A major U.S. private prison operator known for inmate abuse, violations, and disregard for the truth reported a 56-percent spike in profit in the first quarter of 2013, due in part to its new strategy for drastically reducing its taxes, the Associated Press reports. During a conference call touting its success, representatives at GEO Group boasted that the company continues to have “solid occupancy rates in mid to high 90s” and that they are optimistic “regarding the outlook for the industry,” in part due to a “growing offender population.” GEO Senior Vice President John Hurley assured investors during the call:

We have a longstanding partnership with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the United States Marshal Service and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. … We continue to see meaningful opportunities for us to partner with all three of these federal agencies, notwithstanding the various issues with the federal budget, which we believe will have no material negative impact on our business. The federal bureau of prisons continues to face capacity constraints coupled with a growing offender population.

The federal prison population has swelled 790 percent since 1980, in large part due to draconian drug and immigration laws. And the United States maintains the title of the world’s number one jailer. Private prison operators nonetheless remain enthusiastic about the prospects of high incarceration rates for business. Representatives on this call shied away from the strong language fellow prison firm Corrections Corporation of America used during its investor call in February, when CEO Damon Hininger assured a strong “continued demand for beds” even after immigration reform. GEO executives explained that they are now taking the position that “discussing our approach and strategies about any particular procurement is really not in the best interest of our company or our shareholders.”

Following a trend of corporations achieving dramatic tax reductions by becoming a real estate investment trust (REIT) – a mechanism historically reserved for firms holding real estate as an investment — both GEO and fellow prison operator Corrections Corporation of America successfully persuaded the Internal Revenue Service recently that they are essentially holding real estate, analogizing prisoners to renters paid for by the government. In reality, the job of running a prison is only nominally about the facility where it’s housed, and primarily about ensuring humane prisoner treatment, inmate rehabilitation, and public safety. But private prison corporations charging “rent” to house prisoners make no more or less money depending on whether they achieve these goals, particularly not when immense political spending to lobby for incarceration and privatization outweighs the public pressure from widely reported abuses at private facilities.

Leading the movement to fight back against the private prison industry, New Hampshire rejected all bids last month to house private prisons in the state, and passed a bill in the House to prohibit the private facilities that profit from incarceration. But the bill died in the Senate Thursday along party lines, with opponents saying they wanted to retain the flexibility to contract with private facilities in the future. The New Hampshire Union Leader reports:

Supporters of the bill said private prisons often maximize profits at the expense of prisoners who are separated from their families. They said private prisons focus on driving costs down while paying scant attention to rehabilitating inmates, which the state has an incentive to do to keep them out of corrections system once they are released.

But opponents say the state should not tie its hands and it needs the flexibility in the future, particularly in an emergency if a prison burned.

Senate Finance Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Morse, R-Salem, said there are no contracts on the horizon for using private prisons or turning the state’s prison system over to a private company to manage.

The bill is not needed, he said, adding that the discussion began two years ago when former Gov. John Lynch proposed looking into prison privatization.

Opponents also said they wanted to have the option to use private prisons in the event of an emergency, even though the bill contained a provision that explicitly allowed the state to transfer inmates to a private facility in an emergency. New Hampshire’s new governor has been vocal in her opposition to private prisons, and under her leadership, the state recently rejected every proposal to site private prisons in the state, citing their insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care. A legislative change, however, would have prevented new proposals from being solicited and considered next year.

Private prisons have a perverse incentive to lobby for imprisonment in a country that already has the world’s highest rate of incarceration. In 2012, both GEO Group and Management & Training Corp. contributed to the campaigns of Republican state officials whose agency commissioned studies of private prison proposals. And Corrections Corporation of America had in the past contributed to the campaigns of then-Gov. John Lynch, who had solicited the private prison bids. As of April 2012, all three private prison firms had at least two lobbyists in the state.

After years of litigation, private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America has agreed to a $600,000 settlement to compensate inmates at a Colorado facility for alleged prison staff-inflicted injuries that landed 13 inmates in the hospital. The injuries resulted from a six-hour 2004 riot that prison officials had failed to prepare for, even though they were warned it was likely to occur, according to the complaint. The injured inmates said they were not even involved in the riot. CBS Denver reports:

Thirteen inmates were taken to the hospital after the riots at the prison located about 45 miles east of Pueblo. [...]

The rioting began when more than 100 inmates refused to return to their cells. Then the situation escalated as inmates set fires and attacked other prisoners.

