by Michael Fortino, Ph.D.
In August 2016, just after an Obama administration decision to stop contracting with for-profit private prisons sent its stock price tumbling, GEO Group, Inc., the country’s largest private prison contractor, donated $100,000 to a super PAC aligned with then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump.
Through a wholly owned subsidiary called GEO Corrections Holdings, Florida-based GEO Group, Inc. – whose $2.33 billion in 2018 revenues would have been threatened had Hillary Clinton won and continued Obama’s policy – then gave another $125,000 a week before the election to the Trump-aligned super PAC, known as “Rebuilding America Now” and chaired by Florida’s then-governor and current senator, Rick Scott. When Trump won, GEO Group stock quickly rose 21%, and it gave an additional $250,000 to his inauguration committee.
In February 2017, a month after Trump’s inauguration, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he was rescinding the Obama policy and expanding federal use of private prison contractors instead. Two months later, the administration awarded a $110 million, 10-year federal contract to GEO Group for construction and operation of a 1,000-bed facility in Texas to house undocumented detainees for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the $10 billion federal agency primarily tasked with implementing ...
by Scott Grammer
GEO Group, a private prison company, had hired Edelman, the world’s largest public relations firm, to improve its public image. But Edelman found itself with a PR problem of its own because of its ties to GEO. The company has contracts from the Trump administration to run immigrant detention centers where children were being forcibly separated from their parents and where members of Congress were not being allowed to visit.
Just two months after landing the deal, Edelman decided to end the contract with GEO Group on July 12, 2019, mainly because its own employees objected to it. Edelman feared that news of the contract would be leaked. Fishbowl, an Internet-based networking application for professionals, was used by Edelman employees to discuss the contract with GEO Group. According to the New York Times, one employee using Fishbowl wrote, “I am beyond disturbed.” Another said, “This is an inherently political, moral and values-based issue.”
Edelman is not the first or only firm to drop ties with GEO Group and its main competitor, CoreCivic, for fear of soiling its own image. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, BMP Paribas and Wells Fargo have stepped back from private prison ...
by Scott Grammer
Massachusetts Democratic Senator and current presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren introduced a plan last June that would essentially ban all government entities, at any level, from contracting with private prison companies.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, another presidential candidate, also favors banning private prisons. If elected president, Sanders is considering issuing numerous executive actions to circumvent Congress, including one that would abolish private prisons, The Washington Post reported in January.
Warren’s bill has no chance of passing the current Congress. Still, Warren’s idea did not go over well with private prison companies. Politico reports that CoreCivic’s spokesperson Amanda Gilchrist said, “Our company helps keep communities safe, enrolls thousands of inmates in reentry programs that prepare them for life after prison and saves taxpayers millions. It’s unfortunate that politicians advocate against these benefits without themselves providing any solutions to the serious challenges our corrections and detention systems face.”
In January 2020 Warren took her stance farther in a letter to officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) as well as those at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to express her concern over a series of moves into the private prison industry by high-level BOP and ICE employees during ...
by Kevin Bliss
Eagle Pass Correctional Facility (EPCF) have been investigated by the Maverick County, Texas Sheriff’s Office, the Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC), Corizon Correctional Healthcare, and the GEO Group after 56-year-old Kim Sargent Taylor died in January 2019, of “natural causes.” Taylor had been to medical a week earlier complaining of a sore throat, followed by a rising temperature of 101.3, dizziness, and congested lungs. On the night of his death, guards were called because Taylor was pale, sweating, and incoherent. A later report stated that an inexperienced nurse responded supplying subpar medical assistance, which led to his transportation to the local hospital where he was pronounced dead.
EPCF, just southwest of San Antonio, Texas, is GEO Group’s newly acquired prison used to house IDOC’s prisoners, due to overpopulation. It began as a county jail and was later converted in 2018 to meet IDOC’s requirements to house some of their less violent prisoners. Since then, it has been surrounded in controversy because of its poor living conditions. Prisoners and their families have contacted the Idaho American Civil Liberties and the Idaho Press complaining about being locked down 24 hours a day, no access to the grievance procedure, inadequate ...
by David M. Reutter
The superintendent of Pennsylvania’s George W. Hill Correctional Facility, which is run by GEO Group, resigned in November after a media investigation uncovered a buried whistleblower complaint alleging racist and abusive behavior.
John A. Reilly, Jr., was recruited in 2001 as deputy superintendent George W. Hill. “When I came here, it was made clear to me that you’ve got to get up to speed to replace George, if something happens,” Reilly said of Hill, who had health problems. Hill retired in 2008, and Reilly replaced him.
“By then, the jail had attracted notoriety after a series of grim developments, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported this year. “Twelve inmates died at the facility between 2002 and 2008, and lawsuits filed by their families against the prison company resulted in more than half a million dollars in wrongful-death settlements. Two years ago, GEO paid a $7 million settlement to the family of Janene Wallace, a mentally ill 35-year-old woman who had been incarcerated on a probation violation, and then hanged herself after 52 days in solitary confinement.”
