Thanks to Golden Age of Gaia.
By Amir Shaw, Rolling Out – July 30, 2013
Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, 63, serves as an example of why the private prison industry can do more harm than good.
Ciavarella worked alongside owners of private juvenile facilities to ensure that the prison remained occupied. The more prisoners equated to more profits for the owners of the prison.
As a result, Ciavarella would sentence offenders with small offenses to months and, at times, years behind bars.
He once sentenced a teen to three months in jail for creating a MySpace page that mocked her school’s assistant principal. Ciavarella also sentenced another teen to 90 days in jail after a simple schoolyard fight.
But after a federal investigation, it was discovered that Ciavarella and his colleague, Judge Michael Conahan, received more than $2.6 million from privately run youth centers owned by PA Child Care.
In 2011, Ciavarella was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to 28 years in prison. He was also forced to pay $1 million in restitution.
Once Ciavarella was convicted, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed out 4,000 convictions issued by the judge.
Ciavarella appealed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia to have his 28-year sentence overturned. On July 25, the court denied his request.
Ciavarella’s attorneys may attempt to appeal the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Openhearted Rebellion 
I hope he does the full 28 years. That’s poetic justice.
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I hope he ends up in the worst ‘Private Prison’ out there.., but the worst Public prison will suffice if necessary, as long as it’s filled with big bubba convicts..
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Unless this guy sent ONLY black kids to prison while releasing others who weren’t black, the title of your article is seriously and unnecessarily inflammatory.
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You are so right this is a further effort to push black first. I bet he sent just as many WHITE kids to jail as Black ones. Stop pushing the color card and get real.
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Sounds like Plano, TX judge!
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Totally agree. Where are the real journalists these days?
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I agree!!
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I live in the area this happened, there is a movie coming out called Kids for Cash, this is what the movie is based off, and there were more white kids than black, this author is just trying to make it a racist thing, it had alot more to do with money, than race.
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Are you saying that he didn’t send any WHITE kids to jail. Get real, stop wanting to be first just because you are black. .
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He’s white. Even when you’re right about something, you’re still capable of looking like a dick head. However I agree this guy is being unduly inflammatory here.
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Privately owned and operated prisons, being paid by the State, according to the number of inmates housed there = conflict of interest? Gee…who’d a thunk it?
Really, folks, who could even pretend that they didn’t see this coming?
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With all the chit-chat about whose kids (black or white) are being warehoused in prisons for profit, my sense is that sight is being lost of the blatant conflict of interest inherent in this practice of warehousing human beings as privately-owned commodities.
What is to prevent a the private ownership of a penitentiary, which has come to depend upon the special skills of this or that inmate in contributing to the design and manufacture of certain prison products, from finding ways to keep that prisoner from leaving the penitentiary when he/she becomes eligible for parole, or accrues “good time” towards early release, or whose sentence has been served in its entirety?
This is but one example of how things might be bent to serve the greedy interests of people who have somehow not yet out-grown their infatuation with the notion of slavery. No minimum wage in prison. No unions either.
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David
Thank you, you are so right and I appreciate you saying this. If I had the words I would have said the same thing. I fully agree with you.
Lin
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I doubt his victims were all black. I have no doubt a disproportionately larger portion of them were black. I would be willing to bet “poor” would be the greater criteria – poor and unable to fend for themselves or hire good attorneys. But black or white, the sin is just as great. He and his cohort have left inestimable damage to and indeterminate number of young souls, and they both deserve the book thrown at them. I would like to hear more information about what happened to the other judge mentioned in this article for his similar misdeeds. I would like to say that if he and his partner received $2.6 million out of this, but only had to pay a $1 million fine, they got a slap on the hands. They should both lose everything they ever had over this. I would also like to know how much his attorney is getting to defend him? I think these guys that do this kind of thing should get the same kind of court-appointed Legal Aid defense their victims probably had, instead of being able to spend all of their ill-begotten gains to defend their actions. Then I would like to know to whom this $1 million went? Did the state receive it? And what will it be used for? Did any of the victims of this travesty receive a cent of restitution, or treatment and help to overcome the traumas inflicted by these injustices? And are these private juvenile facilities still operating? Did anyone from them get prosecuted for collusion in this crime? Of what? Or why not? Glad to see the guy got some of his just rewards, but not enough for what he did. I hope every appeal he tries comes back and slaps him in the face, and I hope he gets sent to the harshest facility available for his kind.
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It had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with money.
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Private Prisons are a bad idea anyway. Things like this will happen more and more. People are not only in prison but are totally under people who can do what they want to with the people who are supposed to be under their care.
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It’s just a wild guess on my part, but my hunch would be that private prison ownership is driven more by the profit motive than any real aim or desire to perform a public safety or rehabilitation service for the taxpayers who fund their enterprise.
The goldmine of free prison labor has been a corporate “wet dream” since slavery was abolished.
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Indeed David, and we even have confessionals suggesting that the media has been used to promote drugs, gangs and breaking the law in an effort to fill up private prisons that individuals within the entertainment industry have invested in. Beyond farming our energy and creating slaves, it’s all about money!
Much Love,
Wes 🙂
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Confessionals from whom in the entertainment world, Wes? This discussion is suddenly somewhat fascinating.