Guards used tear gas and rubber bullets to try to get the inmates under control. The riot was limited to prison grounds. No inmates escaped.

Court documents reveal that supervisors at the prison ignored a warning that conditions were ripe for a riot despite those signs coming from both inmates and correctional officers.

The problem was that hundreds of prisoners that were transferred from Washington state were angry about being so far away from home. They were also upset that an 18-year-old transferred inmate was placed into isolation earlier that day.

Inmates said they were cuffed, dragged through water and left to sit in their cells that were then flooded with water.

The inmates said they have been pushing for change in the private prison system.

“I would gladly take no money if I knew that CCA was going to be no more, not only in Colorado but everywhere. It really should be up to states to run their own prisons, to supply their own correctional officers and to keep their own inmates in check instead of having someone who has labeled you as a number and is just trying to earn money off of you,” said plaintiff Vance Adams.

CCA is the largest U.S. private prison firm, and the settlement comes in the latest allegation of abuse, violations, and abysmal living conditions at CCA and other private prison facilities. Private prisons are incentivized to maximize profit from imprisonment, spending their resources to lobby for more incarceration and garner new contracts, rather than providing the optimum conditions for rehabilitation. Lawmakers who are the beneficiaries of generous private prison contributions, meanwhile, are incentivized to look the other way as troubling conditions persist.

In a scathing consent decree last year, a federal judge described a Mississippi juvenile detention facility run by private prison company GEO Group as “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk.” A year later, a report by court monitors concluded that Walnut Grove Corrections Facility is still rife with safety concerns, in spite of some progress:

WGJCF continues to be plagued with clear signs of instability as evidenced by, among other things, high rates of inmate assaults, lockdowns, contraband control issues, and management of special populations. The assault rate at WGJCF for 2012 was the highest of all the MDOC facilities. Through the first two months of 2013, assaults involving weapons continue to occur at alarming levels. During the reporting period, there have been at least two facility lockdowns related to serious group assaults at the facility. Inmates continue to routinely be found in possession of serious contraband such as cell phones, weapons, and drugs. For example, in December 2012, a cache of contraband was detected that included, among other things, eight hack-saw blades, 12 cell phones, 22 cell phone chargers, five bags of tobacco, and one knife.

Since last year’s consent decree and the ensuing negative press, Mississippi announced that it would end its contract with GEO, and it removed all children to a state-run detention center. But rather than end private management of that and 2 other GEO-run facilities, the state contracted with another private prison operator, Management and Training Corporation (MTC).

Like all private prison firms, MTC has an incentive to profit from imprisonment rather than rehabilitate. The monitor’s report contains data showing that most of the state’s private prisons have assault rates that are two to three times that of publicly run facilities. At Walnut Grove, there are 27 assaults per 100 inmates, as compared to 7 inmates per 100 – the highest rate in any publicly run facility. Many public facilities have had one or zero assaults per hundred inmates. Mississippi has six private prison facilities, and the nation’s second-highest incarceration rate. Walnut Grove is one of a number of private facilities that have seen alarmingly high levels of abuse, violations and abysmal living conditions.

In an unprecedented experiment fueled by budget concerns, Ohio sold a state prison to Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest private prison corporations in the country, in 2011. Within a year, a state audit of Lake Erie Correctional Institute, the nation’s first privately owned state prison, found rampant abuse and abysmal conditions well below state standards. The CCA prison was given another chance to pass, but flunked another inspection four months later. Independent reports continue to illuminate filthy, broken facilities, as well as much higher rates of crime and violence in and around the prison. On Tuesday, the ACLU of Ohio sent Ohio lawmakers a comprehensive timeline of the prison’s decline since CCA took over.

The Lake Erie prison is now reportedly overcrowded at 130 percent capacity, with single-person cells holding 3 inmates each, according to internal documents obtained by the ACLU. Assaults on guards and other inmates have skyrocketed by 40 percent.

In fact, on the same day the ACLU released their timeline, the Lake Erie prison had to tamp down a series of inmate fights that lead to the confinement of 500 inmates.

Private prison companies have been repeatedly caught cutting corners on space, sanitation, and staff in order to maximize their profits. As a result, deadly riots frequently break out at these facilities, sparked by poor food quality, lack of health care access, and unsanitary conditions.

