{"id":68113,"date":"2015-12-28T12:00:32","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T12:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68113"},"modified":"2015-12-27T16:25:25","modified_gmt":"2015-12-27T16:25:25","slug":"private-prison-exec-waves-off-criminal-justice-reform-predicts-more-profits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/12\/private-prison-exec-waves-off-criminal-justice-reform-predicts-more-profits\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Prison Exec Waves Off Criminal Justice Reform, Predicts More Profits"},"content":{"rendered":"

22 Dec 2015 – <\/em>A senior executive with the second-largest for-profit prison company in America assured\u00a0investment bankers last summer that despite talk of drug policy and criminal justice reform, the country\u00a0will continue to \u201cattract crime,\u201d generating new \u201ccorrectional needs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A guard escorts an immigrant detainee from his \u201csegregation cell\u201d at the Adelanto Detention Facility in Adelanto, California. The ICE facility is managed by the Geo Group.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cThe reality is, we are a very affluent country, we have loose borders, and we have a bad education system,\u201d said Shayn March, the vice president and treasurer of the Geo Group. \u201cAnd all that adds up to a significant amount of correctional needs, which, thankfully, we\u2019ve been able to help the country out with and states with by providing a lower cost solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

The previously unreported remarks were made during a presentation at the\u00a0Barclays High Yield Bond & Syndicated Loan conference in June.<\/p>\n

While students and activists have protested\u00a0private prison corporations, scoring a recent victory last week with the decision by the University of California system to divest<\/a> from firms like Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America, the firms have largely avoided the spotlight.<\/p>\n

Private prison companies are a controversial player in America\u2019s criminal justice system. In the 1990s, private prison firms\u00a0pushed<\/a>\u00a0for tougher sentencing laws at the state level and have been\u00a0tied<\/a>\u00a0to efforts in recent years to compel local law enforcement officers to enforce immigration laws.\u00a0Geo Group has\u00a0also been faulted for\u00a0multiple\u00a0incidents<\/a>\u00a0of abuse, ranging from inmates who have died in their facilities to employees charged with sexual assault.<\/p>\n

March told attendees at the conference that he was getting questions about drug offenses and sentencing guidelines, an issue he noted had been raised by Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail. \u201cI got to be honest with you, there\u2019s very few people I know, if anybody, who\u2019s in prison for smoking marijuana. It doesn\u2019t exist, guys. That\u2019s not why people are in prison,\u201d March said.<\/p>\n

Rather than reducing incarceration rates, March told his audience that drug reform could have the \u201copposite effect\u201d by increasing prison terms. Most drug-related sentences, he asserted, are the result of plea deals stemming from violent crimes, so if there isn\u2019t an alternative plea arrangement, the only outcome defendants face is for the violent crime, which carries longer sentences.<\/p>\n

March argued that crime is inherent in America because of affluence.\u00a0\u201cNo one is committing a lot of crime in poor countries because, well, who are you going to steal from?\u201d March continued.<\/p>\n

He also claimed that mandatory minimum sentences have not greatly impacted the overall incarceration rate, and that growth in mandatory sentencing has been \u201cjust as substantial\u201d as non-mandatory sentencing. Rather, \u201cthere\u2019s just been a lot more crime,\u201d March said.<\/p>\n

How March came to this conclusion is unclear.\u00a0The Geo Group did not respond to The Intercept<\/em>\u2019s request for the sourcing of his claims.<\/p>\n

While there is research that shows inequality as a driver of crime, there is little evidence to support March\u2019s claims about affluence. In the Western Hemisphere, the countries that rank among the lowest in GDP per capita, Honduras and El Salvador, have the highest murder<\/a> rates in the world outside of a war zone.\u00a0Countries with the least violent crime and lowest murder rates<\/a>, including Singapore, Japan, and Denmark, are among the wealthiest societies in the world.<\/p>\n

In fact,\u00a0crime rates<\/a>\u00a0have fallen in America while incarceration rates have increased over the last decade. Moreover,\u00a0according to a 2010\u00a0report<\/a>\u00a0by the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 58.1 percent of offenders in Bureau of Prisons custody were convicted of an offense carrying a mandatory minimum, and 39.4 percent \u201cwere subject to that mandatory minimum penalty at sentencing.\u201d\u00a0The U.S. has 2.3 million people imprisoned, more than any country in the world.<\/p>\n

March spent a significant portion of his talk downplaying the impact of criminal and drug justice reforms on his company\u2019s business. But in its Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Geo Group\u00a0disclosed<\/a>\u00a0to investors that the firm could be \u201cadversely 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit prison company in the U.S.\u00a0and a competitor of\u00a0Geo Group, discussed sentencing reforms on a call with investors in August. Damon Hininger, the chief executive of CCA, told analysts that new guidelines that narrow the disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentences will \u201chave an impact\u201d on \u201cBureau of Prisons populations.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, March told attendees\u00a0that factoring in\u00a0elderly care, immigrant detention, and expansion plans overseas, the company is sure to grow. \u201cI think I started at GEO, our stock price \u2026 got down to $12.50. And if you factor in an apples-to-apples comparison to where we are today, our stock is well over $50 a share. So we have quadrupled our value in that six-year period.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added, \u201cNo, we\u2019re not Google, but we\u2019re still doing pretty good.\u201d<\/p>\n

___________________________________<\/p>\n

Lee Fang<\/a>: \u2709lee.fang@\u200btheintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theintercept.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

22 Dec 2015 – A senior executive with the second-largest for-profit prison company in America assured investment bankers last summer that despite talk of drug policy and criminal justice reform, the country will continue to \u201cattract crime,\u201d generating new \u201ccorrectional needs.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68113\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}