The GEO Group Inc

GEO Group opened its first U.S. prison in the late-1980s. The company operates its prisons under county, state, or federal contracts under three business models. Under the first, it owns and manages prisons; under the second, it manages government-owned prisons through manage-only contracts; and under the third, it leases some of its prisons to third parties for use by government agencies.

As of 2023, GEO Group owns, manages, and/or leases out 49 prisons and jails, including immigration jails, in the U.S. Operated on behalf of ICE, USMS, the BOP, and State Departments of Corrections, these prisons and jails incarcerated over 62,000 people in 2023. Some are currently empty (“idle”).

GEO Group prisons throughout the country have long faced allegations of inhumane living conditions, understaffing, violence, inadequate medical care, forced prison labor (see more below), physical and sexual abuse (including illegal strip searches), overcrowding, “staff corruption,” prolonged use of solitary confinement, and other problems. In 2023, for example, a man incarcerated at the then GEO-operated Lawton Correctional and Rehabilitation Facility in Oklahoma died after prison guards locked him in a cell, with life-threatening injuries, for hours without care. The company discontinued its contract for the prison in June 2024, claiming issues with funding and “staff recruitment and retention.”

Until 2021, GEO Group owned and operated Abraxas, a youth and family “residential treatment” company that ran “youth centers” for “hard-to-place juvenile populations.” One of its youth jails, Abraxas Academy in Morgantown, Penn., was reportedly used to hold migrant teenagers detained by ICE. The center was cited by state regulators for sexual harassment and abuse, as well as excessive use of force in restraining children. In 2018, an employee pled guilty to sexually harassing and assaulting an Abraxas “resident,” and at least one other employee was terminated after being caught on video physically assaulting a child. At the Abraxas-Hector Garza Center in San Antonio, Texas, monitors found that 81% of children held there in 2020 had reported being put in painful restraints.

In July 2021, GEO Group divested the operational side of Abraxas, which became a nonprofit organization. The company still retains ownership of the buildings that Abraxas operates in and holds lease agreements with Abraxas for its six youth jails.

GEO Group owns and/or manages 28 immigration jails on behalf of ICE and USMS, with a total capacity of approximately 30,500 people. ICE contracts accounted for 42.7% of GEO Group’s annual revenue in 2023. ICE pays the company a per diem rate based on the number of immigrants it imprisons. In 2022, for example, a contract between ICE and GEO Group for the company’s operation of ICE’s LaSalle Processing Center stipulated a guaranteed minimum of 1,170 jailed immigrants at a rate of $76.64 per bed each day (approximately $2.7 million a month).

ICE is the single largest client of GEO Group, accounting for 42.7% of the company’s total revenues in 2023. Following the Trump administration’s announcement in 2018 of its “zero-tolerance” immigration policy and plans to add 15,000 more beds to facilitate family detention, GEO Group’s stock prices increased by 1.79%. In 2020, just before Biden took office, ICE awarded the company a new 10-year contract for the continued operation of its South Texas ICE Processing Center. Organizers and advocates have observed that ICE deliberately extended this contract by an unusually long period of time in order to extend “the harm of this administration far beyond Trump’s term in office.”

While the Biden administration’s executive order regarding private prisons does not apply to contracts with ICE, GEO Group has stated that changes in federal immigration policies and changes in federal immigration policies may impact the government’s use of public-private partnerships with prisons and immigration jails and therefore negatively affect the company’s contracts with ICE. The company has also identified “declines in crossings and apprehensions along the Southwest border” as a risk to its shareholders.

GEO Group has lied about its involvement in family separation. Since 2014, the company has managed the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center, an ICE jail designed to hold up to 1,328 people. The immigration jail previously held up to 830 migrant families with children until 2021, when ICE announced it would instead begin using it as a short-term “reception center” for detained immigrants. The company claimed that it “has never had any involvement, in any way” with the separation of families.

Like its other prisons, GEO Group’s immigration jails have been implicated in numerous human rights abuses, including sexual abuse, forced labor (see below), medical neglect, spying, excessive use of solitary confinement, deprivation of food and recreation time, and other inhumane conditions that have resulted in deaths and self-deportations.

GEO Group has operations in Australia, Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. In addition to managing three prisons in Australia, one in South Africa, and one “immigration removal centre” in the U.K., the company has provided services for the design and construction of 11 new prisons and for the renovation and expansion of two additional prisons abroad. As of 2023, it provides primary health services to thirteen public prisons in Australia and, through its GEOAmey joint venture, provides transportation services to prisons and immigration jails in the U.K. In 2023, these international operations accounted for just over 10% of its total revenues.

