As the prison population continued to grow steeply throughout the 1990s, the profit margins of private prison corporations such as CCA and GeoGroup continued to increase. Throughout the 1990s, the CCA and GeoGroup were both significant donors to the American Legislative Exchange Council. In 1995, Congress passed another piece of ALEC-influenced legislation, the Prison Industries Act, allowing corporations to pay prison laborers less than the federal minimum wage and divert the difference to constructing facilities for further prison labor.
