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Today's Top News
Jailing Kids for Cash
As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.
Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration:
"I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word."
Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible."
She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times.
Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella.
As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud.
They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.
This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails-a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out).
Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration."
Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust."
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
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64 Comments so far
Show AllThis is exactly why prisons should be public, NOT private.
When the prisons are publicly funded and run, the public strikes a balance between the cost of incarceration and the threat to the community (not that the current balance is perfect!). When the prisons are privately run, the incentive exists to create more prisoners! We're all at risk.
Is anyone really shocked? The U. S. has the more political prisoners than all other nations combined.
Yet another task for all of us: shutting down prisons and releasing the enemies of the State. We need all the help we can get to bring this government down.
I am now a retired principal, as my school closed, due to lack of funds, last December. So, can I say what I really think about this case? Jailing kids at all is despicable; jailing them for profit is heinous! However, regarding the quality of a large sector of American education, jailing kids might be the norm: crime not necessary.
judges are the cream of the mob / link their salary to reduction of crime, and you'll set the crime here below china level
edweg
Today Amy Goodman has someone from the Institute For Policy Studies on her excellent Democracy Now show. Yet when the founder of that institute, former JFK aid Marcus Raskin, gives a rave review-- as did Daniel Ellsberg-- to the new book that connects JFKs Cold War Policies with his assassination and CONSISTENTLY EVOLVING estrangement from the CIA, to put it mildly, the book is systematically ignored by all foundation funded leftists like Goodman.
This would not be as noticeable if Goodman and foundation funded friends did not consistently present a very one sided view of JFK as a pure cold warrior. This IS half the story, but 1960-63 was the elbow of the cold war-- the point at which there was the last chance a flexibility before permanent war economy. A mistake of 50% here is equivelent to a lie, when it is repeated ad infin. To much like Encounter, the CIA funded left-liberal mag of Cold War See The Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders in England called WHo paid the piper. This book shows how the CIA funded so called left media but for rightward ends.
Please read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, or people will remain thinking that the Presidents Chosen by Wolf Blitzer will change everything, and we-- as a species will devlove into quivering lime Jello, and not even cold quiverin
I agree that the CIA funds liberal radio like NPR and radiofreeEurope...
However, they also fund right wing hate radio through their front companies...
I think JFK was a lot like BHO, in that he had good rhetorical skills, and people tended to project their own ideas onto them...
Perhaps JFK was against the MIC...? Who knows... However it is just one issue from 46 years ago, and Goodman does give voice to others to share their perspective, whether it is convincing or not...
I disagree that it is just one issue from 46 years ago, and I also disagree that Goodman gives the other side of JFK.
It is about the fundemental issue of whether the president congress etc really control US foreign policy, and for that matter domestic. The JFK years have been systematicall detatched from their historical context so that most ESPECIALLY ON THE LEFT EG READERS OF COCKBURN CHOMSKY GOODMAN think that JFK was the same as LBJ. Not so
All of the recent hsitories since the 93 contraversy show THAT JFK WAS IN FACT GETTING OUT OF VIETNAM .BUT ALL THAT MOST SEE IS NEWSWEEK AND NATION ATTACKS MIXED IN WITH FLYING SAUCER RHETORIC IN THE MANNER OF A LINGUISTIC SIBERIA DISMISSAL
Also JFK prevented that invasion of CUba that would likely have strarted WW3 Again see JFK and the Unspeakable and many other new history books on this topic
ALSO JFK yes had been a serious cold Warrior but was very seriously changing for a number of reasons after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet especially on the left we only get half the story. JFK by 1963 represented the threat of detente. This is the part the left is not allowed to hear so that it SOUNDS like a conpiracy theory. It isnt . It is the conflusion of studying us foreign policy btw 60 and 63 of some of the best modern academic historians.
The Warren Commssions absurd defense is not about JFK. It is about preserving three outdated words as the ONLY SOCIALLY MEDIATED DISCOURSE FOR DESCRIBING HOW PWER WORKS IN 2009-- THE LEGISLATIVE, THE EXECUTIVE AND THE JUDICIAL. You and I both know these old words have little to do with the way power really works in 2009. And WE can learn otherwise on sites like this one.
What makes the JFK assassination different is that it calls into question one of those three words -- one that is drilled into every one of the three hundred milion skulls in the country-- the president. Note that authors like Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson are not really dangerous because they toe the old mantra-line "the CIA is only a vehicle for the will of the President" ie power is still elected. Well
1) SOMETIMES this is true
2) sometimes divergence btw prez and CIA is a deliberate act of plausible denial (see IRan Contra and Bush Iraq war and
manufactured media divergence btw CIA and Bush)
but there was a time when the CIA was off the reservation-- in Laos , Vietnam, CUba and with the Cold War in general. This was intimately connected to whether the US would be an oil war and banking economy on the one one hand, or on the other an economy that still made stuff.
