, Democrats and Republicans alike relied heavily on "targeted-voter" strategies developed by their consultants. The idea was that it is easier to win 16 percent of the ;' vote in an election where only 30 percent of voters go to the polls than to try to appeal to large numbers of people with varying and often conflicting interests.

Writing for the Progressive, John Nichols observed correctly that "a campaign that emphasizes issues of broad popular appeal might turn off corporate contributors. That's something Democratic insiders fear since, as their party has moved further and further to the right, it has come to rely on the same Wall Street donor base as the Republicans." Nichols concluded that such action "leaves many voters with a clear sense that the political choices they make don't matter." And this sense of political helplessness among the nontargeted population is exactly what the consultants are counting on.

In a conversation I had a couple of years ago with historian Howard Zinn, he made a similar point. Zinn told me that throughout our country's history, whenever the two parties have become nearly indistinguishable from one another, as is the case in the 1990s, people tend to remove themselves from the political process through apathy. It seems that the current trend toward a one-party system-a trend that has been accelerated by the rise in importance of the political consultant-has simply made a comfortable couch on election day preferable to a line at a voting booth, where a person more often than not these days gets to choose between two nearly identical candidates. In the 1990s, the choice is generally between a pro-big business, hard-on-crime, millionaire attorney claiming to be a Democrat in favor of abortion, or a pro-big business, hard-on-crime, millionaire attorney claiming to be a Republican who opposes abortion. This is too often the reality of modern politics.

If the majority of people were to actually vote, it would be nearly impossible for candidates to efficiently target wealthy demographic groups with their sound-bite-laden commercials and financial appeals. This, in many ways, would make the campaign process more difficult for politicians, and this is particularly true for Democrats, who must still maintain, though somewhat disingenuously, that they represent the concerns of poor and working-class Americans. As Nichols has pointed out, Democrats these days have become increasingly dependent upon wealthy constituents and corporations whose political desires are, more often than not, in direct conflict with those of blue-collar workers and people living in poverty.

p129
The flight to the burbs by those who could afford it has done much to drive a wedge between the interests of the rich and poor. In the past when a library or a fire station was built in urban America, it would likely have benefited voters of every economic strata, at least to some degree, because all the classes lived in relative proximity to one another. But geographic segregation has put communities of varying classes at war with one another over government expenditures. Suburbanites would much rather see their tax dollars go for beautiful parks, or that increasingly popular form of class discrimination known as "open space," in their own neighborhoods than for some inner-city school that they will never lay eyes on or for fire trucks that will never spray their lifesaving water on the beautifully landscaped, nearly identical homes found in suburban clusters with names like "Fawn Brook" or "Aspen Meadows."

p130
Any campaign truly designed to speak to the needs of the lower class would have to include operative discussions of such modern political taboos as income redistribution, community-to-community diversion of tax revenues, and the racist elements and economic shortcomings of the war on crime-issues that, if put forward by Democrats, would run the risk of pushing the wealthy individuals and corporations who now pay for their TV commercials even further to the right and possibly into the waiting arms of "moderate Republicans.

Consequently, most politicians, including modern pseudo-progressives of the Clinton ilk, have made the decision to cater their campaign platform to the desires of that portion of the electorate that political consultants tell them is most critical to victory, namely, suburbanites who are already predisposed to vote and who offer the added bonus of being able to fill campaign coffers. That being the case, the challenge for politicians is to make sure that voters from other demographic groups stay home on election day. In recent years, political consultants have revised methods that make apathy less a byproduct of disenfranchisement than a result of high-tech media manipulation.

Before the first political commercial has hit the airwaves, the political consultants and advertising executives have already experimented with polls and focus groups composed of people of every make and model. Rich and poor, black and white have all been strapped into chairs and hooked to an array of electronic gadgets designed to measure their emotional responses to all that is political. The goal of this electronic wizardry is as much designed to determine what content might encourage some demographic groups to abstain from voting as it is to determine what issues will motivate other voters.

As former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich once observed, "When things happen that make one side's partisans unhappy, they stay homme." That being the case, both political parties are now spending significant time and money to search out those issues that they believe can be hyped in commercials or leaked to the press that will insure that selected "partisans" are "unhappy" and, therefore, motivated to stay home on election day. Since both sides are now courting the same well-to-do voter base, it is largely the poor who are being encouraged to stay at home so that their conflicting interests don't muddy up the political waters for either party.

By 1994, this misuse of technology, coupled with the increasing emergence of an apathy-enhancing one-party system designed to appeal to wealthy constituents, had helped to reduce voter turnout to a measly 38 percent of those registered. We are often told that the "common person" no longer believes that his or her vote counts, but we are rarely informed that such political intuition is, for the most part, by design.

p131
The growing cost of political campaigns has greatly increased the influence of those who provide politicians with campaign funds. In addition, this need for massive amounts of money has become the central force in a process that has caused the Democratic and Republican Parties to become increasingly blended and indistinguishable, as they have adopted many of each other's platform positions, including a nearly universal acceptance of the hard-on-crime position.

p132
It can be argued, and many have done so, that modern campaign financing is one of the most destructive forces in America at the end of the twentieth century. That's because, in its current form, our process of funding elections has resulted in nothing short of our turning over the reins of our government to those who pick up the tab for the campaigns. Let's take a look at the political money supply, starting with the donor class-that all-powerful .0025 percent of the individuals in the United States who give money to politicians.

