GEO Group made $254 million in profit last year. Not revenue. Profit. Pure money in their pocket. The year before, it made $32 million. A man named Jean Wilson Brutus made it about 24 hours. Just one of the 50+ deaths in ICE custody in two years.
Back in 2010, nearly two decades ago, reporters were already speaking out against the abhorrent conditions in their facilities. Some states even shut them down back when oversight was still somewhat a thing. They have been getting away with this for decades. Nobody stops them. It is not just the private prisons, either. They are doing the exact same thing in their mental health facilities. They are doing it in their immigration detention centers.
So how exactly does a corporation get this massive? Who exactly do they know in Washington to keep getting away with this?
Well, yes Trump. But given all the power they’ve had for years, you have to ask yourself where they came from. And as it turns out, the history is a lot darker and much more complicated than you could ever imagine.
But they’ve lasted this long because they didn’t just pop up overnight.
They’ve been doing this since 1954. Only back then, the GEO Group didn’t exist. They went by a different name: Wackenhut. The corruption and blood-spilled by Wackenhut has been hidden between the pages of the state-issued history books, and somehow…
Blood is still on their hands, even today.
CORRUPTION
Jean Wilson Brutus was only 41-years-old. He entered ICE custody on December 11, 2025. The next day, ICE transferred him to GEO Group’s facility, Delaney Hall, where he left this world forever.
According to ICE’s own account, he showed no signs of distress at intake and had no history of any health issues. The timeline given is that at 1:25 pm, a registered nurse sits down to do an intake screening on Jean. They check his vitals, completely normal. He denies any medical issues.
The nurse officially clears him for the general population — a totally healthy man, right?
As he is being escorted to his housing unit, this perfectly healthy 41-year-old man suddenly, “becomes sluggish” and “starts hyperventilating” in the hall.
And what time did someone finally call 911? 4:32 PM.
Think about the timeline. His intake was at 1:25 pm; they called for an ambulance at 4:32 pm. What exactly happened in those 3-hours while a human being was under the care of a massive, for-profit prison corporation that they didn’t feel the need to call 911? Is it that much of an inconvenience for you to get them life-saving care?
Unfortunately, Jean was rushed to University Hospital where he was pronounced dead only 4.5 hours after his nurse intake. The cause of death on his death certificate is “inconclusive,” and his family wants answers.
His death was the first publicly reported death at Delaney Hall since the facility reopened just months earlier under a 15-year, $1 billion ICE contract that pays GEO Group roughly $60 million a year.
After his death, conditions did not improve at Delaney Hall. They evidentially had not learned their lesson.
Just weeks ago, about 300 detainees announced a joint hunger and labor strike on May 22. Why? Because the billion-dollar GEO Group was serving them rotting, moldy food infested with worms. Because they were denying the pregnant and the elderly access to healthcare. They were demanding the release of the vulnerable people locked up with them.
When Sen. Andy Kim of New Jersey arrived to inspect the facility that month, GEO Group told him he could enter the building but he could not speak to a single detainee. If he tried, the tour would end. Kim said it was the first time he had ever been blocked from oversight at a detention center.
A private, for-profit corporation just gagged an elected official from inspecting a taxpayer-funded black site. And it’s not the first time they’ve done this.
GEO Group has actively sued several states, and is currently suing Colorado after they passed a very basic, common-sense law allowing health inspectors to make sure the people inside GEO facilities have clean water, edible food, and basic medical care. That's it. That’s the reason.
So, we have a multi-billion-dollar corporate monopoly that has spent years using an army of high-priced lawyers to build a legal fortress around its operations. They have systematically stripped away the right of the public to know what is being done in our name, and with our money.
So you have to ask yourself the most obvious question in the world: what are they hiding?
This is one facility. GEO Group operates nearly two dozen.
~51 people have died in ICE custody since Trump’s 2025 inauguration. About one in three people in ICE custody is held by GEO Group. According to their own documentation 80% of GEO’s revenue comes from ICE or state government contracts.
