"Pennsylvania is one of just a handful of states that do not provide any money to counties to defend those who can't afford a lawyer."[1]
Perhaps the DA and Public Defenders office should have equal budgets.
I am hoping some very smart lawyer figures out how to sue the prison company for these children. I am sure their is a corporate veil, but it can be pierced in the cases of criminal activity. Public-private partnerships work in a lot of cases, but this one needs a serious hammer to show that pulling this crap is bad and will put some scheming folks in jail.
That's how it works in the military. There was recently some interesting discussion about the merits of this idea amongst some defense attorneys (including some PDs and a lawyer with military justice experience) in the comments section here:
England and Wales. While the CPS has moved towards having more permanently employed barristers, it still regularly hires barristers in private practice to represent the Crown in the lower courts as so-called "agents" that are "instructed" by the CPS [1].
This has largely historical reasons; until not so long ago, England did not have designated prosecutors (in fact, well into the 19th century it often fell to private citizens to initiate prosecution, until the police started to take over that role).
That said, the CPS will likely still have more resources at its disposal than public defenders.
I was a juror on a murder trial and the number one reason for me voting not guilty was the absolute glaring disparity between the budget of the defense and the budget of the prosecution. The defendant essentially had no representation. I would do it again without reservation.
Good move. Another thing along these lines that's worth mentioning is jury nullification. You can believe that the person is 100% guilty as charged and still vote "not guilty" if you believe that the situation merited the actions or even if you believe that the action was wrong but the punishment will be too harsh. It's one of the checks and balances we (citizens) have over our government.
I've been following this case for a while .. extremely disturbing situation and the sentences were far too light for many of the offending parties, such as the builder of the facility who bribed the judges. Just imagine how it must have felt to be one of the kids. It's sick, really.
It seems that if you hide behind corporate structures and contracts you can transform the nature of charges against your actions. In this case, the offenses committed involved enslaving children for personal financial gain. If there is any offense worse than that, please inform.
The judges received long sentences for their involvement. Robert Powell, co-owner of the facility and Robert Mericle, the developer who built the facilities, only pled guilty to failing to report a felony, failing to disclose money paid as a finders' fee, and conspiracy to tax evasion. They face one to three years each, but those sentences are consistent with the felonies to which they pled guilty.
The plea deal is light for the two developers probably because the prosecutor didn't have as much evidence to pin on them, and because they needed their cooperation to get the judges. Remember, news articles about a crime are not admissible as the factual record in a trial. Just because it's obvious from a news article exactly what happened does not mean that the prosecutor didn't need to bargain for certain peoples' cooperation to bring all those facts to light.
It sounds ridiculous, but remember, the standard of proof at a criminal trial is "beyond a reasonable doubt." In a situation like this with four people pointing fingers at each other, giving the owners a plea deal probably ensured the prosecutors' ability to get the judges.
Were those two people still sitting judges up until the time the other co-conspirators agreed to cooperate? If so, it would have been massively more important to take down the judges.
Later
The appeals decision upholding Ciavarella's conviction suggests that he was still a sitting judge at the time Powell began cooperating.
Btw, I agree with you regarding why this outcome was reached. Doesn't change it being an unjust outcome.
From the article you linked ..
"Even though they were in positions of power and influence, I had the ultimate ability to do the right thing and say no. I was wrong for giving in and paying them and will forever bear the burden of having done so," he [Robert Powell] wrote.
Whether or not they "extorted" him (though he still managed to profit in the millions), doesn't change the seriousness of what he did .. which was to enslave children.
Btw, I don't disagree with you re: the seriousness of what they did. I'm just saying I see the tactical reason for why they were charged the way they were.
It was meant to be somewhere between satire and horror that this could happen in a civilised society.
It failed quite badly. Deleting.
Edit: My original comment said use the NSA / anti terror apparatus against the child slavers in Lousiana. The sheer scale and obvious uses of those program's has managed to have such an impact that a once liberal Brit now can make off handed comments that evidence from torture and illegal surveillance is ok. No matter what happens, the sheer existence of those program's has changed the debate on them. Curious.
What really troubles me is what they'll do to help those 4000 children. I think they might lack the maturity to deal with their experience. Hell, if someone sent me to jail over something like that when I was in my teens, I would certainly have taken the wrong turn at that point.
With that many kids, at those impressionable ages, I'd say there's a limited but real chance they may have created a "Joker" level villian somewhere in that bunch.
