is available to prisoners returning to Washington, D.C., from the Rivers Correctional Facility in North Carolina. By February 2020, the company had expanded the Continuum of Care program to 18 prisons. Later in 2020, the company also opened its Connection and Intervention Center in Idaho Falls, Idaho, for this purpose. One report noted that GEO "spends 11% of its revenue in Florida on inmate education and rehabilitation". Several inmates credited the Continuum of Care program with helping them to adjust to post-prison life by providing "classes, training and one-on-one case managers within the facility", and "teaching [them] basic life skills like dealing with [their] anger". In order to facilitate post-incarceration employment, prisoners received professional training and materials, and an opportunity to take professional qualification exams. The program also provides support for former prisoners, helping them to find housing, providing counseling, and following up on their living conditions. These services are provided at no cost to the former prisoners. In other philanthropic work, beginning in 2007, GEO Group annually awarded scholarships to students in Webb County, Texas, in support of their efforts to attend college. GEO Group thereafter "continued to provide $25,000 every year, on a year-to-year basis, raising the scholarship contribution to $375,000" as of mid-2021. In May 2021, GEO Group staff and inmates at a state prison in Golden Valley, Arizona, built a house for a homeless veteran residing in that city. Controversies and criticisms Public relations issues In February 2013, the GEO Group's private foundation pledged US$6 million to company founder George Zoley's alma mater, Florida Atlantic University. In return, the GEO Group received naming rights to the university's football stadium. In April, after pressure from students, faculty, and alumni, GEO Group withdrew the gift. Public relations firm Edelman supported GEO Group and was characterized by one source as helping in "laundering the reputation of private US concentration camps" in July 2019. In May 2019, The New York Times reported that executives from the Washington, D.C., office, including office president Lisa Ross and former Trump White House deputy press secretary, Lindsay Walters, traveled to Florida to present the pitch. In terminating California's contract with GEO's Central Valley Modified Community Correctional Facility in McFarland, Governor Gavin Newsom said that this was a step intended to, "end the outrage of private prisons once and for all." Newsom further stated: "Private, for-profit prisons have been used for many years to help