Does this person have 200M to pay back? If not, put him back in jail. It's insane someone would put kids as young as 8 years into detention, let alone profiting from it.
Well, one guy was sentenced to 28 years in prison in 2011 and is still in jail. The other guy got 17.5 years in 2011 and is currently on house arrest since 2020.
Do moral culpability when it comes to our failings as a nation, precisely because we have a democracy? Or, do we even really have a choice? With the coercive system in place one can hardly not interact with the government. Throwing a name in a hat to elect your local jailer doesn't make you morally culpable when you are essentially forced to participate. Eg, jury duty. You are threatened to show up under threat of fines or jailing. How can you say a jury is unbiased when they've been forced under threat of death to appear?
>Another plaintiffs' attorney, Sol Weiss, said he would begin a probe of the judges' assets, but did not think they had any money to pay a judgment.
Still, I find it hard to believe that two high-profile judges nearing retirement age could possibly be broke. Especially considering that they spent a significant part of their career taking kickbacks.
Well, one of them is still in jail and has been since 2011. He is scheduled to be released in 2035, when he is 85 years old. The other guy was also sentenced to prison in 2011, and was set to be released in 2026. However, he is currently on house arrest since 2020 because of Covid or something.
Wrong thing or just not the main thing? The prevalence of private prisons is unrelated to whether or not they should be closed, never mind that they still operate within and are funded by a public system.
The article was literally about judges getting kickbacks from private prisons. They aren't blaming the wrong thing: This wouldn't have happened without the private prisons existing (and even more issues solved for taking away other financial incentives in the system).
Private prisons are an atrocity. That they are 8% does not change that the entirety of that 8% is deriving profit from the suffering of others. Acting like this corrupt practice is an unimportant part of this story is absurd and betrays a deep ignorance of the US prison system’s many different ugly faces.
Where I live there’s basically a two tier system for long term prisoners.
Either prisoners are sent to a prison for long term prisoners, or to jail for “short term” prisoners.
But many “short term” prisoners include those serving consecutive short term sentences that add up to a lot of time.
Jails are the correctional equivalent of a bus station. Not the sort of place you want to live in.
Jails aren’t long term facilities, but some prisoners can spend over a decade in them.
Even worse than jails is being sent out of state. The state pays out of state prisons and jails to incarcerate our felons. These prisons are money making machines for the states that offer them.
The wide variety of conditions we have now prove pretty clearly things could be much better or worse.
This naive view that incentives engineering could somehow fix the fact that a profit oriented creature means that any other value become subjugated to profit. Ppl are amazing at optimizing for stuff, especially stuff you can measure.
If you throw away the non tangible values of decency truth fairness freedom, in favor of the very tangible value of money you'll get corporations working hard to maximize their profit in any way imaginable, including twisted lobbying to rewrite the incentives and outright kickbacks.
We see this happen again and again and again, and still the "incentive engineers" want to try one more time.
I don’t even know where to start. I guess because we as a society agree that we need protection from each other, that punishment is a thing, and that one of the ways we punish/isolate/shame people for transgressions is prison time? And because, if someone has to do it, then that someone ought to be paid to do it?
…not that it’s done properly or humanely though, or that the incentives are commensurate with those ideals. It seems we can’t agree on whether people who have ever shown an ounce of imperfection get to retain their rights. Ah, politics…
> despite them being a tiny fraction of prisons (8%)
to start filling those 8% you have to over-fill the 92% of the government ones.
Giving the guaranteed minimum vacancy clauses in the private prison contracts, state officials have to send people there, and they wouldn't look good doing that while having free space in state prisons, so they need to keep the state prisons overfilled.
The punishment should be more than a fine it should be jail. If you can pay for the consequences then there are no laws. Take away their freedom and make them lose time in their life.
Federal prison. From the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator.[1]
MARK A CIAVARELLA
Register Number: 15008-067
Age: 72
Race: White
Sex: Male
Located at: Ashland FCI
Release Date: 06/18/2035
MICHAEL T CONAHAN
Register Number: 15009-067
Age: 70
Race: White
Sex: Male
Located at: Miami RRM
Release Date: 08/19/2026
Everyone involve deserves the maximum possible punishment, if only as an example to others. Instead, the people who ran the prison pay a fine, and the judges go to a nice prison for a few years.
To quote the last sentence of the article:
> Other major figures in the case settled years ago, including the builder and the owner of the private lockups and their companies, in payouts totaling about $25 million.
