Former DOC Director Was Moonlighting

New documents show that former Department of Corrections (DOC) director Nolin Renfrow was working for private prison contractor the GEO Group while he was still on the state payroll.

The information was obtained through an open records request by Colorado Citizens for Ethics in Government (CCEG), a non-profit watchdog group.

More after the flip.From the press release:

The documents obtained by CCEG confirm that former Director of Prisons Nolin Renfrow began working for The GEO Group while still on state payroll, a blatant conflict of interest.  In an email to Brian Burnett, the deputy executive director of CDOC, Dave Schouweiler, DOC Manager of Purchasing, stated that Renfrow was on state payroll until January 31, 2006 and acknowledged the “impropriety of Mr. Renfrow’s involvement with the originating procurement.”

The GEO group also runs a federal ICE lockup facility in Aurora, Colorado where 22 prisoners were suddenly moved from the building while contract negotiations with the federal government were being resolved in 1998.

GEO recently lost a state contract in Pueblo after the firm sought to change the agreement and failed to start construction.

Erin Rosa was born in Spain and raised in Colorado Springs. She is a freelance writer currently living in Denver. Rosa's work has been featured in a variety of news outlets including the Huffington Post, Democracy Now!, and the Rocky Mountain Chronicle, an alternative-weekly in Northern Colorado where she worked as a columnist covering the state legislature. Rosa has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists for her reporting on lobbying and woman's health issues. She was also tapped with a rare honorable mention award by the Newspaper Guild-CWA's David S. Barr Award in 2008--only the second such honor conferred in its nine-year history--for her investigative series covering the federal government's Supermax prison in the state. Rosa covers the labor community, corrections, immigration and government transparency matters. She can be reached at erosa@www.coloradoindependent.com.

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