GEO Group
The GEO Group, Inc. is a publicly traded C corporation headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, that invests in private prisons and mental health facilities in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. The company's facilities include immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers, and mental-health and residential-treatment facilities. GEO also operates government-owned facilities pursuant to management contracts. As of September 30, 2024, the company owned or managed 80,000 beds at 99 facilities, making it the largest prison operator in the United States. In 2019, agencies of the federal government of the United States generated 53% of the company's revenues. Up until 2021 the company was designated as a real estate investment trust, at which time the board of directors elected to reclassify as a C corporation under the stated goal of reducing the company's debt.
The company has been the subject of civil suits in the United States by prisoners and their families for injuries from riots and poor treatment at prisons and immigrant detention facilities. Due to settlement of a class-action suit in 2012 for its management of Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, the GEO Group lost its contract for this and two other Mississippi prisons, which it had been operating since 2010. Related federal investigations of kickback and bribery schemes associated with nearly $1 billion in Mississippi state contracts for prisons and related services have resulted in the criminal prosecution of several public officials in the state. In 2017, the state attorney general announced a civil suit for damages, to recover monies from contracts completed in the period of corruption. In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its intention to phase out contracts with privately operated prisons. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was reviewing its contracts with private firms, which operate several immigrant detention facilities. In the spring of 2017, officials of the Donald Trump administration said they would be reviewing this policy. In September 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would terminate California's contract with GEO's Central Valley Modified Community Correctional Facility in McFarland.
History
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was formed as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation in 1984 after George Zoley presented the idea of a separate prison management company to Wackenhut founder George Wackenhut. It was incorporated as a Wackenhut subsidiary in 1988. In July 1994, the company became a public company via an initial public offering.In 2003, WCC management raised funds to repurchase all common stock held by G4S, and in 2004, the company changed its name to The GEO Group, Inc. In 2005, the company acquired Correctional Services Corporation for $62 million in cash, and the assumption of $124 million in debt. The company sold CSC's juvenile services division to James Slattery, CSC's former CEO, for $3.75 million. Slattery renamed this business as Slattery's Youth Services International. In December 2008, the company opened the 654-bed Maverick County Detention Center in Eagle Pass, Texas.
On August 12, 2010, the company acquired Cornell Companies, formerly Cornell Corrections, for $730 million in stock and cash. In February 2011, GEO acquired BI Incorporated, provider of electronic offender-tracking equipment and services, founded in 1978 and based in Boulder, Colorado, for $415 million. At the time, BI was the exclusive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provider of Intensive Supervision and Appearance Program monitoring and supervision services. In summer 2018, this subsidiary received media attention for the $500 million in contracts it has received from ICE since 2004.
In 2015, GEO launched its Continuum of Care program to assist prisoners in returning to society. In 2016, the firm's revenues totaled $2 billion, and on April 4, 2017, GEO announced the closing of a $360 million cash purchase of Community Education Centers, which owned or managed more than 12,000 beds in the U.S., including over 7,000 community re-entry beds. It provided in-prison treatment services at over 30 government-operated facilities. In January 2020, local Pennsylvania lawmakers announced a potential plan to deprivatize the George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the last private prison in the state, with which GEO Group had a nine-year $495 million county contract. The lawmakers alleged that GEO Group had covered up liabilities at the facility.
In 2018, GEO Group entered into a collaboration with the National Federation of Federal Employees called Reentry Success DC, designed to enhance "GEO Group's pre- and post-release services by connecting returning citizens to gainful employment". The program is available to prisoners returning to Washington, D.C., from the Rivers Correctional Facility in North Carolina. By February 2020, the company had expanded the Continuum of Care program to 18 prisons. Later in 2020, the company also opened its Connection and Intervention Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for this purpose.
Facilities
In 2010, the company was reported to operate more than a dozen facilities in the state of Texas, and nearly three dozen in the rest of the United States. In addition to prison facilities operated under contract with U.S. states, the GEO Group owns and operates the Broward Transitional Center, a 720-bed facility in Pompano Beach, Florida; the Aurora Detention Facility in Colorado; and the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, all under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of the fiscal year ended December 31, 2012, GEO managed 96 facilities worldwide totaling about 73,000 beds, including 65,949 active beds and 6,056 idle beds. The company had an average facility occupancy rate of 95.7% for 2012.Other GEO Group facilities include the Reeves County Detention Complex, a three-part complex in Texas described as the largest private prison in the world. It houses more than 3700 inmates, mostly immigrants held for low-level crimes before being deported after serving their sentences. Riots here by prisoners in 2008 and 2009 because of poor conditions resulted in more than $21 million in damages. A detention center operated by GEO Group in the state of Washington has a capacity of 1,575 immigrant detainees. When ICE had renewed its contract for ten years in 2015, GEO estimated the center would receive $57 million each year, operating at full capacity.