We don't have a really effective way to make this kind of corruption stop. Increasing the fines won't result in the money getting collected. We used to have social and religious ways of dealing with those near the end of their lives who just want to burn the world for personal gain.
Even as late as the 60s, we'd at least deny them pride of place in the parts of communities that dealt with family and spiritual needs. "Prosperity Gospel" shamelessness came later.
I still don't understand. I know what the prosperity gospel is but I am not connecting the dots. What's "pride of place in the parts of communities that dealt with family and spiritual needs" ?
But it isn't profit on paper, the state ones cause just as many problems, if not more. If incarceration is solving someone's work problems, that's just like profit.
The "social and religious ways" usually made the problem worse; that's why got rid of them. And it's not just about raping children in industrial quantities and an occasional murder; even in this case "Ciavarella was also active in several civic and Catholic organizations", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ciavarella.
[EDIT]: I just listened to the entire episode. Although the presentation was a little too… busy for my tastes, there were quite a few details related that I hadn't heard before. (Busy isn't the right term but close).
Rule of law means, more than anything else, that there are consequences for the rich and powerful.
> Other major figures in the case settled years ago, including the builder and the owner of the private lockups and their companies, in payouts totaling about $25 million.
When you can settle for "just the cost of doing business" prices, the rule of law is clearly weak enough that you know corruption is accelerating.
Nothing has made America's lack of rule of law more apparent to me than the "rule of law" party's 2nd most powerful person standing in front of news cameras and confidently saying "My husband and I have a right to trade stocks with insider information, despite numerous professionals being restricted from doing so. Rules for thee, but not for me, because I'm a congresswoman."
How are we supposed to fight corruption, systemic or otherwise, when the people most equipped to fight it won't even look at themselves?
IIUC, insider trading your own corporate stock is illegal (depending on your position at the company).
This doesn't apply to what you're talking about, though.
The more common crime is giving insider information. Not acting on it - which would be what congress does.
Am I wrong?
Assuming Pelosi is giving her husband insider info (and come on - why NOT assume) - congress has pretty clear laws on things that cannot be shared.
IIUC - giving INSIDER info is only illegal when you either 1) work at the company or 2) obtain the info illegally. Congress people do not work at these companies, and they also are not getting the info illegally.
Is anything we're assuming she's sharing breaching any law?
I can get behind banning Congress from trading - but what about their spouses? What about their cousins and friends? Where do you draw the line?
The law surrounding insider trading is incredibly opaque and hard to understand. The way things are currently interpreted, Congress members cannot be guilty of insider trading for acting on confidential information acquired as part of their official duties.
I don't know. I am a layman. There is clearly a conflict of interest when a person who has the power to kill competition via regulation, or give corporate handouts via incentives and subsidies can invest in those very same companies.
I was wrong to state trading with insider information (although knowing what regulation will happen certainly seems like a form of privileged information) was the root problem here. The conflict of interest is what is corrosive to society.
I was always under the impression that the GOP claimed the title "rule of law party"
Also, your paraphrasing of her quote is uncharitable at best. I believe she said “We are a free-market economy. [Congress] should be able to participate in that”
The GOP says "law and order" which has connotations of use of force to ensure order. "Law and order" tends to reference the idea of a dominance hierarchy, and that the authority of the dominance hierarchy is absolute. We saw "law and order" referenced frequently with BLM to put down protests because they were disorderly. "Law and order" means "might makes right." Those with might make the "laws" and enforce them to ensure order.
"Rule of law" is a different concept which references a set of values codified as law which apply equally to everyone.
You're making distinction without difference. Both GOP and Dems value "Law and Order" equally. The Rule of Law bit is far more squishily applied by both parties, however.
The whole private prisons settling as cost of doing business, however, is one reason the LLC and the legal fiction of corporations as completely seperate from the people operating them was controversial in the first place, as it served as what could be used as a layer of protection from the Courts/Justice System.
> “We are a free-market economy. [Congress] should be able to participate in that”
No, you should NOT allowed to be trade on inside information that no one else has access to just because you are "important".
No, you should particularly not be allowed to trade in securities that you are writing legislation on.
All legislators should be obliged to put their investment assets into a blind trust, administered by a complete stranger that they aren't allowed to contact.
If they won't do this, fine - there are plenty of people for which this would not be any sort of problem at all.
I think they were referring to people and companies who owned the private juvenile prisons. Seems like they got away with fines, and those fines were directed toward the companies, not the individuals involved.
