Prison-athletic complex.

• Author: Zirin, Dave
• Position: Edge of Sports - Florida Atlantic University and GEO Group

Sometimes the sports world doesn't just reflect the real world. It mocks our world with a vicious veracity. Recently, we learned that Florida Atlantic University had sold the naming rights to its football field. This isn't unusual at all, but the company the school chose among many suitors certainly was. The stadium will be known as GEO Group Stadium.

For those who have never heard about--or protested--GEO Group, it is a highly profitable private prison corporation. Governments across the world, from South Africa to the United Kingdom to Australia, pay the GEO Group to take over their jails and run them as privatized, for-profit enterprises.

In the United States, where the prison population has more than doubled since 1992 and is now the highest in the world, this is known as a growth industry. In many communities, where people of color are victimized by callously punitive laws (promoted by the lobbying arms of for-profit prisons), its known as the New Jim Crow. The GEO group is the second largest for-profit prison company in the United States, behind only the Correctional Corporation of America.

Florida Atlantic University president Mary Jane Saunder gushed over the GEO Group payment of $6 million over the next twelve years for stadium naming rights. She called the GEO Group a "wonderful company" and said the university was "very proud to partner" with it. "This gift is a true representation of the GEO Group's incredible generosity to FAU and the community it serves," she said. Given how cash-strapped most universities are, and given how university presidents have increasingly become glorified fundraisers, her joy is unsurprising.

But fortunately, her acceptance of this money is sparking anger and protest on campus and beyond.

"It's startling to see a stadium will be named after [the GEO Group]," Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leaders, told The New York Times. "It's like calling something Blackwater Stadium. This is a company whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents that really draw into question their ability to successfully manage a prison facility."

Getting the naming rights is part and parcel of an effort by GEO Group CEO (and Florida Atlantic alum) George Zoley to rebrand the corporation as beneficent, as it undergoes a high-profile effort to take over a significant section of Florida's prison system, the third-largest in...