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Student Satirist Gets 3 Months; the Judge, Likely More
ponraul writes "When Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58, sentenced Hillary Transue, 17, on a harassment charge stemming from a MySpace parody of her high school's assistant principal, Hillary expected to be let off with a stern lecture; instead, the Wilkes-Barre, PA area teen got three months in a commercially operated juvenile detention center. In a reversal of fortune, Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Conahan, 56, find themselves trying to plea-bargain an 87-month sentence in Federal correctional facilities relating to a kick-back scheme that netted the pair $2.6 Million and PA Child Care 5000 inmates." True poetic justice would be for these corrupt, callous judges to serve their sentences in the same kind of environment to which they were happy to dispatch juvenile defendants.
2. Now every single case that ended with juveniles sentenced there should be reviewed. (Looks like they're only looking at the one judge's 5000 cases. They need to look at all of them.) The former judge should be billed for all expenses.
They are all being reviewed.
3. Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
They are actually the ones that turned them in.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
I have a relative serving time in a commercially-run prison. Besides this being a totally repugnant concept to begin with, the way the prison corporation profits off the inmates and their families is unreal. For example, inmate phone calls to family are charged at $16 per half hour. Inmates must buy their personal supplies through a commissary run by the corporation at horribly inflated prices. Luxury items like TVs or guitars, and school supplies must be purchased through a special catalog, again at inflated prices.
You might say, "oh, they're criminals, they deserve to be soaked." But in reality it's the families who are being soaked, even though, in many cases, they are the victims of the inmate's crimes, or are suffering from lack of the inmate's income or parenting or whatever.
It's a completely immoral way to make a buck. The owners and executives of these prison corporations are no better than the inmates they are incarcerating.
No sig? Sigh...
This sort of thing happens all the time. I did a technology contract for "Servo-lift Eastern" who is a big vendor for the prison system.
Privately run prisons are a big business in the U.S.A. Why do you think we imprison more of our population than any other western country? Because the good 'ol boys make money in jailing poor people who can't defend themselves.
Hey, I understand politics. I don't expect human beings to be pillars of integrity, everyone is corrupt on some level. However, if you are willing to knowingly cause material harm to another human being for money, you need to die.
I'd rather have them put down because they're expensive to keep and likely to perform similar crimes in the future.
You should read some statistics. Turns out, between the appeals processes necessary to hopefully ensure you don't accidentally murder an innocent person, and the costs involved in actually killing them, it ends up costing *more* to execute someone than it does to just imprison them for life. And, as an added bonus, there's no take-backsies if it turns out you fucked up somewhere along the line.