Former judges who sent kids to jail for kickbacks must pay more than 200M
npr.org
npr.org
> 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?
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.
Nothing has made America's lack of rule of law more apparent to me than
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.
[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).
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]
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
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.
The love of money and all…
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.
(this is all in the article)
Same 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.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/us/michigan-cancer-doctor-sen...
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.
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 ?
The financial burden should be on the Justice system, not on the victims.