What scares me about it is that these kids have likely gotten used to juvenile detention (and detention in general), which'll lead them to view it more lax.
Adding to that the time they lost outside of the school system, the social stigma that goes along with having been to "jail" and you've got yourself more a more explosive cocktail than anything described in the anarchists cookbook.
If you're socially sidelined and have no options for a career, crime is enticing. Especially since you've been stamped a criminal allready, and you've been locked up (yes, they were aquitted, but they won't realize that, and their peers won't either).
Assuming they just took problem kids across the whole spectrum, assuming 500 non problem kids, you have 3500 problem kids. A rough guess of mine would be that 1-2% are too smart for school kids that cause trouble out of sheer boredom. So you've got 70 bored hacker type kids that suddenly have someone who's mistreated them, and I'd want to get back at them. A couple of them proably took the frugal coping mechanism of sociopathy.
If your school system gets kids to come to school armed, prepared to kill, how the hell will that play out?
> ... Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Michael Conahan, received more than $2.6 million ...
> ... He was also forced to pay $1 million ...
We don't know his cut of the $2.6M or what the other guy's fine is/was (assuming other guy also has to pay). But yes... they basically just had to give the money back. (And go to prison for a bit)
the other judge, Conahan, who not only sold kids but also helped prevent use of the county's facility, got 17.5 years in prison; [2]
Robert Powell, an attorney that passed the bribes and part owner of the facility, got 18mos in prison and $60k in fines (it is unclear how much he will serve), plus he gets to serve in Miami to be close to his family. He did apparently cooperate and wear a wire. [2]
Robert Mericle, the real estate developer who built the two facilities, paid $2.15MM to fund childrens' health programs and will likely serve 1 year or even just probation;
And then you read, from the wiki article [1], "Sandy Fonzo, whose son Edward Kenzakoski committed suicide after Ciavarella gave him a jail sentence, despite Kenzakoski's first-time offender status" and I sit here amazed. Millions of dollars of theft, bribes accepted not only for children but in cases as well, children sold for cash, children pushed into suicide... I'd say all of them got a slap on the wrist.
The other thing, unremarked upon by the wiki article, is I wonder who else knew about this? Just like Annie Dookhan, who was faking drug test results in Boston and sent hundreds at least to prison, possibly tainting thirty four thousand verdicts, or Jonathan Salvador, who was doing similar things in texas [4], tainting five thousand convictions, I'd bet good money there where people who saw this happening. Did you read some of the convictions? "He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal." Many of these fucking pigs knew what was going on, knew how to fuck a kid who was mouthy or didn't kiss their asses and send them to the judge that would send the kid up the river. Moral: never trust a pig.
from [4]
Worse yet, the lab Salvador worked for knew he was doing a bad job for
years. A DPS investigative commission found that Salvador was asked to
correct mistakes in about a third of all the tests he ran. Periodic job
evaluations noted that Salvador struggled with an overall understanding of
chemistry and that his problems were very systemic and his work right on the
edge of tolerable, though not catastrophic.
It could probably be described as catastrophic now. Twenty cases have been
overturned so far, voiding almost 160 years of prison sentences. If all of
Salvador's cases are thrown out, which is looking more likely, the lost
sentences will total more than 10,000 years.
In Walker County, DA David Weeks has already given up. His
office tried to retest evidence from Salvador's cases, but the results were
haphazard, Weeks told the Hunstville Item. In a case where [Salvador] said
there was drugs, there wouldnt be. And when he said there were no drugs,
there were drugs. "Its clear that all the cases [Salvador] worked on are
irreparably damaged, Weeks said. He's already making arrangements to expunge
the records of every affected defendant. It blew up in our faces.
I'd bet if anyone looked hard enough in the kids for cash trade, there were at best a bunch of other people not seeing what was plain as day in front of them.
I am stunned that Robert Mericle, who paid these judges to sentence children to his facility has apparently been able to buy himself a get-out-of-jail free card.
The message being sent here is, if YOU own a prison and YOU do this, it might cost you some extra money if you get caught (and some token prison time).
When I learned about this case some time ago, back when people were appalled by the inital plea bargains offered to the judges, he and the other guy on that side claimed it was a shakedown, the judges were extorting them. Which evidently the authorities believed at the time.
Echoing x0x0's general point, it's pretty clear the county's political machine knew what was happening and looked the other way.
ADDED: It's telling it took the Feds to bring them to justice; the county and state level officials just don't seem interested in this atrocity.
