Bexar County TX Commissioners’ Court voted to extend the GEO Group’s contract to manage the Central Texas Detention Facility in San Antonio, according to the SA Business Journal.

The 685-bed facility, which is owned by Bexar County, houses detainees for the U.S. Marshals Service. Boca Raton, Fla.-based GEO has managed the facility since 1988. The new contract will have an effective date of April 29, 2009, and will last for 10 years. Officials with GEO expect the latest contract will generate $11 million in annualized operating revenues for the company at full occupancy.

“The Central Texas Detention Facility plays an important role in addressing the need for federal detention bed-space along the southern border of the United States,” says GEO Chairman and CEO George C. Zoley. “We look forward to strengthening our public-private partnership with Bexar County and the U.S. Marshals Service.”

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GEO wants to build a 3,000-bed correctional facility near Florida City, reports the Miami Herald.

If approved, the GEO Group, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections, would build the $100 million complex … in unincorporated Miami-Dade County.  It would add 900 jobs, said Jerry Proctor, a lawyer representing the GEO Group. He presented the company’s plan at Tuesday’s Florida City Commission meeting.  He said GEO is still looking for a tenant, either from the local, state or federal government.  One government agency might be the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE.   ”The facility is an excellent candidate for use by ICE for its detention requirements,” according to a packet given to the Florida City Commission …

At Florida City’s meeting, GEO Group representatives talked about the economic benefits of having the facility if it is built. They estimated that the combined construction and day-to-day operations of the prison would create 900 jobs and generate nearly $28 million in local spending. Florida City leaders responded positively.  ”The prospect of new, good paying jobs coming into the city is always a positive thing,” Mayor Otis Wallace said.

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The agency that oversees Florida’s six privately run prisons needs to ensure that problems found during audits – such as broken alarms and unsanitary infirmaries – are quickly fixed, lawmakers were told Thursday as part of a report reviewing the agency, according to this report by Associated Press:

Audits of private prisons by the Florida Department of Corrections had previously found broken escape sensors and buildings that had not been checked for any attempts by inmates to tunnel out. Audits also found delays in medical care and problems involving contraband.  “Some of these problems were repeated year after year at the same prisons,” said analyst Vic Williams, who summarized the report for lawmakers in testimony before the Senate Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice Appropriations …

An official with the Department of Management Services, the agency that oversees the private prisons, told lawmakers that his agency has already begun to address some of the issues raised by the report.  “We’ve already started the process to implement a lot of these recommendations,” Department of Management Services’ J.D. Solie told the panel …

The state has six private prisons housing approximately 8,000 inmates or about 8 percent of the state’s inmates. The facilities cost the state about $133 million a  year, or some 6 percent of the Department of Corrections’ $2.2 billion budget. The state currently contracts with two private prison companies: Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America and Boca Raton-based GEO Group Inc ..

Among recommendations, the report also said private prisons should be required to track the percentage of inmates who successfully complete substance abuse and education programs.   It also noted that phone calls made from private prisons are more expensive than calls from prisons run by the Department of Corrections. A 15 minute phone call from a private prison costs around $6 while the same call costs 50 cents in a state-run prison, lawmakers were told.   And while families can visit state-run prisons on Saturdays and Sundays, private facilities allow visits either every other weekend or only one of the two weekend days, the report found.

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Law officers and equipment Tuesday moved in and out of a federal prison that was damaged by inmate rioting.

The company that runs the West Texas prison said Saturday’s riot, the second in two months at the Reeves County Detention Center near Pecos, caused “significant” damage.   Authorities said the facility at this time is unable to resume normal operations …

The GEO Group said inmates in two of the center’s three units remain under staff view in a central area.  The Boca Raton, Fla.-based company says inmates remain “cooperative and compliant.”    No serious injuries to staff or inmates were reported.

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Thousands of inmates rioted at the Reeves County Detention Center in Texas on Saturday, the second disturbance at the prison facility in the last two months.

The prison is a 2,400-bed, low-security facility, operated by Geo Group Inc. It houses federal prisoners as well as inmates from other states. CNN reports:

As many as 2,080 inmates from two of the center’s three buildings began fighting in the prison yard about 4:30 p.m. CT, said county Sheriff’s Office Dispatcher Anna Granado.   Authorities from several law enforcement agencies responded to quell the violence. However, officials had not brought the unrest under control as of 1 a.m. Sunday, according to the sheriff’s office.  Officials said they do not know what prompted the riots. Three inmates were hospitalized, including one with a severed finger, the sheriff’s office said.

On December 12, inmates took two workers hostage and set fire to the recreation area at the center in Pecos, located about 430 miles west of Dallas.

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The following analysis is from the Wall Street Journal:

Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.  The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.

Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts. Private prisons housed 7.4% of the country’s 1.59 million incarcerated adults in federal and state prisons as of the middle of 2007, up from 1.57 million in 2006, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, a crime-data-gathering arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.

Corrections Corp., the largest private-prison operator in the U.S., with 64 facilities, has built two prisons this year and expanded nine facilities, and it plans to finish two more in 2009. The Nashville, Tenn., company put 1,680 new prison beds into service in its third quarter, helping boost net income 14% to $37.9 million. “There is going to be a larger opportunity for us in the future,” said Damon Hininger, Corrections Corp.’s president and chief operations officer, in a recent interview.  California has shipped more than 5,100 inmates to private prisons run by Corrections Corp. in Arizona, Mississippi and other states since late 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered emergency measures to control a ballooning state-prison population. Prisons were so overcrowded that hundreds of inmates were sleeping in gyms, according to one report. An additional 2,900 prisoners are scheduled to be transferred to private prisons outside the state by the end of next year, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.   “Private prisons are a short-term solution while we work on long-term solutions, rehabilitation programs and recidivism strategies,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the state’s corrections department.

