Last year, we reported how the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison company, used its close ties to the Texas legislature to defeat measures that would have placed more restrictions on how it does business.

In recent years the firm has suffered a spate of inmate deaths and scandals that call into question the outfit's ability to run prisons and jails.

In 2007, state regulators shut down GEO's juvenile justice facility, citing filthy conditions, while a pair of riots broke out at its prison in West Texas in 2008 and 2009. Also last year, a high court upheld one of the largest wrongful death judgments in recent U.S. history against the GEO Group after an inmate was fatally beaten at another one of its facilities. After the appellate court concluded that the company's conduct was "clearly reprehensible," the GEO Group settled earlier this year.

• In 2008 Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who had been serving a 30-month sentence at the Reeves County Detention Center, for illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico at El Paso, was allegedly sent to solitary confinement after he suffered a seizure. He later died.

• Juan Angel Guerra, a defense attorney and former South Texas district attorney, told Fort Worth Weekly  that he believes at least five men have died in the Reeves County facility since August 2008; however, he says the real story goes far behind the statistics. “We have evidence that people who are going to die are removed … to die elsewhere, to keep the numbers down."

• In 1999, at the Coke County Juvenile Justice Center in Bronte, in West Texas, GEO Group. then known as Wackenhut Corrections Corp, settled a lawsuit for $1.5 million after several female juvenile detainees claimed they had been sexually abused by a Wackenhut employee, who was a convicted sex offender at the time he was hired.