Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, plead guilty in open court that they sentenced children to juvenile detention because they were paid off to do it by the PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare corporation that ran the private facilities.
Ciavarella wrote in a letter to the court,
“Your statement that I have disgraced my judgeship is true. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.”
The two judges face up to seven years in prison under a plea agreement made with the state.
The companies in question paid the two judges more than $2.6 million dollars to send children to detention. The companies receive a stipend from the government for each inmate they house. So as more children were sentenced to the detention center, PA Childcare and Western PA Childcare received more money from the government, prosecutors said.
According to the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit group, teenagers were sentenced to detention for simple misdemeanors.
The Constitution guarantees the right to legal representation in U.S. courts. But many of the juveniles appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney because they were told by the probation service that their minor offenses didn’t require one.
Marsha Levick, chief counsel for the Juvenile Law Center, estimated that of approximately 5,000 juveniles who came before Ciavarella from 2003 and 2006, between 1,000 and 2,000 received sentences that far outweighed their crimes. She said the center will be suing the judges and the companies to compensate the victims.
Levick said.
“That judges would allow their greed to trump the rights of defendants is just obscene,”
This nightmare scenario has long been the cry of those trying to end the practice of privatizing prisons in the United States.
source. a few weeks old, but it had me actually gagging with anger.
Operating prisons for-profit is about as bad as letting the for-profit companies run healthcare in my book.
Honestly I re-wrote that sentence three times because I couldn't decide if I felt thet were almost as bad, just as bad, or even worse than the judges. They are all completely shitty people though.
They only get up to 7 years in prison for ruining the lives of thousands of children?
we are flawed.
These guys should be in jail for decades, not a few years.
Here is the wikipedia entry on the entire thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_c
As you can see, Ciavarella is in fact going to be in jail for 28 years, not 7. I don't know where the 7 came from in that article - maybe something new has come to light, maybe he's getting time off for good behavior, I dunno, and since the Inquisitr article has no sources for it's information and is treating this case like it's new (it's not - it broke in 2008 and Ciavarella was sentenced in 2011) I'm really hesitant to trust anything from it.
What I did find while googling around for actual facts is that what HAS happened semi-recently is that the law suit against the two companies giving the bribes was - of fucking course - settled out of court and the two companies "admit no fault" even though they're paying millions of dollars out to, mostly, the kids who were directly traumatized by their completely unscrupulous actions.
If you're gonna get mad about something, get mad about that.
ETA: Not that I blame you for posting this, OP - I've just seen it going around a lot without anyone looking into it further than this one article from a rather dubious source and it's driving me bonkers.
Edited at 2012-04-20 12:44 am (UTC)