George C. Zoley

George C. Zoley is the chairman of the board, CEO and founder of GEO Group, the second largest private prison company is the United States. Born in 1960, Zoley has been with GEO or its former parent company, the Wackenhut Corporation, since 1981. He once called the late George Wackenhut, the controversial right-wing founder of Wackenhut Corporation, the person he most admired.

When Zoley joined Wackenhut in the early 1980s, the company was expanding into providing strike support services for private companies to allow them to continue operating during strikes.

Zoley has been prominently involved in local and national privatization battles throughout his career. In his early years at Wackenhut, Zoley promoted the privatization of public fire departments. In Dover, New Hampshire, the International Association of Firefighters and a citizen's group fought Zoley's efforts tenaciously, suing to block one such outsourcing of their local fire department, saying it was intended to break the union.

Zoley's efforts were being promoted at the time by the pro-privatization Reason Foundation, which covered the pitched privatization battle between Wackenhut’s Zoley and the firefighters in Dover in its magazine. Reason also pushed Zoley's views on private policing. Wackenhut has financially supported the Reason Foundation.

As a staff member at Wackenhut (1981-1988), Zoley helped the company form Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) as a division in 1984. A GEO Group timeline reports that during this period, Zoley "was instrumental to the development and marketing of detention and correctional services to government agencies." In promoting the use of private prisons, Zoley reportedly said they are "kind of like a hotel with room and board."

In 1987, under Zoley’s direction, Wackenhut received its first contract, from the former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), to build and operate a detention center in Aurora, Colorado; and in 1988 was hired to run two facilities in Texas. That year, Wackenhut incorporated WCC as a subsidiary, and in July 1994, with Zoley as president and director, took it public.

In 1997, Zoley secured WCC's first contract with the federal bureau of prisons to operate the Taft Correctional Institution in California, and led WCC into the private prison health industry by buying Atlantic Shores Hospital and securing newly-created GEO Care's first contract.

In 2003, with Zoley as board chair, WCC purchased its remaining stock from G4S (which had merged with its parent company Wackenhut and become an indirect owner of WCC shares) and renamed itself The GEO Group. In 2005, Zoley signed an agreement with Indiana making GEO Group the first private company to run a prison in the state.

From 2006 to 2008, Zoley, as GEO Group CEO and board chair, was involved in a shareholder lawsuit over CentraCore Properties Trust (CPT), a real estate investment trust (REIT) that was technically independent of GEO but that, according to investigative reporter Beau Hodai, was “essentially the entity which held all of Wackenhut/GEO's real estate holdings.” Zoley was a founding CPT Trustee. According to Hodai, questions had been raised by both CPT shareholders and the SEC over whether CPT was in fact independent of GEO Group. When GEO Group sought to merge with CPT, shareholders filed suit in Maryland and Florida, “alleging that the merger was an inside deal beneficial to CPT trustees and GEO executives and that there were irreconcilable conflicts of interest between the two.” The lawsuits were settled out of court in 2008 on undisclosed terms.

Zoley has been politically active in Florida and nationally, contributing to the campaigns of now-Senator Marco Rubio, former Governor Charlie Crist, and raising more than $100,000 for George W. Bush's 2004 presidential campaign. Zoley has close ties with current Florida governor Rick Scott, who has pushed hard to privatize Florida's prison and prison healthcare systems. Zoley travelled to Britain with Scott in July 2012 on a business development trip.

Zoley, along with other Geo Group employees, also weighed in with a campaign contribution to former Arizona House Speaker Kirk Adams, who sponsored the controversial SB 1070 bill empowering state and local law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of residents (much of the law was later struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court).

Zoley was also involved in a controversial $6 million deal in 2013 over Florida International University's agreement to sell the naming rights to its sports stadium to GEO Group. Zoley is an FAU alumnus, former chair of the FAU board of trustees, one-time chair of its presidential search committee, and board member of the FAU foundation. The deal, which collapsed under heavy adverse publicity, led to the resignation of the university president, Mary Jane Saunders.

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council
GEO Group's parent company, Wackenhut Corporation, has funded the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). GEO Group itself has also been a member as of 2010, according to In These Times.

While Wackenhut (later GEO) was a member of ALEC's crime Task Force, ALEC pushed legislation to privatize prisons, and at the same time advanced harsh sentencing bills to put more people in prison for more time, particularly "truth-in-sentencing" legislation calling for all violent offenders to serve 85 percent of their sentences before being eligible for release, and "three strikes you're out" bills requiring mandatory life imprisonment for a third felony conviction. These bills became law in a majority of states during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Between 2003 and 2010, ProPublica reports that GEO Group contributed to many candidates who have or had connections to ALEC.

Compensation
In 2012, Zoley received $5,976,604 in compensation from the GEO Group. In addition, according to the Palm Beach Post, Zoley earned more than $5 million in dividends from converting the GEO Group into a real estate trust. The Post also reports that as part of the REIT conversion, GEO sold its residential treatment centers, at a loss, for $36 million to a group led by Zoley, and quotes compensation expert Paul Hodgson of BHJ Partners as saying the deal "raises multiple red flags." Hodgson is quoted as saying "that’s a clear conflict of interest. If I were a shareholder of that firm, I’d be raising questions."

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * GEO Group
 * Corrections Corporation of America
 * Outsourcing America Exposed Portal

Related PRWatch Articles

 * Brendan Fischer, Violence, Abuse, and Death at For-Profit Prisons: A GEO Group Rap Sheet, PRWatch, September 26, 2013.
 * Brendan Fischer, Lockup Quotas Help For-Profit Prison Companies Keep Profits High and Prisons Full, PRWatch, September 20, 2013.
 * Brendan Fischer, Pushback Against Privatization Across the Country, PRWatch, June 28, 2013.
 * Beau Hodai, or Terror: How Arizona's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate Interests, Turned on Occupy Phoenix, '"PRWatch'', May 20, 2013.
 * Beau Hodai, Marco Rubio, GEO Group, and a Legacy of Corruption, PRWatch, August 29, 2012.