Geo Group, of Boca Raton, Fla., the second-largest prison company, has built or expanded eight facilities this year in Georgia, Texas, Mississippi and other states, and it plans seven more expansions or new prisons by 2010. Last month, Geo Group was awarded a contract by Florida’s Department of Management Services to design and build a 2,000-bed special-needs prison in that state. Cornell Cos., the nation’s third-largest prison company, recently broke ground on a 1,250-bed private prison for men in Hudson, Colo.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons, the government agency that operates all federal prisons and manages the handling of inmates convicted of federal crimes, has awarded 13 contracts since 1997 to prison companies to build prisons and detention centers that house low-security inmates, primarily “low security criminal aliens,” says Felicia Ponce, a spokeswoman for the agency. The contracts give the bureau “flexibility to manage a rapidly growing inmate population and to help control overcrowding,” Ms. Ponce says.

Outsourcing incarceration to prison companies can reduce a government’s cost of housing those prisoners by as much as 15%, according to a study by the Reason Foundation, a research organization in Los Angeles. Private operators say they can build prisons more quickly and operate them less expensively than governments because their payroll costs are lower and they can consolidate prisoners from many far-flung jurisdictions into facilities located in areas where land and building costs are very low.

Some groups accuse the private prisons of neglecting inmates or of putting them in bad conditions. “Profit is still a motive and it’s structured into the way these prisons are operated,” says Judy Greene, a justice-policy analyst for Justice Strategies, a nonprofit studying prison-sentencing issues and problems. “Just because the system has expanded doesn’t mean there is evidence that conditions have improved.”  The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits involving several prison companies over the past decade alleging poor treatment of inmates. Last year, the organization and other parties filed a lawsuit against Corrections Corp. and the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm in federal court in San Diego, alleging that the company was operating an overcrowded, unsafe immigrant-detention center in that city. Detainees were routinely assigned in groups of three to sleep in two-room cells — meaning one had to sleep on the floor near the toilet — or to temporary beds in recreation rooms and other common spaces, according to the complaint. The suit also alleged that detainees had little access to mental-health care. “We have serious concerns about for-profit prison companies because they are notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners,” says Jody Kent, a public-policy coordinator for the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

The lawsuit was settled in June, with Corrections Corp. and Homeland Security agreeing to limit immigrant detainees to the number of inmates the facility was designed for. Louise Grant, a Corrections Corp. spokeswoman, says the company’s prison practices complied with federal standards and that it regularly discloses capacity levels and other information in federal filings. “Our government partners monitor us daily,” Ms. Grant says. “There is no cutting corners.”

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A private company that operates Indiana’s New Castle Correctional Facility plans to expand the prison’s capacity for about 400 more inmates.

GEO Group said Friday that it would expand the prison from 2,104 to 2,524 beds. The extra beds will be available starting Monday. Indiana Department of Corrections spokesman Randall Koester says GEO Group is opening two housing units of the New Castle facility that have not been used since the prison was opened in 2002. The units will house medium-security adult male inmates.

About 500 inmates from Arizona and Indiana rioted at the prison in April 2007. Eight prisoners and two staff members suffered minor injuries at the prison about 45 miles east of Indianapolis. Koester said all the Arizona inmates have since been returned to that state.

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The Delaware County PA Board of Prison Inspectors didn’t have much of a choice yesterday in deciding which company would run the George W. Hill Correctional Facility next year.

Only one firm in the country was willing to assume the $40 million annual contract left behind by the Florida-based GEO Group, which is skipping town amid a flurry of costly lawsuits and an inability to turn a substantial profit at the 1,883-bed county lockup.

The five-member board awarded the contract to Community Education Centers (CEC), a smaller company that specializes in inmate re-entry programs and, according to its Web site, “believes in the opportunity for redemption” and providing “second chances” to ex-offenders. John Reilly, the jail’s acting superintendent, who oversees GEO’s performance on the county’s behalf, said that CEC will begin managing the prison on Jan. 5 and is expected to retain most of the 500 GEO employees.

The prison, located in Thornbury, has been operated by GEO, formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corp., since 1996 and is the state’s only privatized county jail.  The cost of running the prison – about $43.8 million this year – is the single largest expenditure of county tax dollars in Delaware County’s $316 million annual budget. But officials say that the public-private partnership has saved taxpayers millions.

More at the Philadelphia Daily News.

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The GEO Group has been criminally indicted for the death of an inmate in Texas.

The indictment released Thursday alleges The GEO Group let other inmates fatally beat Gregorio de la Rosa Jr. with padlocks stuffed into socks.  He died four days before his scheduled release from a facility in Raymondville on the southern tip of Texas.  A jury ordered the company to pay de la Rosa’s family $47.5 million in a 2006 civil judgment. He died in 2001.

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From Forbes.com:

GEO Group Inc. said Friday that its Australian subsidiary received a $75 million three-year contract extension for the management of the Fulham Correctional Center.  GEO Australia has managed the 845-bed minimum- to medium-security prison for the State of Victoria Department of Corrections since its opening in 1997.

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