Squid goes to prison with the hedge fund coming to manage some probationers in Monterey County.

Prison Industrial Complexity…After all the May Gray and June Gloom, Squid decided to put on the parka and light a fire this weekend and read about places with a climate similar to Monterey Bay in summer. Squid googled “Siberia,” and became instantly obsessed with the dramatic, daring escape of two New York inmates from what’s called “Little Siberia,” a maximum-security prison in upstate New York. The place is practically in Canada; maybe that’s where the fugitives are right now.

That’s one country, incidentally, where private prison company the GEO Group, Inc., does not operate prisons. The publicly traded company is at the forefront of globalizing the privatized prison and security industry, and calls itself “the world's leading provider of correctional, detention, and community reentry services,” aka a pioneer in prison privatization.

And Tuesday, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors is set to sign a two-and-a-half-year contract for nearly $960,000 a year—for a grand total of $2.9 million—with GEO Reentry Services, LLC, a subsidiary of the GEO Group. It’s the first “fully-integrated equity real estate investment trust specializing” in correctional facilities, and the company has 106 facilities in the U.S., U.K., Australia and South Africa, totaling 85,000 beds.

For the past three years, GEO has managed the day reporting center in Salinas, an alternative justice option for probationers, who check in there for drug testing, anger management therapy and parenting classes. To graduate, they need to stay sober and find a job.

Squid thinks the program is a smart, creative idea for keeping people out of prison, but Squid can’t help but wonder if the place could be run by someone else, and maybe better, than the mega-prison/real estate company GEO.

The chance arrived last fall when GEO’s contract was set to expire, and the county set the day reporting center contract out to bid. Six firms responded with proposals and budgets to run the day reporting center.

But the public—and the clientele—don’t know who those five other contenders are, what their proposed costs are, or how good they are. In short, we know nothing, because the process happened completely in secret.

That’s not uncommon for county contracts, County Contracts/Purchasing Officer Mike Derr tells Squid. “We don't want to diminish our ability to negotiate with another vendor,” he says.

A secret review panel vetted the proposals and ranked them, but Squid doesn’t even know who those reviewers are, or which proposals they liked or didn’t like.

“The reason we don't do that is the inability of us to get future reviewers because of harassment or badgering,” Derr says. “This county has made it a practice not to release names unless it is court-ordered.”

The Community Corrections Partnership—the inter-departmental partnership created in the wake of prison realignment, designed to uncrowd state prisons by shifting would-be inmates to counties—voted 5-1 May 11 to approve GEO’s bid, and sent that recommendation on to the supes.

The only dissenting vote was Public Defender Jim Egar, who says he’d prefer to have an open discussion about who the other contenders are and what they can offer. GEO has solid leadership these days, but it has a spotty track record: The Salinas center went through four managers in as many years, while going through a number of contract debates with the Community Corrections Partnership.

Since 2009, GEO has been under contract to serve up to 100 clients at a time, but has historically averaged only 65-70. The county long paid a flat monthly fee, even when the place was only 60-percent full. (Now the center averages 80 clients, and last year shifted to a tiered pricing structure, so the county’s monthly bill is based on how full it actually is.)

But still, Egar doubts the parent company’s good intentions: “It’s a multibillion-dollar international equities firm that’s come to Monterey County to obtain the benefits of a multimillion-dollar contract,” Egar says.

Squid is accustomed to watching Monterey County leadership do business in the dark. Maybe Squid should invite them to the dimly lit lair; it would be just like home for them, except it would give at least this one large-eyed cephalopod a chance to see exactly what’s going on.