Correct. In fact, the typical procedure was that the parents of the accused were persuaded to waive their right to counsel, the argument being that if they did so, the judge would go easy on them… and what really happened was a two-minute “trial” in which the judge glanced at the accusations and sentenced the kid to time, after which said kid was carted off forthwith, in handcuffs.
The real question now is what about all the other people who must have known something really wrong was going on… for years… and didn’t say anything. (It appears that the court was packed with relatives and friends of the judges.)
It was more of an FYI to anyone interested in the continuing story. I was going to put the thread in MPSIMS, but two of the last three threads that came up on a search were in the Pit, so I figured that would be the best place for it.
He threw away other peoples lives. That is far far worse than just wrecking his own. And he didn’t do it for anything other than greed. Abuse of power, at its worst. Disgusting.
Given Moore’s leanings, I hope he noted that the judges involved were elected officials and registered Democrats.
I commented about this case in previous threads - you can read my comments there if you wish. But I can save you the trouble of looking things up - this case was at the heart of it a political corruption case. The children who were victimized were victimized by government officials - these judges would have had no power to gain at their expense except by their office.
In the other thread where I commented, an absurd comment was made that this validated the government’s role because “it’s a disinterested party which has no profit stake in the outcome of the decisions it oversees.” That is nonsense - these judges were the government, and had pretty clear profit motives. What is clear from all of this is that whatever system is in place, corruption may occur and the right of individuals to seek redress when it happens to them must remain robust and strong.
I’d say “See the movie”. But since you are not going to, I can confirm that he did both. He laid the blame firmly on the whole idea of turning incarceration into a profit-making entity, and that creates greater opportunity for corruption.
See above. There is plenty of other corruption in our prison system, and the main source of that corruption is profit - the insanely high fees for collect calls, “outsourcing” food and security services, etc. Any place in the system where there is opportunity for profit, there is opportunity for corruption. Follow the money.
But the thing I can’t figure out is how this profit motive is to be eliminated. The Soviet Union was heavily bureaucratized, and also pretty corrupt - all of these little bureaucrats would sell services they should have been providing for free. And that isn’t a particularly noteworthy example - I just chose it because it was a place where said profit motive was most heavily stigmatized.
In this particular case this is true - but I don’t think that matters much. A corrupt official can find ways to profit on his office even if there are no private prisons or other private services available for him to subvert.
When Rod Blagojevich tried to sell a Senate appointment, was there a private entity involved anywhere?
While one can never hope to eliminate all opportunities for corruption, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to eliminate the opportunity to sell innocent people into captivity for profit by members of the judiciary. If some schmoe is overcharging the government for prison food services, that costs the taxpayers a bit of money. One tries to minimize this, but it will always be there. And it’s not that big a deal, frankly. Some schmoe contributing to the false imprisonment of innocent victims for personal gain - that is a big deal. That’s not just bit of regrettable but inevitable corruption. That’s a gross miscarriage of justice.
So , A really big prison industrial complex that paid bribes, is not equal at least in culpability with the judge? They created and financed the whole playground the judge was happy to play in. When do they get prosecuted?
There will always be opportunities for people with any sort of power, whether government power or private power, to engage in corruption in which they seek financial gain for the inappropriate exercise of that power.
The thing is, when you privatize something like prisons, you take that potential for corruption and lay over it another, even more institutionalized set of motivations.
Whatever criticisms one might make of government taxing and spending, and about the desire of politicians and/or bureaucrats to create self-perpetuating cycles of spending, the government itself is not a profit-seeking entity. Yes, it can and should try to minimize costs to the taxpayer through judicious spending and allocation of resources, but it is also expected to serve more general social and cultural welfare, and is not expected to infringe on people’s minimum human rights in order to save a buck. We expect (or, we should expect) that government will adequately house and feed prisoners, and will not seek to incarcerate people inappropriately for simple financial gain.
A private corporation, on the other hand, does not exist to serve the general welfare. It exists as a profit-making entity designed to make money for its owners, whether those owners be a private partnership or the shareholders of a publicly-traded corporation. The central, motivating factor of such a business is the bottom line; while it might talk about some sort of social mission, the fact is that this will always be considered only after steps have been made to ensure adequate profit.
I say this not particularly as a criticism. In fact, defenders of capitalism have, since Adam Smith, defended the system as one that is essentially amoral (not immoral) in its economic function, a system that works best when every individual seeks to satisfy his or her own self-interest, and when the invisible hand of market forces is not restrained by artificial regulation or controls.
We, as a society, recognize the amoral character of the corporation when we put in place controls to regulate things like minimum wages, and workplace health and safety. As a society, we decide that these aspects of the more general welfare need to be taken care of, and we recognize that there is nothing inherent in the pursuit of efficiency and profit that is likely to induce companies to adopt reasonable standards on their own.
As a society, we would ideally like a situation in which there was a need for fewer prisons, rather than more prisons. If we could work out a way to reduce crime, and to reduce the number of people going to prison, and if this led to some prisons needing to be shut down, society as a whole would probably consider this a positive thing. And the government, as the entity running the prison, would be happy to close down an institution that costs money to run.
But if the prison is private, the people who run it have no vested interest in reducing the prison population. In fact, if they are paid on a per-inmate basis, they have specific positive incentive to find ways in which to increase the incarcerated population. Prisoners are, in a very real sense, their customers; even better, they’re customers who have no choice about whether or not to use the service, and the more there are, the better for the corporation running the prison. This institutional pursuit of profit, relying on as many prisoners as possible, is what places another layer of potential corruption into the system, on top of the regular opportunities for personal graft and kickbacks.
How many innocent people went to jail because Blagojevich tried to peddle his influence?
I mean, obviously, if there were no private prisons, this judge would still have been corrupt. It’s not simply the opportunity that turned him into a scumbag. But I’m having trouble coming up with scenarios where his corruption could have been so broadly destructive absent the existence of privately run prisons.
You’re not looking hard enough. This distinguished judge was checking inmates out of jail to do work at his house. Said work was of an intimate nature, and involved paddling.
I don’t see that this involved a private prison, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way.
An ordinary private prison is going to have layers of administrative and judicial review. This case was anomalous because it was the corrupt judges themselves who structured the local government body such that they and they alone had the power to select the prison system and shield themselves from any sort of effective review or oversight.
This is such an anomaly as a matter of governance that I’m not sure how much can be drawn in the way of broad lessons for government or industry, because it’s just not going to happen but exceedingly rarely.
You ain’t kidding. And while I think we may both agree that the scale of the abuse might be different, we would also agree that these were both violations of the public trust that could damage the public’s faith in the judicial system.