PHOENIX—Speaking to reporters Tuesday from his spacious corner office in the company’s sleek downtown corporate headquarters, Harbor Corrections Group CEO Walter G. Parks reminisced fondly about the business’s humble beginnings as a modest six-cell prison.
Parks recalled how he founded HCG in 1986, back when “[he] was just a kid,” in his words, with a single government contract and only a handful of convicts to his company’s name, pausing often to share colorful asides about his business’s early struggles.
“I’d say we’ve come a long way since those crazy early days,” said Parks, chuckling at the thought of the multiple loans he took out to finance the initial 1,300-square-foot facility and the long hours he put in trying to get the company’s name out to various states’ departments of corrections. “When we opened for business, all we had was two or three part-time guards for the whole place—.
“If you’d told me back then—back when we had only one basketball hoop in the yard and barely enough money to keep the surveillance cameras on—that one day we’d have 80,000 beds at 60 facilities in 22 states, I’d have called you nuts,” he continued. According to Parks, it was “all hands on deck” the first few years, and for a time, he handled the intake of each prisoner personally, filling out all the necessary forms and overseeing the filing system, and even stepping in on occasion to act as the facility’s cook to provide the inmates with their three square meals a day. In those days, he said, the cell HCG used for solitary confinement doubled as its office supply closet.
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