As with its U.S. prisons and immigration jails, GEO’s operations abroad have been linked to various human rights abuses and incidents of violence and death. In the U.K., for example, individuals including victims of torture and those found to be at the highest risk of mental health–related problems have been held at the GEO-managed Dungavel House immigration jail for “unnecessarily prolonged” periods of time. In Australia, the company has been implicated multiple times in the mistreatment and deaths of aboriginal individuals incarcerated in its prisons, including in 2021, 2020, and 2015. Similar incidents have occurred at the company’s Kutama-Sinthumule Correctional Centre, where, in 2014, guards reportedly left incarcerated people locked in cells for days with no access to food or medication, leading to riots.

GEO Group has reported that it will continue to expand its international operations, capitalizing on “foreign governments’ initiatives to enter into public-private partnerships for secure services.”

GEO Group routinely uses prison labor as part of its prison operations. For as little as 50 cents per day, people incarcerated in the company’s prisons and assigned to “facility work programs” cook and serve food, operate commissaries, launder clothing, clean common areas, landscape, or perform other prison maintenance. This labor saves GEO Group millions of dollars each year.

In addition to working prison maintenance and operations jobs, some people held in GEO Group prisons work for specialized industries, such as metal fabrication, manufacturing, woodwork, horticulture, auto mechanics, commercial cleaning, carpentry, painting, and plumbing. Some of these programs operate within the prisons, such as in two New Mexico prisons in Guadalupe and Lea County, which house “state industry programs.” Other programs operate outside GEO Group’s prisons. For example, in 2016, GEO Group’s Phoenix West prison in Arizona established an off-site partnership with local construction company Erickson Framing.

Others incarcerated in GEO Group prisons  participate in voluntary “community service” work programs. For example, some people incarcerated at the company’s New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana are required to complete an annual 365 hours of unpaid community work, which has included farming and harvesting produce, repairing town property, and picking up trash along highways. In 2017, New Castle’s prison workers performed 24,349 hours of unpaid labor that, at minimum-wage rates, would have cost the state $176,000. In 2020, work crews from Fulham Correctional Centre in Australia were assigned to months of similar, unpaid “community projects.”

While GEO Group presents prison jobs as voluntary work programs, vocational training courses, or community service opportunities, its “inmate handbooks” reveal that these jobs are often performed under the threat of punishment. According to one such handbook from a Pennsylvania prison, those who refuse to work or encourage others to refuse to work may lose privileges, including commissary and “good time” earnings; be assigned to administrative segregation; or be placed under disciplinary custody status. Another handbook from a New Mexico prison stated that “failing to report to work” constitutes “escape without force” and can be punished by up to 365 days of “punitive segregation” and the loss of privileges, including all “good time” earnings. In 2020, the NAACP and a group of people incarcerated in three GEO Group prisons in Arizona filed a lawsuit alleging that the company’s use of prison labor is akin to slavery. The case is still pending as of April 2022.

GEO Group also routinely uses forced labor in immigration jails that it operates on behalf of ICE. More than 50,000 immigrants have been working in the company’s immigration jails without pay or for $1 a day, according to a 2014 lawsuit filed by immigrants held in ICE’s immigration jail in Aurora, Colo. While the case is still pending as of March 2022,  it produced multiple documents that shed light on the company’s practices. Under the company’s sanitation policy for its Aurora jail, immigrants were required to work as janitors. The jail’s 2013 “detainee handbook” further specified that “[e]ncouraging others to participate in a work stoppage or refusing to work” may be punishable by disciplinary segregation or the loss of privileges, including commissary.

Some immigrants also worked in “voluntary work programs” for $1 a day, performing prison maintenance and operations tasks such as stripping and waxing floors, doing laundry, preparing food, cutting hair, and working as library aides. Aurora’s 2012 Detainee Work Plan shows that work shifts last between three and eight hours, and that workers are paid $1 per day regardless of the number of hours they work. According to one account, during a single month in 2012, work performed by immigrants in Aurora would have cost GEO Group at least $125,000 in wages had the company hired outside personnel. Instead, the company paid a total of $1,680 for the same labor, and hired only one outside janitor for the entire jail.

Lawsuits were also filed against GEO Group in Washington and California in 2017.The Washington lawsuit alleges a violation of state labor laws. In October 2021, a federal jury in the case determined that GEO Group violated Washington’s minimum wage laws by paying detained workers at its Northwest ICE Processing Center only $1 per day and that it must pay nearly $17.3 million in back pay for the work that they performed. The California lawsuit, which is still pending as of July 2022, claims that forced labor in immigration jails operated by GEO Group violates the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA). The TVPA prohibits forced labor. In two similar lawsuits against CoreCivic, the courts ruled that anti-trafficking laws apply to private immigration jails.

