Summary
After learning of the state's desire to privatize the south Florida hospital, Wackenhut purchased an 87-bed, private psychiatric hospital in Fort Lauderdale for $6 million and spun off a company, Atlantic Shores Healthcare, to provide mental health services. The company, meanwhile, now doing business as GEO Care, has been able to leverage its success at the south Florida hospital into additional contracts in Florida and New Mexico - and possible contracts in other states like Nevada, Georgia and Utah that are considering privatizing the operation of mental health facilities.
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Extract
A New Mindset
In the late 1950s, the state opened the South Florida State Hospital in Pembroke Pines as a treatment facility for people suffering from severe and persistent mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and major depression. But by the late 1980s, the hospital had become little more than a human warehouse where the mentally ill wandered about naked and shared toothbrushes from a communal bucket. When passers-by complained of seeing nude patients from the street, state workers responded by painting the hospital's windows black. Patients sat idle; therapy was almost non-existent.
A class-action lawsuit in 1988 produced some improvements, but a decade later the hospital was still dysfunctional. Patients often wandered off the grou...See the full content of this document
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