Putting Kids In Jail For Profit

In Pennsylvania they caught two judges jailing kids for profit. Here's the scheme: Two privately-run detention centers are built. The judges make a deal with the companies, and order state juvenile detention facilities shut down for being in poor condition. Then they start sentencing lots of kids to serve jail time in the private facilities. Always jail time, for anything, and no lenience. The kids are taken away in shackles. The state gives money to the private facilities for taking the kids, and the judges get kickbacks.

We're talking about 5,000 kids.

See Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit.

I think it would be a good idea to look into all situations of people of all ages being sentenced to any privately-run facility. There is a profit motive involved, and we have learned from the banks and from the Republican destruction of the economy what can happen when a profit motive is involved.

Comments

[FogBelter]

Dave, the problem is the laws are too lenient in the United States for heinous acts such as this. These judges and the authorities of these for profit detainment centers and, for that matter anyone having direct knowledge of this practice, should face capital punishment. These Judges and their cohorts in crime are institutional kidnappers who have taught 5000 children the opposite of Justice.

Let the punishment fit the crime, these Judges have betrayed their oaths and used the authority of the bench to engage in criminal conspiracy which perverted Justice for benefit of personal profit.

And lets not kid ourselves, just like Corporate America wants to take over the public schools and create centers of controlled knowledge that will produce a pliant labor force with a monochrome worldview... the ultimate goal of these privately run Prisons, with inmates of dubious guilt, is the creation of an incarcerated corporate slave labor force whose work product falls under the auspices of "paying one's debt to society."

[ddrew2u]

Last I heard, infringing freedom of speech while acting under color of law is a felony civil rights violation -- under the 1964 Federal Civil Rights Act -- not absolutely sure; someone should check it out. This case reminds me of a school corporal punishment story I read in the Times about 20 years ago when the move was on to eliminate it in NY public schools. A teacher paddled a kid and, then, when the kid groaned when sitting down took him to the principal's office for a separate paddling for groaning. Clearly, the second paddling was an unprotected illegal assault which clearly should have been prosecuted and nobody (this was the Times!) seemed to catch on.

How anybody who went to law school (I didn't) in the United States could dream of prosecuting a student for publicly criticizing a government paid teacher (or anyone else) is past my imagining. You see stories of people arrested for "talking back" to cops in our presumably First Amendment aware media and nobody seems to catch on. Cops may not even tell arrested persons to "shut up" -- they are not sentenced prisoners.

Myself, I wont rise for the judge -- you don't have to salute the flag: just a working stiff lawyer in a co-equally crackpot branch of government; color purple or black; her courtroom or her J.O.B.? Prosecuted for criticizing a public school teacher -- should be unthinkable.

[arnray]

I worked in inpatient facilities for at-risk youth for twenty years and watched the shift towards private, for profit "care" first hand. I quit the day I was told, in no uncertain terms, to "emphasize the problems" of kids with good insurance and "emphasize the progress" of kids without insurance when writing daily progress notes. This started, of course, under Ketchupasavegetable Reagan.

[MajorKong]

This sounds like a legalized form of kidnapping.

[SSGVABEACH]

Profits before people. This sort of thing is ingrained in the US. As a child I was sent to a psychiatric facility and somehow pronounced cured right at the time our insurance would no longer pay the facility.That was 1980.

[BARRISTER]

America remains on the edge of Civilized Society, a place it has occupied for two centuries, always fearing to step in and smell the coffee for fear of losing its ability to be inhumane.

[petphotos]

In some countries, if you get caught doing corrupt things, they (the government) put a bullet in the back of your head. Seems that here we just look away. Needs to stop.

Having lived in PA, I am ashamed to see that it was judges from there doing such a horrible thing.
I sat on a jury while living there, and learned how screwed up our justice system is. My background included working with the police (as a medic), and dealing with evidence and rules of law. Found how ignorant the general public is on criminal matters. Then having judges that are either crooked or not impartial (as this one was) just makes a mockery of the system.

These two criminals need to go to Greaterford (Max security), in PA, and then tell the general population who they are.

[Nofsdad]

Hell, my county has been putting poor people's kids in foster care for profit for years now. Juvenile or family court judges seem to have a propensity for this kind of thing.

[philistine]

This story infuriated me. As a naive soul unexposed to the "justice" system until my divorce, I found inconceivable the fact that this gross, abhorrent, immoral distortion of our judicial system could have taken place. Alas, the privatization rot that has set into our government has been a source of great profit to those with connections (like our former vice president, for example), and will be hard to uproot. We as a country have our work cut out for us.

[sharonh]

A national discrace. These judges need the harshest penalities possible imposed on them. No wonder there is no faith in our un"justice system".

[anachoret]

"We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob."

President Franklin D. Roosevelt
October 31, 1936
Madison Square Garden Speech

[NCIndependant]

Something we still haven't learned apparently...

[oustfan]

That story makes me sick. We need to remember that state run facilities are just as corrupt.

[usedtowander]

They lose some money and spend 87 months in jail.
How many seconds is that per day per juvenile they falsely sentenced?

What is it with the Justice Department - do they have to give their own law enforcement people such short sentences?

Just as useful as they've been with the people who perpetrated the bank loan Ponzi scheme. Seems the best they can do is put Martha Stewart in jail. They don't seem to be very interested in going after people who really cause problem.