I agree with the idea that we are in general too mindlessly harsh with prison sentences. But that shouldn't prohibit exceptions. These guys, judges and prison profiteers, are an exception. They ruined and took lives for profit, and they are society's last line of defense, the supposed reason for us not to indulge in vigilantism. They are fucking civilization. They deserve to die in prison, and not the one that paid them. They're a cancer.
I agree. I'm not arguing for the sentences to be reduced, and I'm surprised at the shortness of two of the sentences. I generally think that if abuse of authority is involved, then harsh sentences are warranted. But to characterise a 17- and a 28-year sentence as a 'slap on the wrist' is indicative of a damaging mindset around sentencing.
Those are not light nor trivial sentences, and characterising such long sentences as such gives us things like decade-long 'three-strikes' sentences for stealing pizza.
I don't care whether you're a jaywalker or Hitler. Stealing pizza should not be handed a 25-year sentence, regardless if it was from a group of children or not. Recidivism should merely prevent leniency in sentencing, it shouldn't turn a trivial offence into a lifelong burden. The punishment should fit the crime.
Even if you don't care for rehabilitation of the criminal, a 25-year sentence is incredibly expensive to enforce, and stretches resources that could be better applied to more serious criminals. I mean, seriously, what once was a sentence for murder is now a sentence for stealing food? How is that not hysterical?
But they did something that warranted a "lock em up". They materially damaged families and children's lives (in a position of public trust) far more than their sentences convey.
28 years - yep, it may sound at first like a long time (even though they destroyed decades of life for their victims). Yet with good behavior these snakes will probably be out in 7 (if i understand the system correctly), and it doesn't look like they are going to serve time in any serious security tough facility.
Yes, perhaps better would be less time + public burning at the stake (or reverse the order), especially in extreme cases where innocents were damaged severely and there is little doubt that the prosecution is unfair.
Our society sometimes looks like something Charles Dickens wrote about (or worse). Bringing back the old punishments (drawing & quartering, hanging, etc.) might help, but I doubt it.
A Brit once told me that it was very effective in helping one to focus. He claimed that his caning in mathematics class was responsible for his Ph.D. in math.
Actually I thought of the caning they use in Singapore as a form of punishment for crimes. Pretty cruel, but I guess it beats getting raped in American prisons.
I'd really hate to say it but people who abuse authority in this manner don't deserve to enjoy being members of society. How many lives do you have to destroy before we destroy yours? 10, 100, 1000?
I can empathise, but that is not the role of the courts. Particularly when the problem is systemic.
The court's role here should be to sentence in a way that a) offsets the incentives that exist for corruption, and b) provides restitution where possible.
The problem is not evil individuals, but that incentives for corruption exist in the first place.
It's really not that hard to choose not to mastermind a child slavery pipeline from a position of power atop state government. This isn't the sort of crime that underpriveleged individuals get forced into.
I find it a little ironic that in a story that indicates that the system is horribly corrupt, you would advocate that the same system be allowed to destroy lives.
Prison isn't awesome, but you can still study all sorts of things, expand your mind, and you get out at the end. I don't really see why 28 years in the pen "might as well be dead".
The big news: Once Ciavarella was convicted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out 4,000 convictions issued by the judge. Will the kids or their families get any restitution for wrongful imprisonment?
The states have sovereign immunity (they can only be sued by the federal government, other states, or when they consent to be sued). State sovereign immunity dates to the common law, but was explicitly affirmed by the 11th amendment.
Sovereign immunity ("the King can do no wrong") is a very strange doctrine. One would have thought that notion would have gone out of the window when they beheaded Charles I, but somehow it has a strong foothold in the US. In most civilized countries it does not.
In Alden vs Maine, this is argued pretty well in the majority opinion written by Anthony Kennedy.
"sometimes referred to the States’ immunity from suit as "Eleventh Amendment immunity[,]" [that] phrase is [a] convenient shorthand but something of a misnomer, [because] the sovereign immunity of the States neither derives from nor is limited by the terms of the Eleventh Amendment. Rather, as the Constitution's structure, and its history, and the authoritative interpretations by this Court make clear, the States’ immunity from suit is a fundamental aspect of the sovereignty which the States enjoyed before the ratification of the Constitution, and which they retain today (either literally or by virtue of their admission into the Union upon an equal footing with the other States) except as altered by the plan of the Convention or certain constitutional Amendments."
