Judge Sentenced to 28 Years for Selling Kids to the Prison System (2013)

regards

How come a judge can do stuff like this, without anyone else noticing/care? One would think a punishment so serious as prison would involve more than one pair of eyes.

The plea agreement[8] called for Ciavarella to serve up to seven years in prison, pay fines and restitution, and accept responsibility for the crimes.[9] However, Ciavarella has denied that there was a connection between the juvenile sentences he rendered and the kickbacks he received.[10][11] In part because of this denial, on July 30, 2009, Judge Edwin M. Kosik of Federal District Court in Scranton, Pennsylvania rejected the plea agreement. He ruled that Ciavarella had continued to deny that there was a ‘quid pro quo’ between his receipt of money and his jailing of juveniles, instead characterizing the money as a "finder’s fee" despite what Judge Kosik felt was the weight of the government's evidence.[12] Attorneys for the two judges brought a motion requesting reconsideration of the judge's rejection of the plea agreement.[13] The motion was denied on August 24, and Ciavarella and Conahan withdrew their guilty pleas, resulting in the case going to trial.[14]

On September 9, 2009, a federal grand jury in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania returned a 48 count indictment against Ciavarella and Conahan,[15] which includes racketeering, fraud, money laundering, extortion, bribery, and federal tax violations. Both judges were arraigned on the charges on September 15, 2009.[16][17] Ciavarella and Conahan entered pleas of not guilty to the 48 count indictment and remained free on one million dollar bail, despite federal prosecutors contentions that their bail should be raised since they now faced the possibility of substantially more prison time and that there was evidence of their attempts to shield assets.[18]

On February 18, 2011, a jury in federal court found Ciavarella guilty of racketeering. This charge stemmed from Ciavarella accepting $997,000 in illegal payments from Robert Mericle, the real estate developer of PA Child Care, and attorney Robert Powell, a co-owner of the facility. Ciavarella was also on trial for 38 other counts including accepting numerous payments from Mericle and Powell as well as tax evasion.[19]

On August 11, 2011, Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison. On May 24, 2013, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals vacated one count of the indictment against Ciavarella, but upheld all other charges, as well as his sentence.[20] The Third Circuit refused to reconsider on July 24th, 2013. Ciavarella can still appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but it rarely accepts cases.[21] With good behavior, he could be released in less than 24 years, when he would be 85.[22] Ciavarella, inmate number 15008-067, is serving his sentence at Federal Correctional Institution, Pekin in Pekin, Illinois. His earliest projected release date is December 30, 2035."

From Wikipedia.

To me, the idea of a for-profit prison is just backwards, there should never be an incentive for them to incarcerate innocent people, and if it is that is a symptom that the system is broken.

I expect he was telling himself that these kids weren't great kids to begin with, and probably basically deserved to be in juvie anyway.

(I'm not sure that makes it better, and it's atrocious regardless, but it is a slightly different perspective).

Police departments are also often rewarded based on how many people they get locked up, rather than how much they reduce crime. So there's little incentive to pursue hard-to-prove crimes (like rape) and lots of incentive to lock people up for minor but easy to prove charges, or even charges for which it's easy to fake evidence.

    - prisons create high paying jobs in rural areas
    - private prison companies like Vanguard are quite lucrative (and Vanguard just happens to have former Vice Pres. Cheney as a major investor)
    - prison labor is drastically cheaper than minimum wage

If you want to kill a nation, shake people's faith in the function of its legal institutions.

Looking forward to the system wide audit of all people sentenced by all judges over the last 2 decades to make sure this hasn't happened elsewhere.

Yeah, I'm also amazed at the length of some sentences in the US, but this is one of the few times that I totally agree.

You can count me in this group though I realize this feeling I have for this particular criminal is at odds with my desire for a less brutal prison system than the one we currently have in the U.S. We tend to like long prison sentences. I'm generally astonished with the leniency, from my point of view, given to people convicted of serious crimes in Europe.

The for-profit prison industrial complex spends millions of dollars lobbying for lengthier prison sentences.

Every bed they fill is money the state pays them.

Prisons pay politicians to get beds filled for lengthier times, so they can make more money from the states that convict and send them prisoners. It's a disgusting immoral racket.

For one of the more egregious examples (though there were several things wrong with this - this was just the last link in the chain) was the extended detention of a child whose 'crime' was insulting his school principal on Myspace.