And the corruption is deep: The acting director of ICE — David Venturella — used to be a senior vice president at GEO. Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General was a registered lobbyist for GEO in 2019. Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” was on a GEO consulting contract weeks before he took the job. He was also acting director of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Trump’s first term.
Consider the immense effort required to achieve such total, vertical control over human existence. Do you truly believe a corporation accidentally amasses that degree of absolute power? Do they simply wake up one morning, review their stock portfolio, and magically discover they own the politicians, the courts, and the prisons?
GEO Group was incorporated in 1988 as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.
It spent its first decade as a subsidiary of a private security firm so embedded in the American intelligence apparatus that the media called it the shadow CIA.
Long before GEO Group ran a single private prison, the company that it was born from was the largest private intelligence — both foreign and local — operation in the United States.
A firm whose founder, George Wackenhut, was a former FBI agent who built his fortune by keeping files on more than four million Americans suspected of being communists, civil rights demonstrators, or anti-war protesters.
George Wackenhut walked so Peter Thiel and Palantir — a massive digital age surveillance company — could run. And much like Thiel, Wackenhut had his hand in the global cookie jar.
‘SHADOW CIA’ WAS NOT A METAPHOR
Imagine it’s the late 1960s. You’re going about your life, paying your taxes, raising your kids, assuming you live in a free country. But unbeknownst to you, a private company down in Miami — not the government, a private company — has a secret file on you. Well, you and 4 million other Americans.
The whole thing was started back in 1954 by a 34-year-old former FBI agent named George Wackenhut and three of his bureau buddies. They originally called it “Special Agent Investigators Inc.”
by 1955, there was a disagreement among the founders. So George Wackenhut — quite literally — fist fought one of his partners, bought out the rest, and put his own name on the door.
Initially, George Wackenhut, an Army vet from Pennsylvania, tried to join the FBI in 1945 and got rejected. The Bureau wasn’t impressed and offered him half his asking salary, which he turned down. He came back in 1950. J. Edgar Hoover — arguably the most corrupt Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation —hired him in January 1951 at $5000 a year.
And that's how Wackenhut Corporation was created in 1954.
The company he went onto create was hard line anti-communist, anti-leftist, and anti-democratic. And for their employees they recruited heavily from the FBI, the CIA, and the military. This created a ‘shadow CIA’ of a private corporation that wasn’t subject to government oversight. At least not at first. So, they started collecting files.
The files grew fast. By 1965, Wackenhut was telling potential investors it had records on 2.5 million suspected dissidents, roughly one in every 46 American adults then living.
In 1966, the company purchased the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Un-American Activities Committee. This was a committee that was formed to investigate “disloyalty” and “subversive activities” of American citizens.
Frank Donner, the then director of the ACLU's Project on Political Surveillance, documented all of this in his books and papers. He found that Wackenhut kept updating these dossiers right through the 1960s and into the 1970s.
If you protested a war, if you marched for civil rights, congratulations; you were added to their list of — and this is their exact term — “derogatory types.”
And what did they do with this massive, terrifying, unaccountable database? They monetized it. The company sold the information to clients who wanted to know who in their workforce or their town had been to a protest. Companies used this to screen potential hires and make sure they weren’t union organizers and activists.
Between 1975 and 1976, the U.S. Senate actually did its job for once. They found that the government surveillance and attacks went far beyond the House Un-American Activities Committee.
This was brought to light by a different committee — the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — aka the Church Committee. They pulled back the curtain and exposed what the intelligence agencies were really doing in the dark.
They uncovered the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the CIA’s MHCHAOS operation. Both of which had been illegally surveilling and infiltrating Americans engaged in civil rights and antiwar activism. Many of the original documents from these programs are now publicly available online thanks to FOIA for anyone interested in reading them.
In 1970, The Fair Credit Reporting Act passed. This let Americans see and challenge what credit agencies AND investigative agencies were holding about them.