It's not convincing at all. That opinion states that the States enjoy immunity because it had been a long-standing practice going back to before they joined the union. It's a long-standing practice of many civilized nations that the nation itself does not enjoy immunity from prosecution. If what Judge Kennedy wrote (Alden vs Maine happened in 1999!) isn't a no-argument I wouldn't know what is.
Also this: the State of Pennsylvania has committed grave injustice against thousands of its citizens. If they cannot get justice done through the courts what are they supposed to do instead? Take recourse to Direct Action? That's not desirable in civilized society. You can't be your own judge and executioner.
This is what government IS! Executive, Legislative, and Judiciary.
States have some subservience to the Federal government, as well.
The question really is "should the judiciary have power over the executive in this case, or should the executive or legistlature decide what compensation is appropriate." It's still "government" either way.
And let us remember which branch of government was the original villain in this case!
I would assume lawyers would look at other remedies such as lost wages, emotional distress, and other factors to seek a civil trial to get proper compensation.
Well, Pennsylvania has voters, and at least now thousands of them have both motivation and moral standing to push for such statutes.
One shouldn't think of laws as something that exists to be obeyed - laws are (or should be) the written down consensus of We the People about how we want our society to be, and any [lack of] such law can and should be fixed.
Well this was a criminal case, it seems pretty likely that a very successful civil lawsuit will follow. That said, the idea that the monetary penalty is less than he actually made is just bizarre.
Actually the 1 million seems to just be the tax he should have paid on the income.
"The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care."
The prison sentence was the punishment of the wrongful imprisonments.
What really blows my mind is that elsewhere on HN today there was an article about asset forfeiture and police forcing a couple to turn over about $6k that was found in their car without ever even arresting or charging them. So why exactly doesn't this judge have to forfeit the assets he acquired through these kickbacks?! It's an illustration of just how unfair and ineffective our legal system really is, especially in terms of its treatment of the poor and/or uneducated.
The state. Their AG, et al on down allowed this heinous act of gross miscarriage of justice. These innocent youngsters are scarred for life. Being a state conspiracy by the Rico Act these victimized youth could be awarded treble damages. Like the charge of espionage over ES' head with draconian punishment of life in prison, or the inflated charges on Aaron Swartz,arguably to send a message to future whistle blowers and `hackers', the state criminal justice system must live in fear of the punitive consequences of malpractice. Seems to be how everything gets decided today.
No, really Yes but No... I dont think that if your corporation purposefully bribes judges to imprison children for profit, i dont think a civil court fine is sufficient. These guys should be going to jail for decades.
There should be a corporate death penalty that actually gets used. There it will be less likely that any individual would feel "incented" to do shit like this.
This whole problem stems from the movement to privatize prisons. It's a disgusting abuse of power. The lives of many at-risk children (and their families) have been turned upside-down due to greed.
It's sad that in my country, where prisons are currently run by the government, there exist plans for privatization. With privatization there's almost no benefits, and a lot of opportunities for trouble; it the Dutch government feels the urge to repeat the mistakes of others.
The concern isn't the privatization[1], it is the profit motive of the contract does not align with the a just system. If the contract was based on potential cells as opposed to the actual number[2], then bribing to get more profit couldn't happen. The minute any groups profit incentive doesn't match your goal is going to give you problems.
1) do some reading on prison worker unions and you'll see the perversity isn't restricted to private enterprise
2) we will pay you a fixed X for your Y number of cell facility
Not going to disagree with the intent, but that would make it very worth the effort to get as many children who shouldn't be in prison incarcerated since they likely wouldn't be prone to going back. In fact, it might lead to no prison time for hard cases since that would affect he prison's profits.
Absolutely agree with you. It's a general problem with using any performance metric as a sole-focus driver for optimization. You'll find the optimizations may drive behavior beyond where the metric has direct value. That's a truism if you're talking about performance of prison contracts, computer systems, factory throughput, or even capitalism as a whole.
And really, that's what a well-running oversight function should be doing in the case of prison management, adjusting metrics to drive the system toward good whole-society outcomes. Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.
> Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.
Read up on some of the campaigning done by the prison worker's union in California and you will see public has its own profit motives that are just as bad.
"Privatization" where the government contracts to third parties, is not privatization. When the decision is centrally-managed, and the revenue raised by force (taxes), you haven't addressed the central problem. So calling it privatization is misdirection. It's a confusion of terms that is meant to keep people arguing in circles.
Actual privatization removes centralized decision-making. We should be able to opt-out of governments and opt-in to alternative sovereigns. The fact that governments are allowed to claim authority on the basis of geography is why they're still in business, and it's why these messed up situations occur.