GEO Group is the largest provider of 'community corrections' services in the U.S., owning, managing, and/or leasing out 46 residential community corrections/reentry centers and 85 non-residential reentry centers or Day Reporting Centers (DRCs). The majority of these centers operate under state contracts, although 15 of them operate under contracts with the BOP. Combined, they hold approximately 6,838 people, including children, who are “reenter[ing] the community after incarceration” or who have been diverted there as a so-called “alternative” to incarceration. The company’s DRCs surveil thousands more awaiting trial or on parole or probation via daily check-ins, drug and alcohol monitoring, and “intensive case management.”

GEO Group began its expansion into this industry in 2010, when it started acquiring community corrections services companies. Between 2010 and 2017, it acquired Cornell Companies, a private prison operator that specialized in “corrections and treatment programs” and Community Education Centers (CEC), a private prison company that operated residential reentry centers, halfway houses, and in-prison drug treatment programs. GEO Group’s expansion into this “alternatives to incarceration” industry was, in large part, a strategic response to increased public scrutiny surrounding the use of private prisons. The company has stated that “expansionary projects” and “strategic acquisitions” in the community corrections industry is “accretive to [the] company’s earnings and cash flows.”

Like its prisons, these community corrections and day reporting centers have documented histories of abuse, neglect, and mismanagement. In 2020, for example, The Intercept reported that GEO Group systematically ignored the spread of COVID-19, allowing cases to skyrocket, at its halfway houses throughout the country. A 2020 lawsuit similarly alleged that GEO Group did not observe proper COVID safety and health protocols at one of its halfway houses in Texas and threatened individuals if they called any agencies to report deaths or request information or testing.

In 2019, more than 200 reentry center “residents” in Houston sued the company, alleging that during Hurricane Harvey they were left in a flooded GEO Group halfway house surrounded by toxic waste, without food, clean water, or medical care.

In line with GEO Group’s attempt to reposition itself as a provider of reentry services and alternatives to incarceration, the company has expanded its reach within the electronic monitoring (EM), or e-carceration, industry through its subsidiary BI Incorporated (BI). As of 2021, GEO Group monitors over 150,000 individuals “through an array of technology products including radio frequency, GPS, and alcohol monitoring devices.”

Founded in 1978 to monitor cattle and livestock, BI now effectively employs the same technology to monitor and control people. In 2018, BI monitored over 144,000 people across all 50 U.S. states using EM technology. BI holds contracts with local, state, and federal law enforcement and prison agencies to monitor immigrants and individuals within the criminal punishment system.In 2004, ICE contracted BI to be the exclusive EM technology provider for its expanded “Alternatives to Detention” program called Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP). The ISAP program aimed to reduce the costs of ICE detaining refugees and migrants during their asylum or deportation proceedings by placing them on ankle bracelets that monitored their movements 24/7. BI still holds the exclusive contract for ISAP, which was renewed in 2020 for five years and is worth a potential $2.2 billion.

GEO Group purchased BI for $145 million in 2011. With this acquisition, the company “ensured that whether ICE is expanding detention or expanding alternative forms of detention, they’re getting paid.” While the “Alternatives to Detention Program'' is purportedly designed to focus on people with “serious criminal histories” or who pose a threat to public safety, 89% of individuals in ISAP are not considered “dangerous or violent” by ICE’s own criteria. In 2015, immigration attorneys in Texas filed a formal complaint to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, documenting how asylum seekers were deliberately misled and/or coerced into agreeing to wear ankle bracelets in order to be released from detention. The complaints included charges that personnel threatened to withhold medical care for their children if they chose to seek bond hearings instead of agreeing to wear the ankle monitors.

BI also oversees a number of EM subsidiaries purchased by GEO Group. For example, Protocol Criminal Justice Inc, an EM company acquired by GEO Group in 2014 for $13 million, manages tracking data for monitored individuals on BI EM technologies.

As part of its private prison operations, GEO Group provides prison transportation services via its “in-house transportation division,” GEO Transportation, Inc. (GTI). GTI provides armed, secure ground and air transportation services to federal, state, and local prison authorities across all 50 U.S. states. The company boasts that it has transported over 8.1 million incarcerated people since its founding in 2007.

As part of its involvement in immigrant detention, GTI provides ICE with transportation services, including deportation flights. In 2021, for example, DHS awarded the company a $4.8 million contract for “emergency Haitian migrants flight services.” That month, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers from Haiti were deported via “repatriation flights” from Texas.

A 2016 GEO report also revealed that the company purchased two “New Specialized Transport Buses” for its Karnes County Residential Center. The buses, outfitted with child safety seats, were intended to be used to transport children ages four to 17 to “field trips,” court appearances, and immigration appointments. The buses, lined with infant car seats, have been criticized as “prison buses for babies.”