The combination made a corporate database of “derogatory types” legally untenable and a massive liability.
So, if you’re the Wackenhut Corporation, what do you do? Do you come clean? Do you shred the files and apologize to the millions of Americans whose privacy you violated? Of course not… You don’t do that.
No — you find a loophole.
They took their massive dragnet of dossiers and handed it all off to a tax-exempt religious nonprofit called the Church League of America. Much like many of the non-profits of today, it was not a charity, but a total farce. They weren't subject to the same laws so he just stored the files there so he didn't lose access to his database.
The Church League shared the files with the red squads of big-city police departments that had been doing the same kind of surveillance for decades.
In 2026, nothing has changed. What they did is very similar to Peter Thiel’s Gotham — an intelligence software that aggregates massive amounts of disconnected data like phone records, license plate scans, and financial histories into a single, searchable visual web so government and law enforcement agencies can track individuals and their networks.
When the Church League eventually dissolved in the 1980s, its files were acquired by the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University (NYU) where they still sit to this day.
The company that built that database wasn’t a few fringe FBI employees. The Wackenhut board over the decades included former FBI Director Clarence Kelley, Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy Director Frank Carlucci, CIA Deputy Director Bobby Ray Inman, Secret Service Director James J. Rowley, Marine Commandant P.X. Kelley, and DIA Director General Joseph Carroll.
William Casey served as Wackenhut’s legal counsel before President Ronald Reagan made him CIA director in 1981.
The contracts followed the personnel. Much like GEO Group, most of Wackenhut’s contracts were with the U.S. government.
By the early 1990s, Wackenhut was the largest private security provider to U.S. embassies worldwide. This includes in Chile, Greece, and El Salvador, countries.
These were places where the CIA just happened to be working alongside right wing death squads. What a coincidence.
Then the government handed them contracts to ‘protect’ America's top-secret and sensitive locations: Area 51, The Nevada nuclear test site, nuclear facilities at Hanford and the Savannah River.
“It is known throughout the industry that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut.” — Retired FBI agent William Hinshaw, 1992.
In the 1980s, Congress explicitly banned the United States from arming the Contras in Central America. So Washington used Wackenhut to bypass the law entirely. They set up an explosives factory on the Cabazon Indian reservation. Why there? Because it was legally treated as a sovereign nation.
They exploited a domestic loophole to manufacture bombs on American soil and ship them directly to foreign rebels.
Yes, they developed and shipped weapons to the Contras during the Iran-Contra affair that was made possible by the Reagan administration.
In 1992, an investigative journalist named John Connolly documented a 1990 Wackenhut operation that allegedly trucked equipment across the Mexican border. The purpose was to manufacture chemical weapons for Saddam Hussein. I guess old habits die hard.
This same company is getting rich locking people in cages today. We are talking about facilities so completely lawless that people they detain — including minors — have been routinely beaten, raped, and murdered. The conditions are so unimaginable that people are driven to suicide.
WHO IS CASHING IN TODAY?
In 1984, Wackenhut launched a corrections and detention business as an internal division. The new venture was formally incorporated as Wackenhut Corrections Corporation in 1988. A 38-year-old executive named George C. Zoley was made its founding president and director. George Wackenhut himself sat on the early board.
In May 1994, Wackenhut Corrections went public on the New York Stock Exchange, and people were trading dividends on prison cells.
Pause and think about the sheer, grotesque reality of that for a second.
You’re sitting with your broker, looking over your stock portfolio, and your return on investment is entirely dependent on how many human beings are currently locked inside a cage.
The Wackenhut name had grown sour in the mouths of the public. So in 2003, they scrubbed the name completely. They brought in the PR consultants and the focus groups, and they rebranded the company. Wackenhut was dead.
What did they call this vast network of cages and concrete? The GEO Group.
