Further, as the federal government begins to implement the provisions of the recently enacted first step back, we believe that the services we provide through our GEO Reentry division can play an important role in improving rehabilitation and reintegration outcome.
Moving to our Youth Services division, we have continued to experience stable utilization rates and steady operational performance. Our Youth Services facilities and programs provide an important rehabilitation and treatment alternatives for youth across several states and local jurisdiction.
Our BI Electronic Monitoring division has continued to experience steady growth driven in part by the increased utilization under our alternative to detention contract with ICE. This growing program has allowed the federal government to effectively use community alternative for individuals going through the immigration review process.
Finally, we are proud of the continued expansion of our GEO Continuum of Care program, which has been implemented across 18 GEO Care facilities including 15 state correctional facilities in the U.S. Our GEO Continuum of Care integrates enhanced in-custody rehabilitation programs including cognitive behavioral treatment with post-release support services such as transitional housing, transportation, clothing, food and job placement assistance. We believe that the scope and substance of these programs are unparalleled in our industry and we have made a further commitment to fully implement our GEO Continuum of Care at all 22 state correctional facilities operated by GEO by 2020.
At this time, I’ll turn the call back to George for his closing remarks.
George C. Zoley
Chairman, Chief Executive Officer & Founder, The GEO Group, Inc.
Thank you, Ann. Clearly, GEO’s first quarter in 2019 was financially and operationally the best in our history. Further, the balance of 2019 looks very encouraging as well. For these things, we are very proud and grateful. But at the same time, we continue to be mindful of our responsibility to respect and protect the human rights of those in our care.
In 2013, our board of directors established a human rights policy for our company, which was the first in our industry. We have announced that we will begin publishing an annual report in September 2019, which will help our stakeholders better understand our longstanding commitment to respecting human rights, and will over time incorporate appropriate metrics to measure our performance. For our state clients, we are spending $10 million of our own money representing 7% of our annual net income to improve offender rehabilitation through the GEO Continuum of Care. We have expanded the GEO Continuum of Care program to 15 state facilities resulting in over 9,000 vocational certificates and nearly 3,000 high school equivalency diplomas in 2018.
On any typical day, there are approximately 30,000 participants enrolled in GEO’s offender rehabilitation programs, which resulted in 6.7 million program hours completed during 2018. The Continuum of Care program is supervised and assisted at the corporate level with the division that has expanded to 50 staff with subject matter experts in education, cognitive behavioral treatment, substance abuse treatment, post-release services, training and quality assurance.
To our knowledge, no other public or private correctional organization has this accumulation of offender rehabilitation expertise and enables us to aspire to be a world leader in this area. For our federal clients, we have spent hundreds of millions of dollars building modern secure residential care facilities, and each year, we spend tens of millions of dollars renovating facilities to ensure that they meet GEO’s standards for operational excellence. The facilities for the BOP and the U.S. Marshals Service are designed and operated to meet the standards of the American Correctional Association, ACA, which provides accreditation and periodic reaccreditation.
Our ACA scores are consistently 99% or higher. Our ICE facilities meet the design and performance-based national detention standards developed under the Obama administration.
