Two Pennsylvania judges recently suspended by the state’s Supreme Court have pleaded guilty to federal charges that they took millions of dollars in kickbacks in an ongoing corruption scheme of incarcerating juveniles for a profit.
The disgraced Luzerne County judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan, admitted accepting $2.6 million in exchange for rulings that favored the developers of a local juvenile detention center. The judges regularly violated state and federal laws by sentencing many youths who had committed minor offenses to the residential youth facility, often without benefit of counsel.
Note also the injustices being facilitated by the lack of adequate public defenders: those who regularly complain about having "their taxes" used to "defend criminals" might want to consider what would happen if they weren't.
For example:
Anita Barraud: Marsha Levick says up to 2,000 juveniles were wrongly incarcerated; many of the crimes or misdemeanours were extremely trivial.
Marsha Levick: Things like shoplifting a jar of spice that cost $4; taking change out of a parked car, where the car was open, and there was change visible; putting charges on a grandparent's charge card; a fight in a school, where one girl slaps a girl, and the other girl slaps her back; and the girl who slaps her back is then charged with an assault. So a lot of it is minor infractions, some not atypical adolescent misbehaviour, that resulted in these children being removed from their homes and their communities and their schools and placed in these facilities.
Anita Barraud: And I mean a girl charged with a cheeky drawing on her MySpace site or her assistant principal, gets three months.
Marsha Levick: Correct. Yes, it doesn't make any sense. How many teenagers did that yesterday?
Of course, I can't imagine any in the Australian community putting up with ludicrously harsh sentences for juveniles convicted of petty crimes...
The whole idea of private prisons has long bothered me. We want prisons to rehabilitate - but, if they're making a profit out of inmates, that's directly contrary to the interests of those who run the facilities. Why rehabilitate effectively when an unreformed criminal represents future business?
And just how do you make a profit running a prison anyway? It's not "efficiency" that enables a profit to be carved out of what the government had to pay to run the facility originally - it's cutting corners on the state's basic responsibilities to those it has imprisoned. Prisons are not an open market in which competition could conceivably be said to work: the only point of differentiation they can make to their "customer" - the State - is saving it money without it being investigated for human rights abuses. And no prizes for guessing how they do that.
Private prisons are a bad idea, even before you bring the corruption of the judicial process into it.
