[Peace-discuss] Jailing Kids for Cash

Wed Feb 18 19:49:03 CST 2009

I read about this in the nytimes a few days ago... and as a Junior in high
school, I found it especially appalling...

On Wed, Feb 18, 2009 at 8:16 PM, E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

>  http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090217_kids_for_cash/ Posted on
> Feb 17, 2009
>
> By Amy Goodman
>
>   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.
>
>   Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international
> TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She
> was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel"
> prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.*
>
>   (c) 2009 Amy Goodman
>
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090218/64209b1c/attachment.htm