The government’s stance toward companies like GEO underwent a dramatic shift last summer. In early August, the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a troubling report that showed contract prisons had far higher rates of violence and lockdowns, and poorer access to medical care, than comparable federally run facilities.

GEO officials contend the report painted a grossly distorted portrait of its prisons. Its facilities are “equally safe, secure and humane as government-run facilities,” Pablo Paez, a GEO spokesman, wrote in an email to the Inquirer and Daily News.