Second Private Sector Prison Company, With A Bad Track Record Vying For A Piece Of Mi

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http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2015/05/second_private_sector_prison_c.html#incart_river

Shades of Aramark?

 

Could this be another case of the state using the private sector to do prison work when the track record of the company in question is in question?

The Aramark private food vendor has produced plenty of headlines over the past six months by allegedly providing lousy food, sex with inmates in the food freezers and a host of other beefs.

 

Enter the GEO Group, a private prison company which operates some 85,000 beds around the country and it wants to add Michigan to its roster. A bill would hire the Florida firm to reopen the moth-balled so-called Punk Prison in Baldwin.

 

Opened under the Engler administration as an experiment in rehabilitating the toughest of the juvenile delinquents, the experiment was a flop.

Rep. Jon Bumstead from up there is hoping to convince his colleagues to give it another go by allowing GEO to bring in convicts from other states.

Union lobbyist Nick Ciaramitaro has seen this movie before.

 

AFSCME opposed Aramark and it opposes GEO.

 

"The corporation has a long track record of abuse, understaffing, and their staff there is under trained. That puts prisoners at risk; that puts employees at risk; and that puts the community surrounding the prison at risk," he laments.

 

The company website contends it produces high quality at cost-effective prices.  Tell that to a federal judge who ruled the GEO prison in Mississippi was a "cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions." The Mississipians canceled the deal.

 

Bumstead is sanguine about the whole thing. "I think a lot of it is unfounded," he contends regarding the company's track record." He observes, "housing bad people, they do bad things."

 

Mr. Ciaramitaro is also worried about the company eventually siphoning off Michigan inmates into the facility in order to fatten the firm's bottom line if it can't make a buck off the crooks from other states.

 

What appeared to be a fast track effort has been slowed down to a crawl in the Senate, where some have raised concerns about the possible "warehousing" of inmates and whether they are given rehab services. That from Sen. Patrick Colebeck, R-Plymouth.

 

GEO is no stranger to Michigan as it ran the original punk prison and various state agencies concluded it was more expensive than many of the other facilities and by closing it, the state would save over $7 million. The company complained the auditor general's report was "skewed." It was finally shuttered but GEO is back for another bite of the prison apple which some folks feel is poisoned.

Related Stories

Michigan House votes to let private prison house high-security inmates from other states

 

[Wild Bill]

The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) is the world's leading provider of correctional, detention, and community reentry services with 106 facilities, approximately 85,500 beds, and 20,000 employees around the globe. GEO's facilities are located in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa.

 

The world's jailer. Coincidentally there was a story about them yesterday. It reads like a Republican wet dream.

 

GEO Group Whistleblower Exposes First Amendment Violations, Lack of Officer Training, and Poor Conditions at the Adelanto Detention Center

 

A former employee of GEO Group - a corporation that operates the Adelanto Detention Center - claims First Amendment violations, lack of proper training for GEO Group staff, extreme work hours, employee intimidation, and overuse of solitary confinement.

 

The former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, recounted in a recording on file with CIVIC that two Muslim men were put into solitary confinement for quietly saying their daily prayers. He attributed these First Amendment violations to a complete lack of officer training.

 

"They are not trained for bunny muffin," he said. "I had to learn everything on my own. They put me in a dorm and then they said, 'Alright. Good luck. See you later.'"

 

He cited overcrowded conditions and a work culture that required guards to do back-to-back 12- and 16-hour shifts, or risk being fired. Despite the lack of training and the extreme over-time hours, he claims that he was responsible for supervising over 100 detainees on his own. According to him, he was warned, "If you can't handle it, you will lose your job."

 

He stated that GEO Group is paid a certain amount of money from the federal government, but then GEO Group is given unbridled discretion to "do whatever the hell they want." In his view, this is not fair to the guards or the detainees.

 

The Adelanto Detention Center, in San Bernardino, California, is owned and operated by GEO Group, which contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to imprison 1,300 men on any given day. ICE pays GEO Group up to $111 per person imprisoned at Adelanto each day. GEO Group is one of the largest private prison corporations in the United States. According to a compilation of federal figures by CIVIC, GEO Group receives more taxpayer dollars than any other ICE contractor. GEO Group's revenues climbed from $1.52 billion in 2013 to $1.69 billion in 2014.

 

Last year, GEO Group began operating family immigration detention facilities that house juveniles. Yet, they acknowledge in their most recent annual report that they are unsure whether they can "minimize the risks and difficulties" involved in operating juvenile correctional facilities while still "yielding an attractive profit margin."

