Limit solitary confinement to safety or serious violations, capped at 30 consecutive days
Criminal justice - prison reform
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Solitary confinement rules for the public prisons that hold most incarcerated people are set by legislatures, courts and corrections agencies, out of shareholders' reach. A slice of the system is different: GEO Group and CoreCivic are publicly traded companies that run prisons and detention centers, and their owners can demand humane practices directly. Shareholders passed a human rights implementation reporting resolution at GEO Group in 2019 with 88 percent support, showing the ownership channel works where it reaches. The primary resistance is not corporate: reform stalls in legislatures and public corrections agencies, and corrections officer unions, public employees answering to no shareholders, have sued to overturn New York's solitary limits and helped defeat or soften similar bills in Connecticut and other states.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Common Ground of the American People: Prison Reform, Program for Public Consultation / Voice of the People, survey February 2021
- Investors say GEO Group is ill-prepared to guard against human rights risks, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2019
- GEO Group Under Pressure from Shareholders on Human Rights Policy, Prison Legal News, 2019-09-05
- These Labor Unions Are Fighting to Keep Solitary Confinement, The Nation, 2022-08-16
1 campaign on record
Report on how the company puts its human rights policy into practice, including whether staff understand it, what measures show performance, and how failures are fixed.
With Mercy Investment Services, Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment
Result: Passed with 88 percent support at the 2019 annual meeting. The board first opposed it and then told the SEC that its position had evolved.
GEO Group published its first report on implementing the policy, Respect for Our Inmates and Detainees, in September 2019. The investors who filed said publicly that the report fell short of the standards they had asked for.
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Common Ground of the American People's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.