Punishment For Sale: Deeply Rooted in Conservative Politics, GEO Knocks on Harper Government’s Door

Anonymous · Mar 20, 2012

http://404systemerror.com/geo-canada/

The imprisonment of human beings at record levels is both a moral failure and an economic one — especially at a time when more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet and when state governments confront enormous fiscal crises. This report finds, however, that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole. While the nation’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry reaps lucrative rewards. As the public good suffers from mass incarceration, private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages, in some cases totaling millions of dollars.

BREAKING: Democracy Now. March 7 2012 : 2 US Judges Plead guilty to selling children to private prisons!

Geo Group Inc. is the second largest for-profit prison operator in the United States where the private prison sector is a $3 billion, and swiftly growing, industry. In its 2010 report the American Justice Policy Institute’s states,

GEO operates 118 correctional, detention, and residential treatment facilities encompassing approximately 80,600 beds around the world.
Founded in 1984 under the name Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, the company solidified its first contract with the Bureau of Immigration and Custody Enforcement, in 1987.
As of 2010, GEO contracts with 13 states, the Federal Bureau of Prison, the U.S. Marshals Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
In 2010, 66 percent ($842 million) of the $842 million in revenue, 47 percent came from corrections contracts with 11 states.
On August 12, 2010 the GEO Group acquired Cornell Companies—a for-profit private prison company with revenues of over $400 million in 2009 in a merger estimated at $730 million.
With the acquisition of Cornell by GEO, the majority of private prisons are now under the management of either GEO or CCA.
According to its report, for-profit prison operators are “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences”. The Justice Policy Institute states that private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business. It states that prison population has increased 16% while incarceration terms increased 120% (federal) and 33% (state).
In November, Al Jazeera also reported on the connections between harsh prison sentences, private prison corporations, and the conservative roots of GEO:

GEO Group also has deep roots in conservative politics. It is a spin-off of the old Wackenhut private eye outfit, organised by George Wackenhut and three other FBI agents.
According to historian Frank J Donner, half of Wackenhut’s staff eventually was made up of former FBI agents, along with other rightists, most notably from the John Birch Society. At the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s it boasted a list of 2.5 million “subversives”, with 10,000 names added every week – the biggest such list outside of the FBI itself. After Watergate, Wackenhut claimed it had gotten rid of the list, and it concentrated on corrections, today running prisons, detention centres and mental health facilities. It designs and builds corrections facilities for states and the federal government, which it then manages on a contract basis.
What is more, recent evidence gathered by Detention Watch indicates that these for-profit prison corporations have also been actively lobbying the federal government to shape immigration detention regulations.

Over the past four years roughly a million immigrants have been incarcerated in dangerous detention facilities in our taxpayer-financed private prison system. A growing number of news reports and investigations confirm that for many of the people funneled into this system, it is a living nightmare. Children were abused, women were raped, and men died from lack of basic medical attention.
It is particularly concerning that GEO is now wanting to operate in Canada, especially with theincrease in human rights violations within GEO facilities. In January, The Examiner reported,

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that an inmate cannot bring suit in a federal court against employees of the major private prison operator Geo Group Inc, formerly called Wackenhut, for allegedly violating the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment but state law can address the claim. The ruling follows dozens of other lawsuits against GEO and hunger strikes by 12,000 California inmates due to major prison abuses, Occupy Washington D.C. targeting GEO due to its human rights violations, and a Methodist church selling its shares in the group saying holding those shares is “incompatible with Bible teachings.”
GEO Group Inc. has been lobbying the Harper government through The Parliament Group. Although privatization of prisons has not quite entered public debate, the push by the Conservative government of controversial and constitutionally questionable legislations – immigration i.e. revoking of citizenship, terrorism, omnibus crime bill, online surveillance, among others – begin to indicate a potential high rate of criminalization of individuals who have been until now considered lawful. Is it difficult to expect GEO to be lobbying for the same kinds of legislation that have ensured them with billions of profit in the U.S.?
It is not one single clause or bill, but the whole spectrum covered by all these legislations that indicates a shift to what we see now in America to have resulted in a major social, fiscal, moral failure.
This is the time to demand Parliament to stop bill C-10, C-11, C-30, disclose lobbying records, and allow for a public debate on the unconstitutional aspects of all these bills.

+ some interesting info on the lobbying group pushing for it
http://404systemerror.com/lobbyists...roup-inc-active-registration-779026-278825-2-

Quentinanon · Mar 21, 2012

Why do so many social cancers come from the United States?
Three prominent scam corporations based in the U.S.: Goldman Sachs, Scientology and now GEO.

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Punishment For Sale: Deeply Rooted in Conservative Politics, GEO Knocks on Harper Government’s Door

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