 

GEO Group has been the subject of hundreds of lawsuits, ranging from sexual battery to medical neglect to wrongful death. In 2011, a U.S. citizen died at a GEO-run immigration detention facility in England. A jury found that his death was in part due to medical neglect at the Harmondsworth Removal Centre. A report on Harmondsworth by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Prisons in January 2014 found "shocking cases where a sense of humanity was lost." These cases included long periods of solitary confinement - particularly for Muslims - and medical mismanagement. The U.K.'s Home Office ended its contract with GEO Group that September. Back in the United States, another GEO Group whistleblower won a wrongful termination lawsuit, after he divulged illegal activities at a California facility, including sexual and physical assault, fraud, and mishandled incident reports.

Numerous questions about oversight and accountability have been left unanswered by GEO Group. A government report found that GEO Group's medical mismanagement at Adelanto directly led to the death of at least one detainee, Fernando Dominguez, in March 2012. There also are significant questions regarding GEO Group's responsibility in last month's death of Raul Ernesto Morales-Ramos, also at Adelanto.

 

Last week, the ACLU of Southern California, CIVIC, and eight other legal service providers and human rights organizations formally voiced concerns about the poor quality of health care offered at Adelanto. Our letter, sent directly to ICE Director Sarah Saldaña and other government officials, describes abhorrent accounts of medical negligence and reveals that financial costs form a basis for medical decisions. For example, GEO Group denied a man treatment for his severe hip infection because "it was too expensive." The infection ultimately developed into a life-threatening condition that required a 6-week hospitalization at an outside hospital not affiliated with GEO Group.

Despite GEO Group's embattled reputation, ICE has announced plans to expand the available bed space at Adelanto by 640 beds, and for the first time may house women and LGBTQ individuals at the facility. According to their annual report, GEO Group expects to generate $21 million in additional annualized revenue from this expansion.

 

[trichcycler]

check your investment portfolios, there's a good chance many investors are happily profiting  while secretly supporting these monster industries with their retirement investments. They would not exist if stock holders stopped investing with them.

[AmishRnot4ganja]

check your investment portfolios, there's a good chance many investors are happily profiting  while secretly supporting these monster industries with their retirement investments. They would not exist if stock holders stopped investing with them.

Stockholders don't determine whether or not a company is a viable enterprise. Profit determines it. The stock price is just the value that investors place on the company. The only thing that will shut these companies down is if people begin viewing "prison for profit" as the perverted concept that it is.

 

Policing for profit, I believe, has contributed to the police state atmosphere in which we now live. When police and the courts stop viewing us as citizens and instead see us as dollar signs, we are in a heap-o-trouble.

[trichcycler]

^that.

 

I believe a good vote is a vote with our dollar. Just as the politicians use their dollars to persuade industry. Seems weird to me to complain of private prisons, Dupont, ford Motor company etc, while I drive their cars, invest in their prisons, and wear the  fibers Dupont replaced cannabis with.  Responsibility begins at home I think.  Who among us doesn't view private prisons as a perverted concept it is?   If IRA's and Roths, and 401k's didn't heavily invest in private prisons in our country I suspect their success would be lessened. enough of us believe it to be so profitable that we cannot help ourselves from investing in their future success, regardless of how we see them. Are thy running amuck, or doing exactly what their CEO tells them to, and then we wonder who tells him what to do....... money money money. The fact that the concept of privatized prisons even fruited in America is a scary thought.

[+washtenaut]

GM, you have been beating this drum for quite a while now.  I don't think this is really correct, as Amish4G points out.  You have often compared investing in private prisons with investing in cannabis companies too.

 

You have pointed out several times that investors buying stock in a publicly traded cannabis company are essentially traitors to the common cause around here.  If you wish to point fingers, I think it would be much more accurate to focus on customers of companies rather than stockholders.  For private prisons, these customers are our legislative representatives.

 

Private prisons make money by charging taxpayers X dollars for each prisoner they take in, while spending something less than X to house and feed that prisoner.  Continuing the analogy, cannabis companies will succeed if they can sell their goods to customers for a profit

 

Note, while a company can make money on their stock by putting forth secondary offerings, that is not a sustainable strategy unless the market feels that future profits will grow.  Stock prices reflect the markets' expectations for future company profits.  If the markets don't believe customers will buy a company's product in the future, the stock price falls.  The customers are the key to profits and so to the stock price, not the other way around.

[trichcycler]

very good explanation.^^

  I still cant wrap my head around someone complaining about the successes of private prisons for example, while counting the money they make from dividends paid to them by the same company for the consumer support. Not to say any of us are doing this, but the responsibility must lay with us, the consumer. We already know what the 1%'ers invest in, and why.  both customers/consumers and investors are needed to succeed. Both are responsible for the success of a company I believe.  If nobody bought or invested in Monsanto products and success, they would fail quickly. Consumers may have the first responsibility of course, but both types of supporters are necessary.

 

If I invested in a company attempting to shut down my home grow, assuming I want to support home growing,  shame on me  I maintain.

As a consumer if I eat the foods that are causing me cancer, while complaining of the food quality, shame on me.

If I invest in a company that employs monsters, assuming I complain about companies owned by monsters, shame on me.

 

peace