On June 17, an article by Zacks Equity Research appeared on the Yahoo! Finance web page titled, “Is Geo Group Inc (GEO) Stock Outpacing Its Finance Peers This Year?” The article notes that “GEO is currently sporting a Zacks Rank of #1 (Strong Buy)” and it concludes, “Investors with an interest in Finance stocks should continue to track GEO. The stock will be looking to continue its solid performance.”[1]
What the article did not say is that GEO is the second largest private prison operator in the world. Nor did it mention that in 2012, the GEO Group was part of a lawsuit, involving a youth detention facility that GEO ran called Walnut Grove. The judge in the case said that Walnut Grove “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate” when he ordered a Consent Decree banning the practice of subjecting kids convicted as adults to solitary confinement and requiring the state (Mississippi) to move them out of the privately run prison.[2]
And the article did not mention that the lobbying arm of GEO Group “spent $1.56 million on lobbying in 2018, deploying only lobbyists who previously worked in government” or that it receives multi-million dollar contracts from the US DHS to run detention facilities.[3]One of those contracts is the Adelanto Detention Center in San Bernardino County, where the city of Adelanto recently decided to end their intergovernmental service contract with ICE.[4]
And, finally, what the article did not mention is that the $800,000,000 industry of for-profit detention centers is underwritten by US taxpayers.[5]
There are a lot of complex matters behind the operations of companies like GEO and their relationships with different levels of government. There are a lot of complex matters behind immigration and border crossings. Much of that complexity falls to the background when a photo of a Salvadoran man, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, and his 23-month-old daughter Valeria, taken by photojournalist Julia De Luc, appeared in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, after they drowned in the currents of the Rio Grande. We have to suppress our core humanity not to look at that photo and ask deep and troubling questions about who we are, what we are willing to abide, how we speak about the desperation of immigrants, where our treasure is, and whether we truly believe in a God of justice.
As a way of approaching these questions, I want to begin with the simple observation that a June 17 article by Zacks Equity Research on GEO concluded that “Investors with an interest in Finance stocks should continue to track GEO. The stock will be looking to continue its solid performance” and never once raised any of the troubling questions about how GEO would make their stunning profits. Apparently, the article assumes that “Investors with an interest in Finance stocks” have such clear compartments that they can look at this matter from a strictly financial perspective, leaving the troubling questions aside. It’s hard to imagine a more damning description of human nature.
Mark of St. Mark
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/geo-group-inc-geo-stock-133001752.html. Accessed on June 28, 2019.
[2]https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/picture-such-horror-should-be-unrealized-anywhere-civilized?redirect=blog/prisoners-rights-criminal-law-reform/picture-such-horror-should-be-unrealized-anywhere.
Accessed on June 28, 2019.
[3]https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2019/04/detention-center-contractors-keep-reaping-profit-after-dhs-upheaval/. Accessed on June 28, 2019.
[4]https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-adelanto-immigrant-detention-20190408-story.html. Accessed on June 28, 2019.
[5]https://www.thedailybeast.com/dollar800-million-in-taxpayer-money-went-to-private-prisons-where-migrants-work-for-pennies?ref=scroll.
No comments:
Post a Comment