Despite Lake Erie’s multiple violations of state standards, Ohio has stubbornly maintained its infatuation with private prisons. The state plans to outsource prison food to a private vendor even after a failed experiment using Aramark drove up costs in the late 90s. The vendor is under investigation in Kentucky for multiple contract violations, including serving old food that had not been stored properly and overbilling the state.

Republican-dominated state legislatures are all too eager to ignore the private prison industry’s dismal record. CCA and other companies like GEO are paying well to maintain their massively profitable government contracts; the industry spent $45 million on lobbying in the past decade. CCA has done especially well for itself, rebounding from near bankruptcy in 2000 to rake in a net income of $162 million in 2011.

New Hampshire officials rejected all four bids to privatize its prisons, citing prison operators’ insufficient understanding of court-mandated standards of inmate care, and proposed wages that are half what prison security staff now earn. The decision comes following a recent vote by the state House of Representatives to prohibit private prisons in the state. For-profit prison operators’ interest in profiting off inmates leads to perverse incentives, and many private facilities have been cited for human rights abuses and violations of state law. The Concord Monitor reports:

“The proposals exhibited a lack of understanding of the overarching legal requirements placed upon the (corrections department) relating to the court orders, consent decrees and settlements which, in large part, dictate the administration and operation of their correctional facilities and attendant services to the inmate populations,” read the report. It concluded that meeting those requirements for inmates’ medical and mental health care “appeared to be too great a burden for the vendors.”

The state’s decision to cancel the bid puts prison privatization off the table for now unless Gov. Maggie Hassan or the Legislature directs the state to reissue the bid, said Michael Connor of the state Department of Administrative Services. That seems unlikely. […]

State corrections and administrative service officials began investigating prison privatization in 2011 at the direction of former governor John Lynch and the last Legislature. Four companies submitted 17 proposals that were so voluminous and complex that state officials hired a private consultant, at a cost of $171,000, to help them evaluate the bids.

New Hampshire’s now-governor has been vocal in opposition to private prisons, and her spokesman said this week that “the track record of such arrangements in other states has not demonstrated success in terms of protecting taxpayer dollars while maintaining the highest level of public safety.” The state could, however, solicit new proposals in future years if the House bill to prohibit the facilities is not also approved by the Senate.

Earlier coverage of the bids reports that the three national private prison companies each have at least two lobbyists in the state, reflecting the nationwide efforts of prison firms to lobby for privatization of prison facilities, prison health care, and laws that incarcerate more people in a country that already has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Legislators who support private prisons, many enriched by campaign contributions from these very companies, have claimed that they are a way to save money. But New Hampshire’s report confirms the experiences of other states – that these prisons cost more. New Hampshire spent $171,000 for a consultant to pore through proposals that, in spite of being too unwieldy to be reviewed in-house, failed to address basic state criteria. What’s more, New Hampshire’s report is the latest evidence that private firms’ attempts to cut costs come at the expense of adequate inmate treatment and good wages.

Florida Atlantic University’s football stadium will no longer be named after a notorious private prison corporation, after GEO Group announced Monday it would withdraw its $6 million pledge to the university, saying it has “surprisingly evolved into an ongoing distraction.”

The announcement in February that the university would rename its stadium garnered immediate outcry and protests, and the reaction should not have been so surprising. GEO Group, the second-largest operator of U.S. private prisons, has become known for reports of juvenile abuse, deaths, and riots at its facilities, and has poured money into Florida politics as the legislature considered proposals to privatize the state’s prison health care. GEO executives escalated the controversy over associating college football with prison by falsely denying reports that GEO had overseen a facility that a federal judge described as a “cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts.” The $6 million pledge paid out over 12 years would have been the largest one-time gift in the history of FAU athletics, signaling both the monetary influence of the private prison industry, and its willingness to wield that influence to secure a better reputation. Instead, the company said it would make one $500,000 donation toward the school’s scholarship program.

On Thursday, an Augusta, Ga., judge issued the latest rebuke against a private probation firm that is holding poor individuals criminally responsible for their failure to pay fees. This time, Sentinel Offender Services had held open an arrest warrant on an individual whose probation term for reckless driving had expired two years earlier. When William Stephen Carter was pulled over for speeding, he was arrested and put in jail for allegedly owing court fines and probation fees. Carter says he already paid all his fees, but he could not get out of jail until he paid the $655 Sentinel said he owed.