There were also many people in the "justice apparatus" (ie. the prosecutor, police, a GREAT many social workers of two dozen different organizations, schools, ...) that were intimately involved with this practice. They got away with it because they didn't get paid.
But their "duty" is to "protect the interest of the children" (literally from the law). To say they utterly failed their duty is vastly understating what happened. Half a dozen children committed suicide because of them. Frankly, if that happened because of a private citizen ... they would have been dragged before the court on charges of murder and faced decades in prison.
If all it takes is one bad actor (e.g. a more-and-more drunk elderly judge) to create this practice for 5 years, which then goes unpunished for another 10 years ... then we've lost all semblance of justice.
From the article, one is still in jail in Kentucky, and one is at home under house arrest following release due to COVID mitigations. Nothing there about the jail security level.
Seriously; the people involved on the private prison side should also see jail time. And if the scheme was pervasive or high-up enough, the government should have dissolved the companies entirely.
> "My husband and I have a right to trade stocks with insider information, despite numerous professionals being restricted from doing so. Rules for thee, but not for me, because I'm a congresswoman."
I agree with your message, but one nitpick would be to not use quotations for something not really said by the person you are referring to. I was confused for a moment if that was a real quote.
But you can, theoretically, have private prisons without perverse incentives - just like you can have private grid operators and power plants without perverse incentives.
It just requires regulation.
Pretty much everything does.
We can't even have medicine without regulation to make sure people aren't filling pills up with nothing (or toxins) just to make an extra couple percentage points.
We don't have private justice, or private law enforcement. Why private prisons?
I see your point, but I'm not sure the perverse incentives can be regulated away the way they are with grid operators because of the inherent differences in the models.
I agree with the gist, but have an issue with your takeaway:
> We don't have private justice, […]
Then what do you call arbitration causes?
> […] or private law enforcement.
But the laws are enforced differently based on race and economic status. It may not be private, but “rich white people” basically have an entirely different class of protection than anyone else does.
The recommendation is to get treatment from students at the dental school - they will work according to best practices and will not take shortcuts or overtreat.
I'm glad these guys are being punished for their actions, but the wildest part to me is that if they hadn't been taking kickbacks - if they were just Law and Order types who thought sending a 14 year old to boarding school for 9 months was an appropriate punishment for stealing change from unlocked cars, or that sending a 15 year old to wilderness camp for mocking an assistant principal on MySpace - then nothing would have happened and it would still be business as usual. In other words, the issue wasn't wildly punitive sentences for minors committing trivial crimes (or non-crimes); it was that they got paid outside the confines of the system.
Do we know why these kids were convicted? Was it for petty stuff like you mention or was it for worse crimes? (I'm sure it was a mix; 4,000 kids... damn.)
And, regardless of their (possibly not even real) crimes, we can't be certain that they would have been convicted if the judges' profit motive hadn't been there.
I agree that the police are involved in ridiculous ways when kids misbehave at school, but I don't think it's fair to assume that all of these kids would still have had their lives ruined if it wasn't for some corrupt judges.
The "crimes" mentioned in the article are as minor as it gets:
> Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions.
Perhaps controversial, but I agree with kelnos in that in order for a safe and secure society, sometimes we need to set examples and be stricter with our punishments.
And I profoundly disagree that removing children from their daily lives and sending them to to punitive institutions for misdemeanor failures of judgement is good for society.
Setting an example almost always happens to marginalized individuals, while those "with a bright future ahead" escape punishment. All children deserve the chance at a bright future.
I don't know what the most serious conviction/sentencing was.
I'm not trying to construct a hypothetical alternate history; I just mean that these guys were reported to the authorities multiple times regarding their harsh sentences and poorly-operated courtrooms - and nothing happened. Nothing was done until the feds got involved due to the money laundering / tax evasion / racketeering.
I grew up in Luzerne county (I'm here now, actually, staying with my parents). Ciavarella visited my high school to give a presentation about his zero tolerance policy. It was almost mocking. He knew exactly what he was doing and had zero shame.
Kids got sent away to "juvy" and never came back. Parents were ashamed and moved away so the kids didn't have to come back after their sentence was up. Nobody talked about what was happening and it stayed quiet for a long time.
Frankly. Only in the US of A. This is such a stain on the country. How did these not get capital punishment? How did the ones paying the bribes not get capital punishment? How does anyone involved in the crime still have money left?
