The short of it... two Pennsylvania judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, were charged with racketeering for accepting kickbacks from two local private juvenile detention centers. From the article:
The federal indictment says the two judges accepted $2.8 million in kickbacks from the owner and builder of two privately-run juvenile detention facilities. In exchange, the judges agreed to close down the county’s own juvenile detention center, which would have competed with the new, privately-run facilities. In addition they guaranteed that juvenile offenders from their court would be directed to the privately-run facilities.Mr. Ciavarella was just sentenced to 28 years in prison while Mr. Conahan still awaits sentencing.
The whole scheme was labeled Cash For Kids since the private prisons the two judges favored profited off of each kid they housed. While Mr. Ciavarella believes the Cash For Kids line to be cheap character assassination, some statistics support that the label might not be entirely off the mark.
An investigation revealed that half of the children who appeared in his courtroom were not represented by a lawyer and were never advised of their right to counsel. Of those unrepresented children, up to 60 percent were ordered by Ciavarella to serve time at a detention facility.Here's one story in particular:
One of those cases involved 16-year-old A.A., who was arrested for gesturing with her middle finger at a police officer who had been called during a custody dispute involving her parents and her sister.
According to a 2010 report of the Interbranch Pennsylvania Commission on Juvenile Justice, A.A. was an honor roll student, a Girl Scout, and YMCA member, who attended bible school. She had no prior arrest record and had never even been in detention in school.
She was sent to Ciavarella’s court, and was told she wouldn’t need a lawyer since it was a minor issue.
After examining the paperwork, Ciavarella informed A.A. that she had no respect for authority. She later told the investigating commission that Ciavarella never gave her an opportunity to speak at the hearing. She was led out of the courtroom in shackles and held in juvenile detention for six months.It might not be entirely fair to selectively choose what could be one of the more egregious offenses, but when compared to how he was potentially and irrevocably ruining the lives of kids, being unfair seems minor.
The Cash For Kids case demonstrates an obvious and glaring weakness of laissez-faire economics in real-world situations. The privatized prisons used their profits to achieve a type of efficiency many people would find disgusting. Their purchasing power went to influencing judges so that they would consider an irrelevant data point (a paycheck) when making their legal determinations. In effect, the prisons bent the market into an unnatural shape that favored them.
I feel that unnatural shape trips up the free-market forces that many conservatives praise when talking about deregulated markets. Imagine what unnatural shapes multinational corporations, with their financial forces that dwarf many countries, could create. There's also the obvious question asking why financial efficiency should take ultimate priority above even people.
In the end, even free-market forces need something to compete against.
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