How would you describe the central problem you're referring to? I think the main issue here is that "the system" allows for the possibility of an unjust justice system due to commercial interests.
Everybody agrees that what has happened was illegal and should not have happened, and that it is the sovereign's responsibility to create a system in which the risks of such events are minimized, simply because the consequences can be so far stretching. This can be done by ensuring financial independence of judges; eliminating the role of parties who benefit from outcomes that are not necessarily aligned with society's benefits.
I don't yet see how decentralizing decision making reduces this risk.
The central problem is any entity that is allowed to raise revenue by force. Which is the definition of a State.
> the possibility of an unjust justice system due to commercial interests.
There's no such thing as a non-commercial interest. Money is not the only thing that is directly in demand. Power is valuable. Regardless of how the government labels its activities, it has things people want; labeling those things non-commercial is just marketing. Trying to plug the holes with regulations and endless "reforms" is a distraction meant to saturate your time.
> ensuring financial independence of judges; eliminating the role of parties who benefit
"Oversight" is a hand-wavy solution to a never-ending problem. The feedback loop is too long.
> how decentralizing decision making reduces this risk
Competition provides alternatives. Lack of competition reduces incentives for providing great service. The state has no competition, and it raises revenue by force, it's silly to expect a good outcome from that.
I am a proponent of strong government but I agree about your point about this fake privatization which most of the time works the same way as before but with more overhead and corruption. It is just switching a government agency to a company filling exactly the same role in the same way.
If the privatization plan had no incentive for increasing occupancy, then this problem would not occur. Regardless of whether things are government run or privately run the key is oversight by independent bodies that have as little incentive to be biased in one way or the other.
Privatized prisons will always have an incentive to increase occupancy because they will always benefit by having more prisons and providing more jobs.
The problem with having an independent body provide oversight is that in the worst case it's just another level of corruption. Even in the best case they have an incentive to keep the prison system larger because it means more work (aka money) investigating and auditing.
I'm not a big fan of the government, but I think prisons are one thing the government should do itself.
True - you would have to set rules in place that would prevent any kind of incentive for increased occupancy, and then create government bodies that enforce these rules. Also, you would have to set rules in place for many kinds of standards for living conditions for inmates, and set up bodies that enforce those as well.
The thing is that when commercial incentives come into play, companies will go out of their way to find ways to increase profits. Privatization essentially starts a race to the bottom; a race that can only be slowed down by regulatory institutions. In the end, the company always wins and society loses. Banks have showed us that.
That said, this is hardly a fair sentence. He should have to serve time equal to all those lives he destroyed. How about surrendering the money and life in prison?
for non-violent offenses, with good behavior you typically only serve 30-40% of your sentence (at least in iowa, my wife is a social worker and deals with people in the system).
He was convicted in federal court, and in the federal system there's no parole and only very limited credit for good behavior. He'll serve at least 87.1% of his sentence[1] (barring unlikely events such as a successful SCOTUS appeal or a pardon). Most likely he'll die in prison -- old prisoners age quite quickly.
Yeah, he'll probably die sometime before the end of the sentence. I'm mostly ok with that.
(It's going to be really weird if life extension tech becomes pervasive, and can't be denied to inmates. People who were sent away for 200-300 years, thinking that would be "well more than life" might end up released after...200-300 years in prison. That's going to be...interesting.)
Imagine what 200-300 years in prison will do to someone. Would they be totally serene, or completely psychotic?
The cost of prison goes up dramatically if people are there for hundreds of years. I think society might reconsider the death penalty. (In addition to moral reasons, one decision for not pursuing the death penalty is the cost - the cases drag on for so long that it's usually cheaper to put someone in jail for life.)
I still think the most moral "terminal" punishment is some form of exile. I wonder if by the time we have 500-1000+ year lifespan, we'd also have some form of exile available (long slow trips to far away parts of the solar system?). I think this has been the theme of lots of sci fi.
They forgot the best part:
1) Statistical analysis of the children's ethnicity and religion. Where is it?
2) What about the personnel working in the prisons? Where they all completely unaware of that situation?
3) Private prisons are State-financed. Translation: money was taken from the pockets of US citizens to make sure these children would not have any chance of a bright future.
Wow! I remember these guys from Micheal Moore's movie "Capitalism a Love Story".There is part about private jails for teenagers. It says that 6500 kids were unjustly convicted. Some kids were locked up even when probation officers objected to detention.
