Pa. Judges Sent Kids to Boot Camp for Kickbacks
CNN reports that two corrupt Luzerne County judges received $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending kids with minor offenses to privately-run boot camps.
One of the two judges shut down the state’s juvenile detention facility in Luzerne County and used the money earmarked for that facility to provide a ‘multimillion dollar lease for the private facility’.
The other judge (a) failed to advise children and parents of their right to counsel and (b) sent kids away for offenses like ‘mocking an assistant principal on a MySpace page’.
The purpose of the kickbacks was to enable the private contractor, Mid-Atlantic Counseling, to demonstrate its viability as an alternative to state-run facilities.
El Somnambulo once again points out that ‘privatization’ is almost always a disaster. Just like prison health care, having ‘for-profit’ firms providing state services simply ensures that the firms will do as little as they can get away with in order to maximize profits. Absent a real watchdog, state funds are ripped off while those depending on the privately-provided services become victims. From the article:
“Privatizing detention facilities is a growing in popularity among governments because the companies say they offer lower rates than the state.
Pennsylvania has the second highest number of private facilities after Florida, accounting for about 11 percent of the private facilities in the United States, according to the National Center for Juvenile Justice in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Critics say private prisons lack transparency because they don’t go through the same inspections and audits as a state facility, and this may have allowed payoffs to go so long without being noticed.
“Once somebody is going to make more money by holding more kids, there is a pretty good predictable profit motive,” said criminal justice consultant Judith Greene, who heads a nonprofit group called Justice Strategies. “It’s predictable that companies are going to tolerate certain behaviors they shouldn’t.”
An audit draft obtained by the Philadelphia Inquirer showed that Luzerne County was spending more than $1.2 million in expenses that weren’t allowed under state regulations. The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, the agency overseeing the audits, says the audit drafts are not final.”
Why am I not surprised. Guess money is the root of all evil.
That’s really disgusting.
Word. We see it over and over again – with the military (billions wasted by Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater), healthcare, schools, prisons and now juvenile detention facilities. The bribery aspect makes it even more disgusting.
Was it a Homeland Security charter bootcamp?
Anyone know the party of the judges in question?
I do — and they were not Republicans.
El Somnambulo has google searched this issue, and can find no reference to the political affiliations of the judges. Guess they must have been appointed rather than elected.
But here are some more tawdry details of the avarice of these two ‘officers of the court’:
http://www.courthouseforum.com/forums/thread.php?id=1054077
Had El Somnanbulo been a regular reader of Common Sense Political Thought, he’d have both known about this story, almost a month ago, and known that the judges in question were both Democrats. That bit of investigation won me my first Instapundit link.
The judges were both elected. In Pennsylvania, judges can enter both the Republican and Democratic primaries, and if they can make the lists for both, run as both, and one of these judges did just that. However, after some digging, I found out that both of the judges were registered as Democrats.
In this part of Pennsylvania, that’s hardly a surprise.
Why are Dana and RwR concerned with the party affiliation of the judges? I don’t give a flying fig what party they are, they should be in jail for taking bribes.
The website Gort 42 is your best online source for this story. Gort is a moderate Democrat who covers politics in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Mrs Isotope asked:
Because it’s been a too-often-to-be-a-coincidence omission by the professional media in this country: when a Republican gets in trouble for ethical or legal violations, he’s always identified as a Republican. When a Democrat gets into the same sorts of trouble, somehow it seems that the professional media are less diligent in noting that.
Thanks for the Gort link, Dana.
That’s not true, Dana. In fact several times during the Mark Foley scandal, Foley was identified as D-Florida.
El Somnambulo found the Gort link while searching, but didn’t see anything re political party. He thanks Dana for the citation.
But that’s not why he wrote the article. He simply could not get his head around judges that would screw 5000 kids in order to pocket bribes. ‘Bulo still does not understand why, with so many families affected, this flew under the radar for so long.
And, though one might think that $2.6 million might satisfy one’s money lust, if you google the articles (‘Bulo used the judges’ names to search), you will discover that they likely were involved in other seriously unsavory activity as well.
The Beast Who Slumbers intends to write about topics he finds interesting and that he hopes the readers will find interesting. Although he has a distinct political perspective, he doesn’t ‘root for the laundry’ while blindly leaving his brain back at the casa.