Internationally, in 2010, GEO operated a total of another 10 facilities in Australia, England, South Africa, and Cuba. As of 2016, subsidiary GEO Group Australia operated four prisons, with a fifth facility expected to open in late 2017. In 2023 staff walked out of the Junee Correctional Centre over disputes regarding pay and working conditions. The New South Wales government later announced it would not be renewing GEO Group's contract to manage the facility.
In the UK, GEO Group are associated with several contracts. The organisation runs the Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, expanded in 2013 to hold 249 detainees, male and female. In 2004 the Children's Commissioner for Scotland described conditions at the facility as "morally upsetting" and threatened to report the UK and Scottish governments to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. In London, it runs the Harmondsworth migrant detention centre. This facility can hold up to 661 detainees.
GEO Group is also contracted to the deportation of migrants, operating the Migrant Operations Center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, from 2006 to 2012. In the late 2010s, activists accused the company of detaining immigrants under inhumane conditions while complying with the Trump administration's family separation policy. GEO Group denied claims of separating families or housing unaccompanied minors.
Business segments
GEO conducts its business through four business segments – U.S. corrections segment, international services segment, GEO Care segment, and facility construction and design segment. The U.S. corrections segment primarily encompasses GEO's U.S.-based privatized corrections and detention business for federal and state authorities.The international services segment primarily consists of GEO's privatized corrections and detention operations in South Africa, Australia, and the United Kingdom. International services reviews opportunities to further diversify into related foreign-based governmental-outsourced services on an ongoing basis. The GEO Care segment, which is operated by GEO's wholly owned subsidiary GEO Care, Inc., comprises GEO's privatized mental-health and residential-treatment services business. As of 2016, it conducts this business in the U.S. only. GEO's facility construction and design segment primarily consists of contracts with various state, local, and federal agencies for the design and construction of prison and related facilities for which GEO has been awarded management contracts.
U.S. federal contracts
On August 18, 2016, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Justice Department intended to end its Bureau of Prisons contracts with for-profit prison operators, generally. As of 2015, GEO Group operated 26 federal prison centers, for the departments of both Justice and Homeland Security, which would have been affected by this change in policy. These centers had a total capacity of 35,692 prisoners, representing 45% of the company's revenue.On February 23, 2017, newly confirmed Trump administration Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded the August 2016 guidance. In March 2017, Pablo Paez, GEO Group vice president, defended the legality of his company's $225,000 donation to a pro-Trump political action committee. He said that the donation was made by a subsidiary, GEO Corrections Holdings, Inc., which has no contracts with any governmental agency, rather than directly from GEO Group itself. Democratic Congressmen Emanuel Cleaver and Luis Gutiérrez disputed that claim in a letter to GEO and its rival, CoreCivic. The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint challenging the contribution with the Federal Elections Commission. GEO and CoreCivic each donated $250,000 supporting Trump's inaugural festivities, according to the corporations' spokesmen. GEO gave $275,000 to the pro-Trump super PAC Rebuilding America Now, according to FEC filings. A $100,000 donation had been made only a day after Sally Yates, at the Department of Justice, announced it would be phasing out its for-profit prison and detention contracts.
In April 2018, a wholly owned subsidiary of GEO Group called GEO Acquisitions II gave $125,000 to a political action committee in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act, which bars companies with active contracts with the federal government from making political donations.
On January 26, 2021, United States President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14006 directing the United States Department of Justice to cease the renewal of federal contracts with private prisons. As a result, in 2021 Geo Group reported that they had closed six of their faculties as a result of the contracts not being renewed by the federal government and that their last facility under direct contract with the Bureau of Prisons would phase out in September 2022. They reported that this resulted in a decline of $240 million in revenue for the 2021 fiscal year.
In February 2025, Geo Group announced they would reopen Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey as an immigration detention facility with capacity to detain up to 1,000 people.