by Ciara O'Neill | 2017-06-21 Print Button

The motives behind political spending are rarely more obvious.

In 2016, one day after the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would cease contracting with private prisons, and as the stock market reacted accordingly, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GEO Group gave $100,000 to the pro-Trump Super PAC Rebuilding America Now. It followed up with another $125,000 in the final days of the campaign. After the election, private prison stock rebounded amid well-founded confidence that the new administration would reverse course.

It did. And this spring, GEO Group received a decent return on its investment.

The Campaign Legal Center (CLC) contends the two contributions were illegal under the federal government’s 75-year-old ban on contributions by federal contractors. The CLC filed a complaint against the subsidiary back in November and also submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents pertaining to new private prison contracts. This latter effort has now turned into a CLC lawsuit against the DOJ.

In 2016, GEO Group gave $368,980 to federal candidates and committees through its PAC, including a $50,000 contribution to Rebuilding America Now in August. GEO Corrections Holdings, the subsidiary of interest in the CLC lawsuit, gave an additional $200,000 to another Super PAC, the Senate Leadership Fund, based in Virginia.

Altogether, the $793,980 GEO Group gave at the federal level in 2016 is slightly more than the previous seven years combined. The private prison corporation usually focuses more at the state level; since 2009, GEO Group has spent almost $4.4 million on state candidates and committees and $8.9 million on lobbying in nine of the 20 states where the Institute has data.

Figure 1: GEO Group State & Federal Political Spending, 2009–2016

https://public.tableau.com/profile/nimsp#!/vizhome/GeoGroupStateFederalPoliticalSpending2009-2016/Dashboard1

Read a thorough account of GEO Group’s state-level political spending in the Institute’s recent report, Prisons & Politics: Profiling the Pecuniary Political Persistence of Private Prisons.


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