The case is one of many challenging this perverse jailing of the poor after they fail to keep up with mounting fees on offenses like rolling through stop signs and public drunkenness.  In Georgia, a law passed in part through bribes and corruption that later landed a public official in jail authorizes every county to hire its own private probationers. Georgia is also the only state in which traffic violations are criminal infractions. The result is a dangerous system in which private probation firms are using every means they have to extract funds from low-level offenders, including jail time. NBC News explained the system in a 2012 report:

In most cases, the system works like this: A person is issued a summons for a relatively minor crime, such as speeding, driving with a suspended license or public intoxication. Upon conviction, those who can pay the fine at once usually are done with the Georgia justice system. But in Richmond County, where Census data show nearly a quarter of its population of about 200,000 live in poverty, and others, many cannot pay in full.

Those who can’t are put on private probation. For an additional monthly fee of between $25 and $45, they can pay the fine over the duration of their probation term.

Probationers may also find themselves responsible for additional costs, such as a one-time “start-up” fee of $15, a daily fee of $7 to $12 for electronic monitoring, a $25 photo fee required for DUI convictions, among others.

Adding to the cost, defendants in Georgia must pay $50 to the court to apply for a public defender, though the judge can waive the fee if a defendant is unable to pay.

Under Georgia law, an indigent person cannot be jailed for inability to pay a fine, unless the refusal is willful. But critics say neither courts nor probation companies make an effort to determine ability to pay. Instead, they say, companies routinely use the threat of jail against probationers for failing to pay not only court fines, but the private fees generated by what is known as “offender-funded supervision.”

Even though the lawsuits challenging this practice are pouring in, individuals are still fighting these battles one at a time, and they frequently don’t even have access to a free lawyer to defend them against minor infractions like traffic violations. Even those who do eventually win their case are often held in jail in the interim. In another lawsuit, a man living on monthly veterans benefits of $243 a month was fined $270 for public drunkenness and put on probation. The company charged an additional $15 per month and $39 a month for the privilege of paying monthly installations. Over the period of a year, that cost amounted to $700, and the man was ultimately jailed for failure to pay.

This criminal justice “debt” problem does not only affect individuals on private probation. But private probation services, like private prisons, make money off criminalizing conduct, and have an incentive to lobby for policies that land more people on probation and/or in jail. In fact, Georgia’s private probationers law passed after a private probation company paid the head of the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles $75,000 to lobby for the law. That official was eventually convicted of public corruption, but the law he backed remains on the books. Thanks in no small part to that law, probation firms can and do threaten their debtors with jail when they do not pay — a power debt collectors normally do not have. Moreover, the state House of Representatives is poised to take up a bill next year that would expand the power of private probationers to operate with limited court oversight.

The New Hampshire House voted today to prohibit private prisons in the Granite State, countering progress the industry has made elsewhere around the country.

The New Hampshire Union Leader has more:

The House on Thursday voted to forbid the executive branch from privatizing the state prison system, saying that to do so would shirk the state’s constitutional responsibility to rehabilitate inmates.

The 197-136 roll call by the Democratic -controlled House sent House Bill 443 to the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim, 13-11 majority and the bill’s fate is uncertain, at best.

The legislation, while prohibiting prison privatization, allows the governor to enter into a temporary contract with a private provider during times of a “corrections emergency” with the approval of the Executive Council.

The move is an abrupt shift in New Hampshire, where just last year the legislature had considered a bill to send its entire male prison population to private prisons.

The problems with private prisons are too numerous to spell out in full, but here are a few highlights.

At its core, the entire private prison industry profits when people are imprisoned, meaning stricter drug and immigration laws produce larger profits. Private prison operators know this, and have spent more than $45 million on lobbying federal and state lawmakers over the past decade, including top Republicans influencing the immigration debate. Indeed, the CEO of one of the largest private prison groups, the Corrections Corporation of America, assured investors on a recent call that there would continue to be “strong demand” for prison cells, even after immigration reform. The industry stands to rake in $5.1 billion detaining immigrants alone.

Though conservatives regularly argue privatizing industries makes them leaner and more cost-effective, the opposite is true for prisons. In Arizona, for example, private prisons cost $3.5 million per year more than state-run prisons. In Florida, the state has started laying people off after privatizing prisoners’ health care. In addition, private prisons are riddled with violations, including emergency procedures and cleanliness.

In the wake of the announcement that Florida Atlantic University would name its football stadium after private prison corporation GEO Group for a hefty price, an executive at the company is disseminating false and misleading information about the firm’s practices and documented abuses at its facilities.