You can watch that part here: http://vimeo.com/39118828 00:30:30
the title referenced "black children" specifically, but the article didn't mention it at all, is it supposed to be assumed all/majority of the kids sent to jail were black?
The actual ugliness of the story here is a bit obscured by the distorted framing of that headline. But that seems to be the modus operandi across this Web site:
how in hell a child can get charged, let alone sent to do actual time, with crime for a mocking page? ok, judge is corrupt. Fine. Happens. Nevertheless, the judge wasn't the one who complained, arrested, charged the child. A lot of adults were involved and they actively facilitated this travesty happening.
People like to blame evil for evil things, yet evil would be able to do much less without reasonable, supposedly good, people actively helping evil things to happen.
I was also shocked by that. How can that be a crime at all? It would seem to be protected speech under the First Amendment. The judge and anyone else involved should have all gone to jail just for that one egregious civil rights violation.
Can we also send all prosecutors who only care about maintaing a 100% conviction rate to jail? Their actions are the exact same as far as I'm concerned.
A prosecutor maintaining a 100% conviction rate isn't necessarily a bad thing if it mean they only charge people against whom they can build an ironclad case.
I don't want a 100% conviction rate from a prosecutor. I want a conviction rate that reflects the statistical norm of a person being charged with a crime and being convicted. Anything outside of that within a few points margin-of-error is grounds for removal.
Usually when "restitution" it always seems to be significantly more than the amount actually taken. In this case, not, and I wonder why:
"...received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care. In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution..."
If there were any justice, the restitution that the bribing company was required to pay would bankrupt it (them?). But we know that won't happen :-(
I would have thought that at least somebody in the company would be thrown under the bus for signing the expense report for the bribes (regardless of the line item description used instead of "bribe"), though. This will allow the company to hire a new patsy to bribe new judges to continue their operation.
I've not seen on a single story related to this about the actual bribers: they just name the company, but don't press criminal charges against individuals, or even sue the company? How is that an appropriate response?
When I first heard about this, I was thinking that it happened in a third world country. After reading that it occured in Pennsylvania....I'm just amazed, disgusted, and furious. Hopefully Harrisburg does a long cleanup of that section of the state's court system, that civil suit crushes those responsible for this, and the bastards that profited from such a bastardization of justice serve the entire sentence out in a Hell on earth.
As I've read about this story for the past couple years not once have the bribers been mentioned. How much time will they be serving? Are these really people that should be trusted with the incarceration of minors?
Contra the OP, the problem isn't for-profit prisons per se; the problem is for-profit prisons in a political system highly susceptible to rent-seeking by special interest groups.
It seems to me that this is an example of exactly the kind of shenanigans that are why we should not allow the government to execute people. If a single judge can wrongfully imprison 4,000 children - and not out of ineptitude, but for profit - then how can we possibly trust the rest of the judicial system not to convict innocent people of capital crimes?
It seems to me that if anyone deserves the death penalty, it's people like this judge.
Ordinary citizens don't have the power to deprive citizens of their civil rights at such a scale, it requires the extraordinary power of the state. The trust we need to have in judges makes such corruption not only more likely, but much more dangerous. So for cases like this, the punishment ought to be as extraordinary as the power needed for the crime.
I personally oppose the death penalty, so the suggestion is only half-serious, but I find the reasoning for reserving executions for egregious political corruption to be more compelling than for more common crimes.
> I personally oppose the death penalty, so the suggestion is only half-serious, but I find the reasoning for reserving executions for egregious political corruption to be more compelling than for more common crimes.
I'm with you there. The way I see it, crimes like these threaten the very premise of our justice system. It is hard for me to imagine a worse crime than destroying our ability to handle crime at all. Punishment for all those other horrible crimes relies on the system people like this are threatening.
What about one of those skin tight spandex suits with shock electrodes in it? Then give the kids a smart phone with an app that allows them to shock on demand. Every time they feels angry or frustrated at their lives being ruined, then can seemly shock the judge...
"Shock the Judge".... Now there's a game show I'd watch.
Perhaps the DA and Public Defenders office should have equal budgets.
I am hoping some very smart lawyer figures out how to sue the prison company for these children. I am sure their is a corporate veil, but it can be pierced in the cases of criminal activity. Public-private partnerships work in a lot of cases, but this one needs a serious hammer to show that pulling this crap is bad and will put some scheming folks in jail.
1) http://www.npr.org/2012/03/03/147876810/after-scandal-new-ru...