narconews | The Clinton Administration took the groundwork laid by Nixon, Reagan and
Bush and embraced and blossomed the expansion and promotion of federal
support for police, enforcement and the War on Drugs with a passion that
was hard to understand unless and until you realized that the American
financial system was deeply dependent on attracting an estimated $500
billion-$1 trillion of annual money laundering. Globalizing corporations
and deepening deficits and housing bubbles required attracting vast
amounts of capital.
Attracting capital also required making the world safe for the
reinvestment of the profits of organized crime and the war machine.
Without growing organized crime and military activities through
government budgets and contracts, the economy would stop centralizing.
The Clinton Administration was to govern a doubling of the federal
prison population.[1]
Whether through subsidy, credit and asset forfeiture kickbacks to
state and local government or increased laws, regulations and federal
sentencing and imprisonment, the supremacy of the federal enforcement
infrastructure and the industry it feeds was to be a Clinton legacy.
One of the first major initiatives by President Bill Clinton was the
Omnibus Crime Bill, signed into law in September 1994. This legislation
implemented mandatory sentencing, authorized $10.5 billion to fund
prison construction that mandatory sentencing would help require,
loosened the rules on allowing federal asset forfeiture teams to keep
and spend the money their operations made from seizing assets, and
provided federal monies for local police. The legislation also provided a
variety of pork for a Clinton Administration vogue constituency —
Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Community Development
Financial Institutions (CDFIs). The CDCs and CDFIs
became instrumental during this period in putting a socially acceptable
face on increasing central control of local finance and shutting off
equity capital to small business.
The potential impact on the private prison industry was significant.
With the bill only through the house, former Attorney General Benjamin
Civiletti joined the board of Wackenhut Corrections, which went public
in July 1994 with an initial public offering of 2.2 million shares. By
the end of 1998, Wackenhut’s stock market value had increased almost ten
times. When I visited their website at that time it offered a feature
that flashed the number of beds they owned and managed. The number
increased as I was watching it — the prison business was growing that
fast.
However, the Clinton Administration did not wait for the Omnibus
Crime Bill to build the federal enforcement infrastructure.
Government-wide, agencies were encouraged to cash in on support in both
Executive Branch and Congress for authorizations and programs — many
justified under the umbrella of the War on Drugs — that allowed agency
personnel to carry weapons, make arrests and generate revenues from
money makers such as civil money penalties and asset forfeitures and
seizures. Indeed, federal enforcement was moving towards a model that
some would call “for profit” faster than one could say “Sheriff of
Nottingham.”
On February 4, 1994, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced Operation Safe Home, a new enforcement program at HUD.
Gore was a former Senator from Tennessee. His hometown of Nashville was
home of the largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation
of America (CCA). He was joined at the press conference by Secretary of
the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen, Attorney General Janet Reno, Director of
Drug Policy Lee Brown and Secretary of HUD Henry Cisneros who said that the Operation Safe Home initiative would claim $800 million of HUD’s
resources. Operation Safe Home was to receive significant support from
the Senate and House appropriations committees. It turned the HUD Inspector
General’s office from an auditor of program areas to a developer of
programs competing for funding with the offices they were supposed to be
auditing — a serious conflict of interest and built-in failure of
government internal controls.
According to the announcement, Operation Safe Home was expected to
“combat violent crime in public and assisted housing.” As part of this
program, the HUD Office of Inspector General
(OIG) coordinated with various federal, state and local enforcement task
forces. Federal agencies that partnered with HUD included the FBI,
the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms (ATF), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the Secret Service,
the U.S. Marshal’s Service, the Postal Inspection Service, the U.S.
Customs Service, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and
the Department of Justice (DOJ). The primary performance measures
reported in the HUD OIG Semi-Annual
Performance Report to Congress for this program are the total number of
asset forfeitures/seizures, equity skimming collections and arrests.
Subsequent intra-agency efforts such as the “ACE” program sponsored by DOJ and initiated by U.S. Attorney’s Offices, working with the DOJ Asset Forfeiture Fund, HUD OIG and HUD Office of General Counsel promoted revenue generating activities as well.
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