How much have private prison companies spent lobbying Congress and state legislatures since 2010?

1. What the reporting actually documents about state lobbying totals

Institute and investigative counts focused on states produce the clearest, best-documented figures: FollowTheMoney’s analyses show private prison industry lobbying expenditures of $15.7 million for 2009–2016 across 15 states (a period that overlaps 2010–2016) and a separate estimate of $26.2 million spent on state lobbying in 16 states since 2012, demonstrating concentrated and recurring outlays targeted at state legislatures ^{[2] [1]}. Those reports also document heavy concentration in particular states — notably Florida and California — and name GEO Group and CoreCivic as the largest state-level spenders ^{[5] [2]}.

2. What the reporting shows about federal lobbying, and why aggregation is hard

Federal lobbying is reported cycle-by-cycle and company-by-company rather than as a neat industry-wide total across the whole decade; OpenSecrets and news stories cite spikes and examples — the industry recorded $2.75 million in federal lobbying in 2016 as it pushed back against Obama-era policy shifts, and GEO Group reported $1.7 million in federal lobbying in 2017 ^{[3] [1]}. These data points show that federal lobbying added multiple millions in individual years, but the supplied sources don’t contain a single compiled federal-plus-state total spanning 2010–present, so any single-dollar industry-wide sum would require pulling raw disclosures across dozens of filings ^{[6] [4]}.

3. Conservative synthesis and the limits of the available evidence

Putting the best-documented pieces together yields a defensible, conservative statement: private prison companies have spent at least the low tens of millions lobbying state governments since 2010 — with FollowTheMoney’s $26.2 million since 2012 serving as a hard, source-backed anchor for state lobbying — and federal lobbying by major firms contributes at least several additional millions in documented single-year spikes ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}. However, the sources supplied do not permit producing a precise cumulative industry-wide total (federal plus state) for 2010–present without further data collection from OpenSecrets, state disclosure repositories, or the National Institute on Money in Politics ^{[7] [6]}.

4. Why different tallies vary and what that implies about influence

Variation in published tallies stems from differences in scope (state-only vs. federal), time windows (e.g., 2009–2016, since 2012), and which firms and affiliated service-providers are counted; specialist reports tend to exclude local spending and some contractor lobbying, while advocacy tallies sometimes aggregate campaign contributions and lobbying into single “influence” totals ^{[2] [7] [8]}. The practical implication is clear from the reporting: concentrated, persistent lobbying — especially around immigration detention funding and state corrections policy — is a deliberate industry strategy to preserve demand for private beds ^{[9] [1]}.

5. Final takeaways and where to look next

The most defensible claim grounded in the provided reporting is this: documented state lobbying by private prison firms since the early 2010s totals at least the mid‑tens of millions (FollowTheMoney’s $26.2M since 2012 is the strongest state-level anchor), federal lobbying added multiple millions in notable years, and producing a precise industry-wide 2010–present cumulative figure requires compiling federal filings (OpenSecrets) and state disclosure databases that the sources reference but do not fully aggregate in one place ^{[1] [2] [3] [6] [7]}.