These judges should be put in jail in solitary. How much hope have they cost the kids who were innocent? Or who were only guilty of small things? What would they do if it was their own kids?
This is from the New York Times:
Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
Niko J. Kallianiotis for The New York TimesHillary Transue was sentenced to three months in juvenile detention for a spoof Web page mocking an assistant principal.
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.
She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.
“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
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.
While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
“In my entire career, I’ve never heard of anything remotely approaching this,” said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003. Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.
The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.
And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.
If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.
You’d think that they would DEFINITELY be going to jail, right? Forever? But the article talks about their pensions! Like they ought to be around to enjoy them or not!
Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.
With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.
They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.
Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.
Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.
But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to charge a quid pro quo.
“We’re not negotiating that, no,” Mr. Zubrod said. “We’re not backing off.”
No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.
February 14, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Wow!
This is the logical consequence of privatizing jails and detention centers.
The Repugs claim that private business can do things more ‘efficiently’ and cost-effectively than a public institution. These are the free market nuts who want to get rid of everything the government does, and let the market determine everything.
Obviously, these places get a per-inmate fee, so it is in their interest to have more inmates to maximize their profits. Sounds good to some … more bad people behind bars for longer times, but the reality is that judges are getting kickbacks to send everyone to jail for any reason, even if they are innocent of the more severe sentences, like this poor girl.
Think about that the next time you go to traffic court over a parking ticket. Maybe that judge will think it is ‘justice’ to sentence you to jailtime for a made up contempt charge or something, all the while fingering the wad of cash in his pocket from the Haliburton clone corporation that is now running the jails in the Free Market uptopia of the Repugs.
I’m with Rachel Maddow on this privatization craze; it just opens the door to greed and corruption way beyond anything the very worst public workers could ever or would ever do in their wildest dreams.