The GEO Group, Inc.

File:GEO Group logo.png
Type	Public (NYSE: GEO)
Industry	Outsourced correctional services
Founded	1984 (as Wackenhut Corrections (WCC))
Founder(s)	George Zoley
Headquarters	One Park Place Boca Raton, FL, USA
Area served	USA Australia South Africa United Kingdom
Key people	George Zoley (Chairman) & (CEO)
Revenue	$ 1.27 billion (2010) [1]
Operating income	$ 140.5 million (2010) [1]
Net income	$ 63.5 million (2010) [1]
Total assets	$ 2.424 billion (2010) [1]
Total equity	$ 1.039 billion (2010) [1]
Employees	20,000- 2011 [2]
Subsidiaries	GEO Care, Inc. The GEO Group Australia GEO Transportation, Inc. The GEO Group UK Ltd.
Website	[1]

The GEO Group, Inc. ("GEO") is a company headquartered in One Park Place, Boca Raton, Florida.^[3][4] GEO is a multi-national provider of governmental services specializing in the management of correctional, detention and mental health and residential treatment in North America, Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom. GEO operates a broad range of correctional and detention facilities including maximum, medium and minimum security prisons, for-profit prisons known as immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers and mental health and residential treatment facilities.

History[link]

In 1988, GEO was incorporated as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation and in 2003 GEO's Board of Directors approved a name change to The GEO Group, Inc. As of the fiscal year ended December 28, 2008, GEO managed 59 facilities totaling approximately 53,400 beds worldwide and had an additional 3,586 beds under development at seven facilities, including an expansion and renovation of one vacant facility which it owns and the expansion of six facilities which it currently operates, of which it owns three. Excluding its 200-bed Oak Creek Confinement Center, which is a facility held for sale at December 28, 2008, GEO maintained an average companywide facility occupancy rate of 96.6%.^[5]

The GEO Group owns and operates the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the largest and primary investigative wing of the United States Department of Homeland Security. GEO Group also holds a large number of shares of the Correctional Services Corporation.

On August 12, 2010, Cornell Companies and GEO merged.^[6]

Business segments[link]

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. 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, all of which is currently conducted in the U.S. GEO's Facility construction and design segment primarily consists of contracts with various state, local and federal agencies for the design and construction of facilities for which GEO has been awarded management contracts.^[5]

Risks Related to GEO's Business and Industry[link]

From the Annual Report of The GEO Group, Inc. ^[7]:

"In particular, the demand for our correctional and detention facilities and services and BI’s services could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws. For example, any changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Similarly, reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities. Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us."^[8]

Controversies[link]

A full scale prisoner uprising occurred on April 24, 2007 at the Geo Group-operated New Castle Correctional Facility in Indiana. The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel reported that "Authorities were investigating whether the six-hour fracas that involved about 500 offenders started Tuesday afternoon because some of the newly arrived prisoners from Arizona were upset about their treatment at the medium-security men’s prison."^[9]

Between 2005 and 2009, at least eight people had died at the Geo Group-operated George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the state's only privately run jail. Several of those deaths resulted in lawsuits by family members who say the facility did not provide adequate medical care or proper supervision for offenders. On December 31, 2008, Geo pulled out of operations at this facility, "citing underperformance and frequent litigations" as the reasons.^[10]

In 2008, Sandy Morgan, a schizophrenic woman who suffered from a thyroid condition died at the Delaware County jail where she had been held for six weeks. Family members said she did not receive her medication during her incarceration.^[11]

On April 25, 2008, Kenneth Keith Kallenbach died from cystic fibrosis, an inherited chronic disease after being denied his medication. He had been housed at the jail since mid-March. Kallenbach's mother, Fay, said her son called her a week before his death, asking her to intervene and help him receive better treatment.^[12]

An inmate in 2008 claimed he was denied access to dental care for a cavity, and as a result it festered into an ulcer that burst open requiring three surgeries.^[13]

In November 2010 plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit against the agencies that operate and own the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, saying that the prison authorities allowed abuses and negligence to occur at the facility.^[14] The lawsuit states that prison guards engaged in sexual intercourse with the prisoners and smuggled illegal drugs into the facilities, and that prison authorities denied education and medical care. As of that month the prison has about 1,200 prisoners ages 13–22; the lawsuit says that half of the prisoners are incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.^[15] Weeks prior to the filing of the lawsuit, United States Department of Justice officials informed Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour that the department had started an investigation concerning the prison.^[16] GEO settled the lawsuit in February 2012 and it was agreed to move the remaining youths from the prison to more suitable locations that conform to juvenile standards. ^[17] Former Walnut Grove YCF warden and 8-term mayor, William Grady Sims, resigned and pleaded guilty to removing a female inmate to a motel for sex and pressuring her to lie about it. He faces up to 20 years in Federal prison. Sims also owned 18 vending machines inside the prison. ^[18]

References[link]

External links[link]

	Miami portal
	Companies portal

• Official website

GEO or Geo may refer to any of the following:

In computational & scientific use:

• GEO (magazine), a popular scientific magazine
• GEO 600, a detector for gravitational radiation
• Global Environment Outlook, an environmental assessment produced by the United Nations
• Geo (microformat), a microformat for marking up geographical coordinates in (X)HTML
• Geo URI, a IETF proposed standard for making URIs for physical locations
• Gene Expression Omnibus, a National Center for Biotechnology Information database for gene expression
• Geostationary Earth orbit, another name for geostationary orbit, a geosynchronous orbit directly above the Earth's equator.