I'm usually a believer in the free market, but in instances like these, I struggle with my faith. I can only pray that this was part of God's plan and that these kids will henceforth be enlightened throughout their lives.
Humanity has to find a way to make individuals with psychopathic traits ineligible for positions of authority. Otherwise, cases like this will keep happening, and potentially end the civilisation some time soon.
133 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 223 ms ] threadSame with big corporations, they can sign a "deferred prosecution agreement" pay a fine and CEO ever goes to jail.
Given their age it may end up being a life sentence.
So I am not sure what you are talking about?
The US doesn't have debtor's prisons.
They should be in jail, but not because they can't pay fines.
>Another plaintiffs' attorney, Sol Weiss, said he would begin a probe of the judges' assets, but did not think they had any money to pay a judgment.
Still, I find it hard to believe that two high-profile judges nearing retirement age could possibly be broke. Especially considering that they spent a significant part of their career taking kickbacks.
I’d think the state should be liable for not negligence for allowing these two to operate.
Why do the kids have the burden here?
It helps no one to blame the wrong thing.
You can pack quite a few people into an extremely small place when you aren’t concerned about their well-being.
Either prisoners are sent to a prison for long term prisoners, or to jail for “short term” prisoners.
But many “short term” prisoners include those serving consecutive short term sentences that add up to a lot of time.
Jails are the correctional equivalent of a bus station. Not the sort of place you want to live in.
Jails aren’t long term facilities, but some prisoners can spend over a decade in them.
Even worse than jails is being sent out of state. The state pays out of state prisons and jails to incarcerate our felons. These prisons are money making machines for the states that offer them.
The wide variety of conditions we have now prove pretty clearly things could be much better or worse.
Imagine if there were something like recidivism bonds or cooperatively owned prisons, with healthy start-up culture behind it.
Meaning that with for profit, there is at least a pathway to new ways of doing prison.
This naive view that incentives engineering could somehow fix the fact that a profit oriented creature means that any other value become subjugated to profit. Ppl are amazing at optimizing for stuff, especially stuff you can measure. If you throw away the non tangible values of decency truth fairness freedom, in favor of the very tangible value of money you'll get corporations working hard to maximize their profit in any way imaginable, including twisted lobbying to rewrite the incentives and outright kickbacks.
We see this happen again and again and again, and still the "incentive engineers" want to try one more time.
…not that it’s done properly or humanely though, or that the incentives are commensurate with those ideals. It seems we can’t agree on whether people who have ever shown an ounce of imperfection get to retain their rights. Ah, politics…
to start filling those 8% you have to over-fill the 92% of the government ones.
Giving the guaranteed minimum vacancy clauses in the private prison contracts, state officials have to send people there, and they wouldn't look good doing that while having free space in state prisons, so they need to keep the state prisons overfilled.
(this is all in the article)
Ciavarella, 72, is serving a 28-year prison sentence in Kentucky. His projected release date is 2035.
Federal prison. From the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator.[1]
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmateloc/Of course these are ole, rich, white, federal judges - not the kind of people we’d want to subject to real prison life.
Part of being rich, powerful, and connected means they will live in private cells with tv, internet, phone, all the amenities of home if in prison.
These two are going to a halfway home for rich people instead of prison and we are supposed to accept it as a reasonable punishment.
More fuel for the fire.
Edit-prison clarification
The judges and prisons sold out society, and imprisoned innocent children, destroying their lives in many cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8JRMGP2hg8
Everyone involve deserves the maximum possible punishment, if only as an example to others. Instead, the people who ran the prison pay a fine, and the judges go to a nice prison for a few years.
Can you elaborate ? All I am thinking of is a pharaoh being offered a cup of poison or an old chieftain sent to a last hunt...
Could you provide an example ?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
[EDIT]: I just listened to the entire episode. Although the presentation was a little too… busy for my tastes, there were quite a few details related that I hadn't heard before. (Busy isn't the right term but close).
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/us/michigan-cancer-doctor-sen...
> Other major figures in the case settled years ago, including the builder and the owner of the private lockups and their companies, in payouts totaling about $25 million.
When you can settle for "just the cost of doing business" prices, the rule of law is clearly weak enough that you know corruption is accelerating.
Nothing has made America's lack of rule of law more apparent to me than the "rule of law" party's 2nd most powerful person standing in front of news cameras and confidently saying "My husband and I have a right to trade stocks with insider information, despite numerous professionals being restricted from doing so. Rules for thee, but not for me, because I'm a congresswoman."
