Open thread for night owls: NRA campaigns helped build prisons and overfill them'all for the money

Tim Murphy at Mother Jones dug into another role that the gun industry's mouthpiece, National Rifle Association, lobbied for in The Big House That Wayne LaPierre Built:

It sounded like a throwaway line. Toward the end of a four-hour Senate hearing on gun violence last week, Wayne LaPierre, the National Rifle Association's executive vice president of over two decades, took a break from extolling the virtues of assault rifles and waded briefly into new territory: criminal justice reform. "We've supported prison building," LaPierre said. Then he hammered California for releasing tens of thousands of nonviolent offenders per a Supreme Court order'what he'd previously termed "the largest prison break in American history." Tim Murphy But California's overflowing prisons, which the Supreme Court had deemed "cruel and unusual punishment" in 2011 because of squalid conditions, were partly a product of the NRA's creation. Starting in 1992, as part of a now-defunct program called CrimeStrike, the NRA spent millions of dollars pushing a slate of supposedly anti-crime measures across the country that kept America's prisons full'and built new ones to meet the demand. CrimeStrike's legacy is everywhere these days. CrimeStrike arose out of necessity. The NRA had come into its own as a political power during the Reagan era, but by the early 1990s, it was strapped for cash. The organization ran up a $9 million deficit in 1991 and was on pace for a $30 million shortfall in 1992, even as it was preparing to go to the mattresses over assault weapons and background checks. The NRA needed a shot in the arm. 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. [...] 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, CrimeStrike had outlived its usefulness and was quietly phased out. But its accomplishments had been literally set in stone. 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. [...]

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