Although he’s now widely known as the moderate Republican choice for 2016, Bush ran multiple campaigns for Florida governor while promoting the “deinvention of government” through broad privatization and the rapid shrinking of the public sector—including the transformation of the state's prison system into a for-profit industry.
Now a national candidate facing a public much more skeptical of private prisons and harsh sentencing, Bush currently supports relatively liberal criminal justice reforms and lighter sentencing laws. In the 1990s, however, he played the conservative tough-on-crime issue at top volume.
“People now cannot walk on their streets without fear of crime!" Bush said during his 1993 gubernatorial campaign. "The simple fact is we are not safe. Not in our homes, not anywhere.”
While Florida crime had just begun a 20-year decline that continues to this day, Bush spent much of the 1990s pushing to build more for-profit prisons in the Sunshine State and around the country, with the stated dual-goals of putting as many criminals in jail as possible and saving taxpayer money at the same time.
“Our criminal justice system is also an obvious target for privatization,” Bush wrote in
a 1995 essay in
Imprimis, an influential conservative publication. “Our prison population has doubled in recent years, and we are spending billions of dollars on prison construction and operation each year. But, according to a number of independent estimates, partial privatization could save an incredible sum—as much as 10-20 percent.”
In fact, Florida's private prisons have notoriously had
trouble reaching even the state-mandated 7 percent savings at several institutions.
Both companies were paid $90 million annually despite audits showing the prisons weren't being run as efficiently as state law required, the
St. Petersburg Times reported.
Nationwide, the industry's profits have gone up close to 500 percent since Bush first wrote about "deinventing government."
Neither Bush nor Bush's spokesperson responded to our requests for comment.
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Jeb Bush in ‘95: We need more for-profit prisons