So who is in the donor class? What do they look like? What do they believe in? Well, first of all they are wealthy. Many are billionaires, or at least millionaires. A full one-fifth reported annual incomes of over $500,000, and four-fifths made at least $100,000. Ninety-five percent are white. Eighty percent are men. And although over 80 percent of all donors are over the age of forty-five, at least 62 percent of those are over the age of sixty. Since it is these wealthy white men who have the ear of our elected officials, it is important to understand what messages they are whispering.

A 1998 study conducted by the Joyce Foundation of Chicago set out to do just that. The study found that on the whole, those who composed the donor class shared the same values. They are generally conservative on economic issues. More than one-half are in favor of tax cuts even if they have to come at the expense of public services. Most are adamantly opposed to any form of national health-care insurance. They oppose any new spending aimed at reducing the effects of poverty. They believe that the free-market system should be allowed to operate unencumbered by government, and they oppose any cuts in the defense budget. Incredibly, these are the shared values of both Democrat and Republican campaign donors, so it should come as no surprise that this list of donor opinions reads like the political platform of both parties during the last ten years.

p134
The poll-driven consultants and those supplying campaign funds believe that putting forward a position on an issue that goes against such strong popular opinion could well result in defeat at election time, and no one giving money wants to take a chance on wasting it on a losing campaign.

p135
Peter Carlson of the Bureau of Prisons
The American public is growing impatient with hearing about the horror stories of crime in our streets . . . and the number one subject in every political poll in the land is public safety. Our legislative bodies are reacting to public opinion-voices are really being heard-and elected representatives are creating our future in the prison business.

p137
What I am describing is the new "natural-selection" process of American politics. For the most part, only candidates holding positions deemed proper by the money supply and the consultants are able to rise to power. Candidates who are hard on crime are seen as more viable because their crime position is in tune with the vast majority of the targeted electorate according to the polls. Such anticrime candidates are therefore the recipients of more campaign funds because they hold this popular position, and in turn, these funds make them more likely to win and stay in office. As a result of this selection process being in effect over the last two decades, the vast majority of those left in office at the end of the century are the men and woman who have always been in favor of hard-on-crime sentencing measures or those who have conveniently become hard on crime in order to stay in office. Those who might have held a position contrary to the hard-on-crime stance have been weeded out to a significant degree over the course of time.

Because of this weeding process, the public either hears the persuasive propaganda of hard-on-crime rhetoric that confirms their media-induced impression that crime is very violent and pervasive, or they hear silence from the few remaining anomalies of modern political evolution who oppose the current crime policies. This lack of debate all but ensures that the public's opinion will not change regarding crime; which means the poll results will not change; which means the recommendations of the consultants to the political money supply will not change; which means that the selection process will continue and that the prison population will likely keep growing year after year, election after election.

p138
"Phase two" of the campaign-finance system takes place postelection, or in the case of incumbents, anytime after a campaign contribution has been made. It is in this phase of the process that campaign contributors get what they paid for-access for the purpose of influencing particular policy decisions. In phase one, the pressure on the politician is exerted by public opinion polls and the necessity to do whatever it takes to win the election. In phase two, politicians are expected to repay contributors in very specific ways such as introducing or supporting legislation that will financially benefit the particular industries that have filled the campaign coffers.

Before we move on, I should point out that many politicians, most of them, in fact, readily admit that our current system for funding campaigns is broken and that they do not like it. I believe that most who voice this opinion are sincere. However, with this broken system so heavily favoring the incumbents-the only ones with the power to dismantle it-no one has been sincere enough to fix the system so far. Every year, members of both parties decry the abuses of the modern system for funding campaigns. And every year, the same politicians fail to reach agreement on how to correct the situation. It's like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray relives the same twenty-four-hour period over and over again. Of course, following, and even during, this public display of contempt regarding campaign finance, the incumbents of both parties are busy exploiting the corrupt system to its fullest because it all but ensures their reelection.

As a sign of just how out of control things have become in our system of financing campaigns, the act of raising money is now the single most important and time consuming part of the job for our elected officials.

p144
GE and Westinghouse do have a direct vested interest in increasing the prison population through their manufacture of products designed for law enforcement and corrections as well as through their funding of prison construction.

p145
There were two groups in California that lobbied hard for three strikes-the NRA and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the union that represents the state's prison guards, parole officers, and prison counselors.

p146
In 1977, California housed 19,600 inmates. In 1998, that number had grown to 159,000. California now runs the biggest prison system in the Western world. It houses more inmates on any given day than do the countries of France, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, and Singapore combined.


The Perpetual Prisoner Machine

Index of Website

Home Page