Hence its not really about JFK. Its about epistomology and how we understand the critical turning point of the Cold War-- the point beyond which there was no turning back from the banking oil and war economy we are now sinking under. Or not.
So many on the left are fooled by rhetoric that all those interested in the assassination are somehow naive liberals as Chomsky spins it. Not true. I cut my teath by studying the CIA and Salvadoran Death Squads. End the straw dog dismissal strategies. Daniel Ellsberg knows a thing or two about JFK, Vietnam and the CIA
IS DANIEL ELLSBERG AUTOMATICALLY A NAIVE LIBERAL BECAUSE HE SAIS THAT THE NEW BOOK JFK AND THE UNSPEAKABLE WHICH CLEARLY AARGUES THAT IT WAS A CIA HIT AND MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY CONNECTS IT TO THE MANY WHYS OF THE COLD WAR-- BECAUSE HE SAID THIS BOOK FUNDEMENTALLY CHANGED HIS VIEW OF THE ASSASSINATION?
If yes then what about IPS founder and foremer Kennedy aid Marcus Raskin. Its not about believing JFK was a saint. Its about studying what happened the last time someone who wanted to change course was in a position to do so. That is ultimately not about an event 46 years ago, but about where we are right now.
And about Goodman and the Kennedys. Well I have given her more than a chance. EVERYTHING SHE SAYS ABOUT JFK AND RFK IS LEFTER- THAN -THOU- negative. Note that I do not disupute much of the factural basis of what Goodman says except when she implies, for example in her RFK reassasination of JUne 4 2008 that RFK ONLY BEGAN SPEAKING OUT FROM A LEFT POINT OF VIEW ON FOREIGN POLICY IN AN OPPORTUNISITC WAY IN 1968. GO BACK AND LOOK AT THE SPEECHES WHICH BY THE WAY ARE NOWHERE ON FOUNDATION FUNDED LEFT WEB SITES. CONTRAST RFK WITH OBAMA TODAY NIGHT AND DAY AMY, NIGHT AND DAY! For a long time I believed the Chomsky line. Then I started reading. A lot. again see history of Encounter Magazine. Of course this does not mean there are not some ecellent things on Goodmans show. There are.
Thanks to Amy Goodman for writing this. I had heard nothing of it.
This clearly illustrates the workings and immorality of the US Prison Industrial Complex, the foundation of which is our pernicious drug policy.
What a horror. And for money. How can you measure a child, their life, their precious time here against money. What could the judges have needed so badly in their lives that they would do such a thing. Did they simply buy more material 'things'. Did they trade our precious legal system for more stuff for their home? Their lives? Their wives? These judges should be made to pay, make full their restitution towards these children, some now adults, as well as to their families. The education for each of these should be entirely free, perhaps a one-time, full-full ride scholarship given by the State for having had to endure such grievous and onerous actions as those witnesed by these judges.
Reasonable?
one of the most horrible stories I have heard
thanks for Amy Goodman publishing this
but why did it disappear from the main stream media after less than one day
are private prisons such big business they can block the news!!!
what else could it be?
the horror of profitting from the jailing of our children cannot be so easily forgotten!!!!!!!
While there is nothing new about any of this, the rate and concentration of the filth among us is accelerating.
Once even the law has been sold, what is our recourse?
With all other alternatives nearing exhaustion, we might consider...
www.peacefulsocieties.org/index.html
So they were paid off to put kids in jail.
How is that different from the teachers getting paid their salaries when the kids warm the seats in class?
Treat the root of the problem first: the assumption that kids have to be locked in school from 8-3.
The problem is even deeper than this.
Judges in many states don't have to have law degrees.
The New York Chief Justice did a review a few years ago and found widespread abuse by judges. They didn't find an intentional scam such as this but actual some far worse. Many judges in up state New York simply don't know the law which isn't surprising seeing how they aren't required to have attended law school. They hold trials without allowing the defendant to have an attorney. One simply said that misdemeanor criminal acts don't require juries or attorneys!!
There are all kinds of predators. Some after money. Some after power. Some after control. Some after sex. Some after lands and territories.And- all of the above. It has always been so. Why are we surprised ? We need to be more aware of the eternal base instincts alive and well in humans- and not just be aware- but insist on transparency and accountability. This responsibility belongs to all of us.
I hope , for the sake of untold numbers of children, that "we" turn a very strong light on some child protection systems- especially when divorce is involved. When there is money to be made, there will be- predators looking to rake it in. No matter if children are hurt and destroyed.As the tv police and "law" type programs frequently say- just follow the money. Make the trails visible and scrutinized by the public. For the sake of our children.