The GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) is an American publicly traded C corporation private prison and mental health facility operator. The company's facilities include immigration detention centers, minimum security detention centers, and mental-health and residential-treatment facilities in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. GEO also operates government-owned facilities pursuant to management contracts. As of September 30, 2024, the company owned or managed 80,000 beds at 95 facilities, making it the largest prison operator in the United States. In 2019, agencies of the federal government of the United States generated 53% of the company's revenues. Up until 2021 the company was designated as a real estate investment trust, at which time its board of directors elected to reclassify as a C corporation under the stated goal of reducing the company's debt.
The company has been the subject of civil suits in the United States by prisoners and their families for injuries from riots and poor treatment at prisons and immigrant detention facilities. Due to settlement of a class-action suit in 2012 for its management of Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, the GEO Group lost its contract for this and two other Mississippi prisons, which it had been operating since 2010. Related federal investigations of kickback and bribery schemes associated with nearly $1 billion in Mississippi state contracts for prisons and related services have resulted in the criminal prosecution of several public officials in the state. In 2017, the state attorney general announced a civil suit for damages, to recover monies from contracts completed in the period of corruption. After a phase-out of federal private prison contracts in 2016 under the Obama administration, GEO Group received substantial new contracts under the second Trump administration, beginning in 2025.
History Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) was formed as a division of the Wackenhut Corporation in 1984 after George Zoley presented the idea of a separate prison management company to Wackenhut founder George Wackenhut. It was incorporated as a Wackenhut subsidiary in 1988. In July 1994, the company became a public company via an initial public offering.
In 2003, WCC management raised funds to repurchase all common stock held by G4S, and in 2004, the company changed its name to The GEO Group, Inc. In 2005, the company acquired Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) for $62 million in cash, and the assumption of $124 million in debt. The company sold CSC's juvenile services division to James Slattery, CSC's former CEO, for $3.75 million. Slattery renamed this business as Slattery's Youth Services International. In December 2008, the company opened the 654-bed Maverick County Detention Center in Eagle Pass, Texas.
On August 12, 2010, the company acquired Cornell Companies, formerly Cornell Corrections, for $730 million in stock and cash. In February 2011, GEO acquired BI Incorporated, provider of electronic offender-tracking equipment and services, founded in 1978 and based in Boulder, Colorado, for $415 million. At the time, BI was the exclusive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) provider of Intensive Supervision and Appearance Program (ISAP) monitoring and supervision services. In summer 2018, this subsidiary received media attention for the $500 million in contracts it has received from ICE since 2004.
In 2015, GEO launched its Continuum of Care program to assist prisoners in returning to society. In 2016, the firm's revenues totaled $2 billion, and on April 4, 2017, GEO announced the closing of a $360 million cash purchase of Community Education Centers ("CEC"), which owned or managed more than 12,000 beds in the U.S., including over 7,000 community re-entry beds. It provided in-prison treatment services at over 30 government-operated facilities.GEO Group closes $360 million acquisition of Community Education Centers , Sun Sentinel, April 6, 2017. Retrieved 23 May 2017. In January 2020, local Pennsylvania lawmakers announced a potential plan to deprivatize the George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, the last private prison in the state, with which GEO Group had a nine-year $495 million county contract. The lawmakers alleged that GEO Group had covered up liabilities at the facility.
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice announced its intention to phase out contracts with privately operated prisons. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said it was reviewing its contracts with private firms, which operate several immigrant detention facilities. In the spring of 2017, officials of the Donald Trump administration said they would be reviewing this policy. In September 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom announced that he would terminate the California contract with GEO's Central Valley Modified Community Correctional Facility in McFarland.
In 2018, GEO Group entered into a collaboration with the National Federation of Federal Employees called Reentry Success DC, designed to enhance "GEO Group's pre- and post-release services by connecting returning citizens to gainful employment". The program is available to prisoners returning to Washington, D.C., from the Rivers Correctional Facility in North Carolina. By February 2020, the company had expanded the Continuum of Care program to 18 prisons. Later in 2020, the company also opened its Connection and Intervention Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for this purpose.
Since the beginning of the second Trump administration in January 2025, the GEO Group received $2.1 billion in federal contracts from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), far more than any other ICE contractor. In their 2025 annual report, the company noted that their new and expanded contracts represented "the largest amount of new business we have won in a single year in our Company’s history".
In 2026 it was reported that GEO Group employees and ICE employees had historically transitioned employment between the two organizations at high rates.
Facilities United States facilities In 2010, the company was reported to operate more than a dozen facilities in the state of Texas, and nearly three dozen in the rest of the United States. In addition to prison facilities operated under contract with U.S. states, the GEO Group owns and operates the Broward Transitional Center, a 720-bed facility in Pompano Beach, Florida; the Aurora Denver Contract Detention Facility in Colorado; and the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, all under contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As of the fiscal year ended December 31, 2012, GEO managed 96 facilities worldwide totaling about 73,000 beds, including 65,949 active beds and 6,056 idle beds. The company had an average facility occupancy rate of 95.7% for 2012.
Other GEO Group facilities include the Reeves County Detention Complex, a three-part complex in Texas described as the largest private prison in the world. It houses more than 3700 inmates, mostly immigrants held for low-level crimes before being deported after serving their sentences. Riots here by prisoners in 2008 and 2009 because of poor conditions resulted in more than $21 million in damages. A detention center operated by GEO Group in the state of Washington has a capacity of 1,575 immigrant detainees. When ICE had renewed its contract for 10 years in 2015, GEO estimated the center would receive $57 million each year, operating at full capacity. In February 2025, pursuant to a contracted with I.C.E., GEO Group re-opened Delaney Hall, in Newark, New Jersey, May 1, which quickly led to political conflict.
International facilities Internationally, in 2010, GEO operated a total of another 10 facilities in Australia, England, South Africa, and Cuba. As of 2016, subsidiary GEO Group Australia operated four prisons (Junee Correctional Centre, Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, Parklea Correctional Centre, and Fulham Correctional Centre), with a fifth facility expected to open in late 2017. In 2023 staff walked out of the Junee Correctional Centre over disputes regarding pay and working conditions. The New South Wales government later announced it would not be renewing GEO Group's contract to manage the facility.
In the UK, GEO Group are associated with several contracts. The organization runs the Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, expanded in 2013 to hold 249 detainees, male and female. In 2004, the Children's Commissioner for Scotland described conditions at the facility as "morally upsetting" and threatened to report the UK and Scottish governments to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. In London, it runs the Harmondsworth migrant detention center. This facility can hold up to 661 detainees.
GEO Group is also contracted to the deportation of migrants, operating the Migrant Operations Center at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, from 2006 to 2012. In the late 2010s, activists accused the company of detaining immigrants under inhumane conditions while complying with the Trump administration's family separation policy. GEO Group denied claims of separating families or housing unaccompanied minors.
Business segments
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 for federal and state authorities.
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. As of 2016, it conducts this business in the U.S. only. GEO's facility construction and design segment primarily consists of contracts with various state, local, and federal agencies for the design and construction of prison and related facilities for which GEO has been awarded management contracts.
U.S. federal contracts and political donations On August 18, 2016, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Justice Department intended to end its Bureau of Prisons contracts with for-profit prison operators.Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons , The Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky & Chico Harlan, August 8, 2016. Retrieved 19 August 2016. As of 2015, GEO Group operated 26 federal prison centers, for the departments of both Justice and Homeland Security, which would have been affected by this change in policy. These centers had a total capacity of 35,692 prisoners, representing 45% of the company's revenue.