What happened over the next 14 years was vertical integration on a scale the private prison industry had never seen. GEO ran a series of acquisitions back to back:
2005. Correctional Services Corporation, for $62 million in cash plus $124 million in assumed debt.
2006. CentraCore Properties Trust, for $356 million. CentraCore was a real estate investment trust that owned 13 correctional facilities. One of them was a 726-bed building in Newark, New Jersey called Delaney Hall.
2010. Cornell Companies, for $730 million in cash and stock. The merger produced a combined company with approximately $1.5 billion in annual revenue and 78,000 beds under management.
2011. BI Incorporated, a Colorado-based provider of electronic offender-tracking technology that held an exclusive contract with ICE for what became the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, or ISAP.
2017. Community Education Centers, the company that had been operating Delaney Hall on a lease from GEO since 2006.
The person who oversaw every one of those moves was Zoley.
He went from president of the subsidiary in 1988, to chairman in 2002, to CEO of GEO from its public listing in 1994 until his temporary retirement in June 2021, to Executive Chairman, and then back to CEO on March 1, 2026, on an employment agreement that runs through April 2029.
His current contract pays $1.2 million in base salary, a target bonus of 200% of base, and annual restricted stock grants worth at least 300% of base. In 2025, his total compensation was roughly $15 million.
George Zoley owns over a million dollars in GEO Group shares; each person in a cage is a dollar in his pocket.
But you may be wondering, who else is profiting from this? Who are the shareholders? Wall Street.
The top five owners:
BlackRock: Larry Finks empire. They hold 20.59 million shares of the GEO Group. That is roughly 15.41% of the entire company, valued at nearly $478.28 million.
The Vanguard Group: Through its various portfolio management arms — like Vanguard Portfolio MGMT and Vanguard Capital Mgmt — they control somewhere between 10 to 11% of the outstanding shares valued at $392 million.
Pentwater Capital Management LP: Founded and owned by Matt Halbower, a billionaire hedge fund manager and now investment banker.
UBS Group AG: This is a a Swiss multinational investment bank that owns 7.03% worth $278.52M. Interestingly, Blackrock owns 5% of UBS Group AG themselves, and Vanguard owns 3-4%.
Continental General Insurance Co: This company owns 4.27%, worth $169.39M. Michael Gorzynski serves as the Executive Chairman of Continental General Insurance Co meaning he made the decision to buy trades.
You can view the full 34-page list of GEO Group shareholders are Nasdaq by clicking here.
WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE US?
Jean Wilson Brutus is where this ends, because Jean Wilson Brutus is where it always ends. A healthy 41-year-old man walked into Delaney Hall on December 12 and was dead within hours. Three hours passed between his intake and the call for help. His death certificate reads "inconclusive."
Every person that walks into a GEO Group facility never walks out the same. Some never walk out at all. And the corruption of the company is older than the President of the United States of America. We’ve let this go on for far too long.
Even if you feel small, you voice is large.
Your voice is large because theirs depends on you staying quiet. That is the whole arrangement. Wackenhut built an empire on four million people who never knew their names sat in a file. GEO Group runs on the bet that you will read about Jean Wilson Brutus, feel something for an afternoon, and move on. Their lawyers, their lobbyists, their revolving door of former officials all rest on that single wager about your attention span.
So break the bet and prove them wrong. Learn the names of the people who died in those facilities. Say them out loud. Call the senators who got turned away at the gate and ask what he plans to do about it. Find out which of your own representatives took GEO money and make them answer for it in public. Support the legal aid groups and journalists who keep dragging these black sites into daylight, because daylight is the one thing a company like this has spent seventy years trying to buy its way out of.
Dissent in Bloom is one woman, a lot of public records, and far too much coffee. If this article taught you something, keep it going by subscribing or buying me a coffee on Ko-fi. Thanks for being here. Thanks for not giving up.
You are doing great work. Thank you.
What we first perceived as sporadic rot in the system is actually widespread gangrene. America needs to perform some serious amputations, if the body of democracy is to be healed.
And Roy Cohn was the right hand man of McCarthy before Cohn was Trump’s mentor who taught him everything he knows.