Football stadium to be named after a private prison company.

Florida - For more than two years, Florida Atlantic University has been searching for the name of a corporate sponsor to adorn its new 30,000-seat, palm-ringed football stadium.

The public university on Tuesday announced an unconventional partner: the nation's second-largest operator of for-profit prisons, the GEO Group Inc. The newly christened GEO Group Stadium came as part of a $6 million donation from the prison company's charitable foundation, which will be paid out to Florida Atlantic over 12 years.

America has a long tradition of unusual corporate athletic sponsorships -- Cleveland's Quicken Loans Arena and Houston's Enron Field (now Minute Maid Park) come to mind. But the GEO Group Stadium puzzled several experienced sports marketing experts.

Stadium sponsorships usually involve a product that a company wants to market to consumers: Cars, in the case of the Mercedez-Benz Superdome in New Orleans; or bank services, with Citi Field in New York. GEO Group's customers are government agencies offering contracts. Prisoners don't have a choice of where they land behind bars.

"It appears to be a charitable gift that is trying to be a marketing vehicle, and it just doesn't make a lot of sense," said Paul Swangard, managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon's business school. "To link themselves with an athletic department when their business is locking people up, it just doesn't connect to me really well."

Critics of the private prison industry said the donation to a public university in Florida falls in line with efforts to gain influence with state and local public officials who decide whether to hand out contracts.

"The company is dependent on public dollars for all of its profits," said Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership, a criminal justice advocacy group. "When you look at other things that GEO gives to, it's generally in communities where they either have contracts or are seeking contracts, and certainly Florida is a state where GEO has tremendous interest."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/florida-atlantic-football-stadium_n_2720223.html

GEO Group edits its Wikipedia page after football stadium naming deal controversy:

GEO Group Inc., the nation's second-largest private prison conglomerate, has until now mostly kept its brand far from the law-abiding public's consciousness.

But this week, as the company donated $6 million as part of a naming rights deal for a college football stadium in Florida, brand image apparently became an elevated concern. Following reports in Deadspin, The Huffington Post and the New York Times on the stadium deal between GEO Group and Florida Atlantic University, a page about the company on Wikipedia suddenly came in for an extreme makeover, with all negative references excised.

A section on the Wikipedia page entitled "controversies," which listed state and federal investigations and lawsuits claiming mistreatment of prisoners in GEO facilities, had disappeared. In its place was a new section, headlined "Quality of Operations," which duplicated language in company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

According to Wikipedia's revision history on the GEO Group entry, someone named Abraham Cohen made substantial changes to the entry Wednesday, deleting references to the controversies and replacing descriptions of the company's operations with text matching that on GEO Group's website. GEO Group employs an Abraham Cohen as a corporate relations manager, according to several articles on the GEO Group's websites, public citations in news articles and a public profile on LinkedIn. Abraham Cohen's LinkedIn profile says he's a Florida Atlantic University graduate and news stories identified him as a former student body president.

A spokesman for the GEO Group, Pablo Paez, wrote in an email that the company was "not going to comment on edits to a Wikipedia page," saying GEO has a policy of not addressing "information that is found on Internet sites or social media outlets, particularly those that can be freely updated by a variety of public users." Paez did not respond to follow-up questions about the similarity between the name for the Wikipedia user who altered the website and the corporate relations official employed by company.

By early Wednesday evening, several Wikipedia editors had made changes to the entry, some registering major concerns with revised language. One editor, Salex1093, wrote in the revision: "If you want to add additional information, it must be from a neutral point of view. Wikipedia refers to the subjects of its articles in the third, not first, person."

Before Wikipedia editors changed the Geo Group page back to its original form around 9 p.m. Wednesday, Wikipedia placed an alert on top of the GEO Group entry that read: "This article appears to be written like an advertisement. Please help improve it by rewriting promotional content from a neutral point of view and removing any inappropriate external links."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/21/geo-group-wikipedia_n_2730220.html

U.S. corporations are profiting from incarcerated Americans:

Human beings matter little in the corporate state. We myopically serve the rapacious appetites of those dedicated to exploitation and maximizing profit. And our corporate masters view prisons—as they do education, health care and war—as a business. The 320-bed Elizabeth Detention Center, which houses only men, is run by one of the largest operators and owners of for-profit prisons in the country, Corrections Corporation of America. CCA, traded on the New York Stock Exchange, has annual revenues in excess of $1.7 billion. An average of 81,384 inmates are in its facilities on any one day. This is a greater number, the American Civil Liberties Union points out ina 2011 report, "Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," than that held by the states of New York and New Jersey combined.

The for-profit prisons and their lobbyists in Washington and state capitals have successfully blocked immigration reform, have prevented a challenge to our draconian drug laws and are pushing through tougher detention policies. Locking up more and more human beings is the bedrock of the industry's profits. These corporations are the engines behind the explosion of our prison system. They are the reason we have spent $300 billion on new prisons since 1980. They are also the reason serious reform is impossible.

The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, according to statistics gathered by the ACLU. The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, the ACLU report notes, says that for-profit companies presently control about 18 percent of federal prisoners and 6.7 percent of all state prisoners. Private prisons account for nearly all of the new prisons built between 2000 and 2005. And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which imprisons about 400,000 undocumented people a year, has an annual budget of more than $5 billion. ICE is planning to expand its operations by establishing several mega-detention centers, most run by private corporations, in states such as New Jersey, Texas, Florida, California and Illinois. Many of these private contractors are, not surprisingly, large campaign donors to "law and order" politicians including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.

In CCA's annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission for 2011, cited by the ACLU, the prison company bluntly states its opposition to prison reform. "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws," it declares. CCA goes on to warn that "any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration" could "potentially [reduce] demand for correctional facilities," as would "mak[ing] more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior," the adoption of "sentencing alternatives [that] ... could put some offenders on probation" and "reductions in crime rates."

CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties and 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the ACLU reported. The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials along with undisclosed funds to lobby state officials, according to the ACLU. CCA, through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), lobbies legislators to impose harsher detention laws at the state and federal levels. The ALEC helped draft Arizona’s draconian anti-immigrant law SB 1070.

A March 2012 CCA investor presentation prospectus, quoted by the ACLU, tells potential investors that incarceration “creates predictable revenue streams.” The document cites demographic trends that the company says will continue to expand profits. These positive investment trends include, the prospectus reads, “high recidivism”—“about 45 percent of individuals released from prison in 1999 and more than 43 percent released from prison in 2004 were returned to prison within three years.” The prospectus invites investments by noting that one in every 100 U.S. adults is currently in prison or jail. And because the U.S. population is projected to grow by approximately 18.6 million from 2012 to 2017, “prison populations would grow by about 80,400 between 2012 and 2017, or by more than 13,000 additional per year, on average,” the CCA document says.

The two largest private prison companies in 2010 received nearly $3 billion in revenue. The senior executives, according to the ACLU report, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million. The for-profit prisons can charge the government up to $200 a day to house an inmate; they pay detention officers as little as $10 an hour.
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/14639-corporations-write-our-laws-and-profit-from-human-misery