In both a statement to reporters and an op-ed, GEO Vice President for Corporate Relations Pablo Paez has falsely claimed that horrific abuses at a GEO juvenile detention facility in Mississippi described by the Department of Justice as “systematic, egregious, and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls” occurred before GEO took control of the prison, even though both DOJ and court documents clearly show otherwise. ACLU National Prison Project Staff Attorney Carl Takei explains in a column:

Last week, [Paez] e-mailed a statement to reporters decrying the news coverage as “unfair,” particularly with regard to Walnut Grove. He wrote:

“For instance, a number of media reports cite problems at a facility formerly operated by GEO in Mississippi, the Walnut Grove Correctional Facility, quoting a report by the Department of Justice issued in November 2010. What those media reports fail to disclose is that our company only assumed management of the facility in late August 2010, and the findings related to problems that preceded GEO’s involvement at the facility, when it was operated by [a] different private operator.”

What’s stunning about this statement is that the timeline it describes is simply false. In fact, the DOJ issued its report condemning GEO in March 2012, almost two years after GEO’s August 2010 takeover of Walnut Grove (the prison was part of the spoils of GEO’s merger with fellow prison operator Cornell Companies). The DOJ report pointedly noted: “Following GEO and Cornell’s merger, key personnel, policies and training at WGYCF [Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility] did not change substantially, despite GEO’s claim that it made corrective reforms to reflect the GEO philosophy.” Additionally, GEO’s statement completely ignores the March 26, 2012 federal court order in a lawsuit against Walnut Grove, which noted that only days before the court’s ruling, the “facility remained so understaffed that a teenage offender was brutally attacked by several other offenders while only one staffer was on site.”

A longer excerpt from Paez’s statement was published by the Broward Palm Beach New Times, and Paez made a similar false statement in a column in the Palm Beach Post, writing, “our company only assumed management of the facility in late 2010, and the challenges at the facility preceded GEO’s involvement.”

For more on why this is blatantly false, the ACLU has a timeline of events that even more clearly articulates GEO’s involvement in what a federal judge called “a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.” In that scathing consent decree, which resulted from a lawsuit by the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves described the conditions this way:

Those allegations … far exceeded mere breaches of the United States Constitution; the investigation uncovered pervasive violations of state and federal civil and criminal law and a wholesale lack of accountability by prison officials. For example, staff of the WGYCF and those responsible for overseeing and supervising the youth engaged in sexual relationships with the youth; they exploited them by selling drugs in the facility; and the youth, “handcuffed and defenseless[,] have been kicked, punched, and beaten all over their bodies.” They are frequently subjected to chemical restraints for the most insignificant of infractions and are denied necessary medical care.

What’s more, Judge Carlton A. Reeves pointed out that GEO Group made absolutely no effort to remedy this behavior, even in the face of a known DOJ investigation and ongoing litigation. Reeves continued:

Those youth, some of whom are mere children, are at risk every minute, every hour, every day. Without Court intervention, they will continue to suffer unconstitutional harms, some of which are due to aberrant and criminal behavior. Nothing has curtailed actions of the staff and indifference of management officials to the constant violations, even though the parties and their experts have been monitoring, investigating and conducting on-site visits constantly since before the lawsuit was filed and during the pendency of this action. Moreover, the fact that the DOJ dared to begin its investigation in October 2010 has not caused the defendants to transform the facility into one that complies with the United States Constitution. But even more astounding is the fact that the notice of the fairness hearing itself did not cause the defendants to change course. The testimony established that only two days before the hearing, the facility remained so understaffed that a teenage offender was brutally attacked by several other offenders while only one staffer was on site. As of the date of the hearing, according to testimony, management has done nothing to address staffing issues. WGYCF has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk.

This is the case from which Paez is now attempting to distance GEO, even though its connection to the facility is memorialized in both official court documents and the DOJ’s report. And it’s not an isolated incident. GEO Group and its subsidiary GEO Care have faced fines for “serious shortcomings in patient care” at its mental health facilities and has been the subject of numerous reports of juvenile abuse, deaths, and riots. Paez also claims GEO Group doesn’t engage in lobbying, even though GEO and its fellow private prison corporations have spent millions on campaign donations and professional lobbying firms. But then again, GEO officials are no strangers to misrepresentations. Last year, GEO Group Senior Vice President of Project Development Thomas Wierdsma testified under oath that lying to a federal agency would be just fine.