One might wonder why an assistant prosecutor like Reilly would be tapped to run a private jail. Critics say it ...
by David M. Reutter
Campaign contributions from private medical provider Wellpath to Virginia’s Loudoun County Sheriff Mike Chapman may be legal under Virginia law but are raising ethical questions. Wellpath is already under federal investigation for a contract renewal in Norfolk County.
Wellpath was known as Correct Care Solutions until October of 2018. Correct Care obtained the contract to provide medical and mental health care to detainees at the Loudoun County Adult Detention Center in 2005. It then began to make thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to former Sheriff Stephen O. Simpson.
Chapman was elected sheriff in 2012, and Correct Care made its first contribution to Chapman’s reelection campaign in 2014. Since then, Chapman has accepted at least $14,750 from the prison-profiteering health-care company. Wellpath has 245 contracts to provide health care to detainees across the nation.
It stays active in the political process. Over a 12-year period, Wellpath and Correct Care contributed around $41,000 to Virginia sheriffs. “This is so widespread and so common, it’s the status quo,” said Max Rose, executive director of Sheriffs for Trusting Communities.
Such contributions are “ethically questionable” said Chapman’s opponent for sheriff, Justin Hannah. “When the Sheriff is accepting political donations in ...
by Matt Clarke
In 2018, Corizon Health was the largest for-profit provider of prisoner health care in the country. It contracted with 534 correctional facilities in 27 states holding about 15 percent of the nation’s prisoners. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, Corizon was sued for malpractice 660 times within five years. It was also subject to millions of dollars in fines and penalties by the governmental entities it contracted with — usually for inadequate staffing. Yet the understaffing and substandard health care continues unabated and prisoner deaths continue to mount while Corizon treats fines, penalties, settlements and jury awards as merely a cost of doing business —not as a catalyst for change to providing adequate health care.
Corizon provides prisoner health care for the Kansas Department of Corrections (DOC). Unlike most entities contracting with Corizon, Kansas provided for oversight of Corizon’s performance by a third party. The University of Kansas Medical Center (UKMC) reviews a sample of health-care records at DOC prisons each year. Perhaps that is why Kansas has assessed Corizon penalties of $1 million for underperformance and $6.4 million for short staffing between July 2015 and December 2018.
When asked for records about its provision of ...
by Ed Lyon
The GEO Group is one of the largest private prison companies in the United States. Its primary reason for existence is to generate profit by warehousing people for the states and federal government. One of GEO’s many prisons is the 1,575-bed Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. Recently renamed the Northwest Processing Center (NPC) in an effort to make the facility appear less onerous, detainees at NPC perform various jobs in the kitchen, laundry and other areas. The detention center holds federal immigrant detainees, who are paid $1.00 per day for their labor – the amount Congress has decreed reimbursable. This practice is similar to that used by Washington State at its Special Commitment Center (SCC) for civilly committed sex offenders on McNeil Island.
Regarding pay for prisoners performing work in Washington prisons, state law exempts prisoners from being paid at all, much less imposing any threshold requirements like $1.00 a day or minimum wage. Wage rates are left to prison administrators’ discretion. The state’s civil commitment system lies outside of that law and is presumably on a par of sorts with the NPC. The NPC has been paying detainee workers a $1.00 per day wage since ...
by David M. Reutter
Nashville’s LGBT Chamber of Commerce (Chamber) has removed for-profit prison company CoreCivic from its membership rolls. The October 8, 2019 decision to return the company’s membership fee came after a vocal outcry from the local LGBT community.
“The voices at our meeting last night were very clear. Their membership was too much for many in our LGBT community,” the Chamber said in a statement. “We heard those concerns and last night our board voted to remove CoreCivic as a member and return their $300 membership fee.”
Speakers at the meeting pointed to the private prison company’s dismal record of poor conditions and abuse inside its facilities, as well as its involvement in detaining immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
PLN has reported on those conditions for years, and has covered numerous reports, audits, incidents and lawsuits involving CoreCivic facilities, often tied to the company’s business model of cutting costs in order to generate profit.
In the current political environment, CoreCivic sees opportunity to grow its business model. The Trump administration’s stance on undocumented immigrants is viewed by the company as a great opportunity. In June 2018, CoreCivic CEO Damon Hininger told investors that ...
by Matt Clarke
On September 30, 2019, U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and U.S. Representatives Mark Pocan and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent letters to five private equity firms – BlueMountain Capital Management, H.I.G. Capital, American Securities, Apax Partners and Platinum Equity.
The firms own companies that provide support services to prisons, including health care, food services and prisoner telephone services. The letters accused the companies of charging exorbitant prices for substandard goods and services while reaping windfall profits, noting that they received over $40 billion in taxpayer funds each year plus money from prisoners and their families. [See: PLN, Aug. 2019, p.22].
The letters from members of Congress expressed “concerns about the rapid spread and effect of private equity investment in many sectors of the economy – including the correctional facility support services industry.” They noted that private equity firms had a history of purchasing companies, stripping them of assets while loading them with debt, and extracting exorbitant fees before selling them for a profit. Other concerns included the role of the private equity firms in consolidation of prison services companies and a steep decline in the quality of services provided. They noted that “three companies – GTL, ...
