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Reeves County straddles I-20 in West Texas, between Odessa and El Paso. Pecos is the county seat, anchored in cowboy mythology. Tiny homes, many of them 100 years old and made of stone, line several dozen downtown streets; beyond them, sandy soil dotted with clumps of short grass and tumbleweed stretch for miles. Oil well pump jacks are more common than trees on the landscape.

The town was home to the world’s first rodeo, the Pecos Kid, and the legendary Judge Roy Bean. Just around the block from the sheriff’s office is a replica of Bean’s office and his single-cell jail.

Times change, though, and these days, a newer prison sits in the southwest corner of town. The Reeves County Detention Center is far bigger than Bean’s, holding 3,700 inmates. The facility is owned by the county and run by the GEO Group, formerly a division of the giant security firm Wackenhut. GEO is one of the largest prison operators in the world — it runs more than a dozen facilities in Texas, nearly three dozen in the rest of the country, and another 10 combined in Australia, England, South Africa, and Cuba. All told, the company controls the lives of more than 60,000 inmates worldwide.

GEO also has one of the world’s worst track records in inmate care: The horror stories range from rapes to suicides to murders to deaths due to inadequate medical care. The company, which declined to respond to questions for this story, once hired a convicted sex offender as a guard in a facility for juvenile females. It’s not as if something goes wrong occasionally at GEO-run prisons — something goes terribly wrong on a regular basis at one or another of their facilities. Texas alone has twice removed all its inmates from a GEO-run facility because of deplorable conditions. And yet the company is still supported by the state and federal governments, a testimony to GEO’s deep connections and deeper pockets when it comes to lobbying expenditures.

GEO’s work in Texas, according to many observers, has been some of the company’s worst. “They have simply been horrendous,” said Bob Libal, coordinator of the Texas division of Grassroots Leadership, an organization bent on eliminating private prisons.

The Reeves County complex is touted as the largest private prison in the world. A little over a year ago it was the site of two major riots, the second of which burned large areas of the complex. The inmates who did it were not killers or hardened criminals. Most were immigrants whose only crime was illegally re-entering the United States after having been deported. And they and their families said they were rioting because of medical care so poor that some of them were dying from it.

The minimum-security detention center is made up of several squat, drab buildings surrounded by twin chain-link fences covered in roll after roll of razor wire.

Sheriff Arnulfo Gomez insists that the prison is not a bad place, as lockups go. “They get plenty of time in the yard, good food, good treatment, lots of programs, and great medical care,” he said.

Not everybody agrees. Since 2008, five inmates have died there — three from inadequate medical care, according to the inmates, and two allegedly by suicide.

In December 2008, the first riot at the prison resulted in damage that cost $1 million to repair. The second, in February 2009, caused more than $20 million in damage that is still being repaired.

According to family members, the first riot started after an inmate with epilepsy died in solitary confinement, without medication.

“When an epileptic dies in solitary confinement from seizures — and the allegations are that he asked for his medications and was denied them before he was put in the hole — well, that doesn’t sound like great medical care to me,” said Dotty Griffith, public education director of the ACLU of Texas.

“Prison riots are rare,” Griffith said. “And in this case, these were mostly non-violent prisoners in a minimum security prison. It strains the imagination that they would riot without cause.”

The prisoner who died was Jesus Manuel Galindo, 32, who had been serving a 30-month sentence for illegally crossing into Texas from Mexico at El Paso. He’d grown up partly in this country but never received legal status here and was deported in early 2007. With no family or friends in Mexico, he returned to the States several weeks later. But his medical condition tripped him up: He had a seizure in a convenience store, and when law enforcement arrived to help, Galindo was arrested and eventually tried and sentenced for illegal re-entry.

According to his mother, Galindo’s seizures increased in frequency while he was in Reeves, and when he asked to see a doctor to get his anticonvulsive medication, he was instead taken to solitary confinement — “the hole” — in the Segregated Housing Unit of the prison. A month later he was dead. According to letters he wrote to his family, he’d never seen
a doctor.

“The more important question,” said Miguel Torres, an El Paso attorney representing Galindo’s family, “is why was someone with a chronic and serious medical condition in need of constant monitoring shut away in solitary confinement without proper supervision?”

When two other inmates also in the SHU saw his body being taken out, they started a fire in a mattress using electrical wires, and the mutiny spread quickly. Guards used rubber bullets, stun grenades, and other non-lethal weaponry, but the inmates forced their way into the prison yards. Two prison employees — not guards — were taken hostage. That evening the inmates sent a delegation to meet with negotiators. They demanded less-crowded conditions, better food, and better medical care. When the negotiators promised to consider the inmate complaints, the hostages were released unharmed, and the riot was over.

But the negotiators didn’t follow through, according to newspaper accounts at the time. Seven weeks later, on Jan. 31, 2009, a second riot broke out because another inmate, Ramon Garcia, 25, was put into solitary confinement after complaining that he was sick and unable to get medical attention. This time the riot lasted almost a week, during which time inmates burned a large section of the prison. No serious injuries were reported, but more than two dozen inmates have been indicted on various charges for their involvement in the uprising.