How are we supposed to fight corruption, systemic or otherwise, when the people most equipped to fight it won't even look at themselves?
Our leaders are failing to lead by example.
This doesn't apply to what you're talking about, though.
The more common crime is giving insider information. Not acting on it - which would be what congress does.
Am I wrong?
Assuming Pelosi is giving her husband insider info (and come on - why NOT assume) - congress has pretty clear laws on things that cannot be shared.
IIUC - giving INSIDER info is only illegal when you either 1) work at the company or 2) obtain the info illegally. Congress people do not work at these companies, and they also are not getting the info illegally.
Is anything we're assuming she's sharing breaching any law?
I can get behind banning Congress from trading - but what about their spouses? What about their cousins and friends? Where do you draw the line?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STOCK_Act
I was wrong to state trading with insider information (although knowing what regulation will happen certainly seems like a form of privileged information) was the root problem here. The conflict of interest is what is corrosive to society.
Also, your paraphrasing of her quote is uncharitable at best. I believe she said “We are a free-market economy. [Congress] should be able to participate in that”
"Rule of law" is a different concept which references a set of values codified as law which apply equally to everyone.
The whole private prisons settling as cost of doing business, however, is one reason the LLC and the legal fiction of corporations as completely seperate from the people operating them was controversial in the first place, as it served as what could be used as a layer of protection from the Courts/Justice System.
No, you should NOT allowed to be trade on inside information that no one else has access to just because you are "important".
No, you should particularly not be allowed to trade in securities that you are writing legislation on.
All legislators should be obliged to put their investment assets into a blind trust, administered by a complete stranger that they aren't allowed to contact.
If they won't do this, fine - there are plenty of people for which this would not be any sort of problem at all.
But their "duty" is to "protect the interest of the children" (literally from the law). To say they utterly failed their duty is vastly understating what happened. Half a dozen children committed suicide because of them. Frankly, if that happened because of a private citizen ... they would have been dragged before the court on charges of murder and faced decades in prison.
If all it takes is one bad actor (e.g. a more-and-more drunk elderly judge) to create this practice for 5 years, which then goes unpunished for another 10 years ... then we've lost all semblance of justice.
28 year sentence at age 70+ is not really a huge amount of justice.
My question is around whether there are penalties for those handing out the bribes.
I agree with your message, but one nitpick would be to not use quotations for something not really said by the person you are referring to. I was confused for a moment if that was a real quote.
But you can, theoretically, have private prisons without perverse incentives - just like you can have private grid operators and power plants without perverse incentives.
It just requires regulation.
Pretty much everything does.
We can't even have medicine without regulation to make sure people aren't filling pills up with nothing (or toxins) just to make an extra couple percentage points.
We don't have private justice, or private law enforcement. Why private prisons?
> We don't have private justice, […]
Then what do you call arbitration causes?
> […] or private law enforcement.
But the laws are enforced differently based on race and economic status. It may not be private, but “rich white people” basically have an entirely different class of protection than anyone else does.
1. Binding arbitration only applies to a very, very small subset of all possible things that you can sue over.
2. Even binding arbitration can be overturned for fraud or bias.
> It may not be private, but “rich white people” basically have an entirely different class of protection than anyone else does.
Explain to me how this differs from literally anything else.
If it's a reason we should ban private prisons, why isn't it a reason we should ban private everything else?
Don't tell me it's because prison is important and it majorly impacts people's lives - so do hospitals and schools and housing and many other things.
The love of money and all…
And, regardless of their (possibly not even real) crimes, we can't be certain that they would have been convicted if the judges' profit motive hadn't been there.
I agree that the police are involved in ridiculous ways when kids misbehave at school, but I don't think it's fair to assume that all of these kids would still have had their lives ruined if it wasn't for some corrupt judges.
> Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions.
Setting an example almost always happens to marginalized individuals, while those "with a bright future ahead" escape punishment. All children deserve the chance at a bright future.
I don't know what the most serious conviction/sentencing was.
I'm not trying to construct a hypothetical alternate history; I just mean that these guys were reported to the authorities multiple times regarding their harsh sentences and poorly-operated courtrooms - and nothing happened. Nothing was done until the feds got involved due to the money laundering / tax evasion / racketeering.
Kids got sent away to "juvy" and never came back. Parents were ashamed and moved away so the kids didn't have to come back after their sentence was up. Nobody talked about what was happening and it stayed quiet for a long time.
The financial burden should be on the Justice system, not on the victims.