In commercial use:

• Geo (marketing), a discipline within marketing analysis
• Geo TV, a leading television channel in Pakistan
• Geo (automobile), a defunct brand of entry-level cars produced by General Motors
• GEO Group, a prison corporation

People:

Look up Geo. in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Geo. is sometimes an abbreviation of the name George
• Rosan Geoman, known as Geo, a German music producer and composer
• Geo Bogza, a Romanian poet and essayist
• Geo Stelar is the main protagonist in Mega Man Star Force
• Christian Geo Heltboe, Danish comedian known by his middle name Geo

As a group:

• Grupo Especial de Operaciones, a division of the Spanish police
• General Education Officer, the basic rank of teachers of the Ministry of Education in Singapore
• Group on Earth Observations, an intergovernmental organization

As a place:

• GEO, the IATA code for Cheddi Jagan International Airport
• Estadio Casas GEO, stadium in Mexicali, Mexico
• Geo (landscape), a creek (inlet) or gulley in the Orkney and Shetland Islands
• The IOC country code and three letter country code for  Georgia, a Eurasian country
• Geo City, a fictional city in the videogame Raw Danger

As a prefix: geo- is taken from the Greek word γη or γαια meaning "earth", usually in the sense of "ground or land". Geo- is thus a prefix for many words dealing in some way with the earth, including:

Look up geo-, geography, geology, geopolitics, or geothermal in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Geography, the study of the Earth and its features
  • Geology, the study of the Earth's structure
  • Geopolitics, the analysis of history, geography and social science with respect to international politics
  • Geodesy, also known as geodetics, the study of the measurement and representation of the earth

• Geometer moth, the larvae of which appear to "measure the earth" as they move in a looping fashion
• Geometry, the study of spatial relationships
  • Geocentric, a model of the universe that places the earth at its centre
    • Geostationary orbit, a circular orbit directly above the Earth's equator
    • Geosynchronous orbit, an orbit that has the same period as the Earth's sidereal rotation

• Geothermal (geology), heat sources from within the Earth
  • Geo-exchange, a heating and cooling system

• Geocaching, an outdoor activity that involves using navigational techniques to find geocaches

• Geocoding or GeoTagging, encoding coordinates in to features, images, web pages and other data records
  • Geolocation, the science of determining the real-world location of a website or website visitor

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

Look up group in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

A group is a number of things or persons being in some relation to one another.

Mathematics[link]

• Group (mathematics), a set together with a binary operation satisfying certain algebraic conditions
  • Group theory, the study of groups
  • Group action, a way of describing the symmetries of objects using groups
  • Group isomorphism, a one-to-one correspondence (function) between two groups which respects the given group operations
  • Group object, a kind of generalization of a group which is built on more complicated structures than sets

Science[link]

Chemistry

• Functional group, a functional entity consisting of certain atoms whose presence provides a certain property to a molecule
• Group (periodic table), a column in the periodic table of chemical elements

Biology

• Cultivar group, a formal classification category in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP)
• Group selection, in evolutionary biology, the idea that alleles can become fixed or spread in a population because of the benefits they bestow upon groups of organisms

Cosmology

• Galaxy groups and clusters, a small number of galaxies near each other
  • Local Group, the group containing the Milky Way Galaxy

Other

• Group delay and phase delay
• a set of lenses stacked together
• Group (stratigraphy), in geology, a lithostratigraphical unit; a group consists of formations, or rock strata.

Business[link]

• Business group, a legal entity comprising several companies

Sociology[link]

• Social groups, a description of various human groups
  • Peer group
  • Working group
  • Interest group
• Group action (sociology)
• Group affective tone
• Group aggression
• Group attribution error
• Group behaviour
• Group cohesiveness
• Group conflict
• Group development
• Group dynamics
• Group guilt
• Group narcissism
• Group polarization
• Group psychological abuse
• Group scapegoating
• Group-serving bias

Computing and the internet[link]

• Group (computing), a collection of users or other objects
  • Group identifier (Unix)
• Group editor, a program that allows many people to edit a shared document over a computer network
• Usenet newsgroup

Military[link]

• Army group
• Group (air force), an air force formation
• Group Captain

Other uses[link]

• Breed Groups (dog), the group or category to which breeds of dogs are assigned by kennel clubs
• Group (auto racing), a category of car allowed to compete in auto racing.
• Group insurance covering people with common characteristics
• A musical ensemble:
  • Boy band
  • Girl group
  • Groupies

See also[link]

• Grouping (disambiguation)
• The Group (disambiguation)
• Functional group (disambiguation)

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.