Cash for kids. Absolutely disgusting, but in a country where all the financial incentives are aligned toward criminal and immoral behavior, it’s hard to find anything surprising at his point. Think about this case and then think about the growing trend of private prisons in America, prisons that are incredibly being given favorable tax treatment. From the UK Independent:
An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.
Mark Ciavarella Jnr was ordered to pay $1.2m (£770,000) in restitution after he was found to be a “figurehead” in the conspiracy that saw thousands of children unjustly punished in the name of profit in the case that became known as “kids for cash”.
Federal prosecutors accused Ciavarella Jnr and a second judge, Michael Conahan, of taking more than $2m in bribes from the builder of the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care detention centres and extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the facilities’ co-owner. Ciavarella Jnr filled the beds of the private prisons with children as young as 10, many of them first-time offenders convicted minor crimes.
Mr. Ciavarells’s biggest mistake? Not being a banker.
Full article here.
Mike
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Perverse incentives yield perverse results.
Private — for profit — prisons? Sick.
What’s really pathetic is that it only makes headlines outside the US.