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There’s an anonymous confessional from a man who claims to have sat in a meeting, the topic of which was promoting rappers and artists who endorsed drugs, gang-like or otherwise illegal activity.
Here’s the link: http://www.hiphopisread.com/2012/04/secret-meeting-that-changed-rap-music.html?m=1
Much Love!
Wes 🙂
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I thought that you might find this article interesting….
Truthout Tuesday, 13 August 2013 / TRUTH-OUT.ORG …The Secret History of GI Joe, Barbie, Darth Vader, and Making War in Children’s Culture (Part 1)
Tom Engelhardt: GI Joe was hardly what he seemed.
The Police State Mindset in Our Public Schools
Instead of making schools safer, we’ve simply managed to make them more authoritarian.
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Tuesday, 13 August 2013 14:28 By The Daily Take, The Thom Hartmann Program | Op-Ed
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(Image: Imprisoned hands via Shutterstock)What does America do when she no longer needs her slaves or surplus workers?
The 1880’s reconstruction era was the first time in our history that America had seen a large surplus of non-white labor.
In the 1870’s many former slaves were integrated into the labor force, but white backlash in the 1880’s and 1890’s led to a permanent underclass through nearly a century of “separate but equal.”
For very different reasons, there was a similar surplus of white labor in the early 1930’s.
Regardless of race, capitalism runs in cycles: It’s called “the business cycle.” There are uptimes when there are jobs for everybody, the labor market is tight, and pay rises.
Then there are downtimes when the economy has a surplus of workers, falling wages, and a high level of unemployment.
We saw this cycle during the boom-and-bust of the roaring 20’s and the stock market crash and Great Depression of the 1930’s. After the crash, nearly a third of American workers couldn’t find a job, and the numbers were even worse in minority communities.
Our economy couldn’t put them to work, because capitalism failed.
So what do you do with all of those extra workers who can’t find a job?
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, that very question was the subject of a clear and open disagreement between Democrats and Republicans.
Herbert Hoover and the Republicans believed that when capitalism fails and you have high unemployment, you do nothing. You wait for the “free market” to magically fix things, and for capitalism to right the ship.
FDR and the Democrats believed that the Republican’s benign indifference was the completely wrong approach. Instead, FDR said that it’s the responsibility of government to put people back to work during times of high unemployment.
He enacted his New Deal. He put Americans back to work planting trees and forests, building schools, and improving the nation’s infrastructure. Twelve million Americans who’d been unemployed for years went back to work, and capitalism was rebooted in America.
For much of the 20th century, Hoover’s and FDR’s approaches represented the two sides of the debate about what to do with surplus workers.
Up until 1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used the powers of government to put Americans back to work.
But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.
When Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always and only did whatever made them the most money, that would magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.
He fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers. Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to work, there was now a third option.
Make a profit off of them.
There are a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own” furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them into prisoners.
That latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most profitable for America’s capitalists.
It’s almost elegant in its simplicity.
Turn unemployed Americans into criminals. Track them, punish them for any crime possible, take away their rights and throw them into for-profit prisons.
Once thrown inside a for-profit prison, an inmate needs food, housing, healthcare and other services. This means huge profits for capitalists. They’re raking in tens of thousands of dollars per prisoner per year – hundreds of percent more than Roosevelt paid to simply put them back to work.
And turning unemployed Americans into very profitable prisoners is a booming business.
From the beginning of America until 1980, the incarceration rate in America remained fairly steady. While Nixon declaring his war on drugs in 1971 did slightly increase incarceration in the United States, the increase was nothing drastic.
But then Reagan came to Washington, and his buddies realized they could make a buck off of unemployed Americans.
The nation’s incarceration rate took off like a rocket.
Thanks to Reagan elevating profit to a religion, between 1980 and 2009, the state and federal prison population in the U.S. increased by over 700 percent.
Since the for-profit prison industry started aggressively buying Congressmen 15 years ago, the number of people thrown into for-profit prisons has exploded.
And Americans sitting in jail make a very exploitable, very profitable, slave-like labor force.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the minimum wage for a prisoner who works in the UNICOR program, the federal government’s prison industries program, is 23 cents an hour. The maximum UNICOR wage is $1.15 an hour.
Across all state prisons, the average minimum wage for prisoners for non-industrial work is 93 cents per hour.
And some states, like Georgia and Texas, are completely upfront about their slave-labor camps. They pay absolutely nothing to prisoners.
Because the Reagan Revolution changed America’s value system, we stopped asking, “What’s the best way to deal with surplus workers?”
Instead, we started asking, “How can we make the most money off surplus workers?”
The logical answer was a return to slavery, and it has been embraced by capitalists with a vengeance.
And that is insane brutality.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
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What is meant by the phrase…”Your comment is awaiting moderation”…attached to my most recent post?
If my comment is “moderated” or altered to suit someone else’s tastes or sensitivities, it is then no longer my comment. What then is the point?
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Hello David,
Worry not – your comment will not be edited for any reason. “Your comment is awaiting moderation” means it hasn’t yet been approved. Every comment we receive goes through an approval process because we get spam as well as hateful and nasty comments at times, which we don’t allow through if the vulgarity or hatefulness accompanying them is too turned up. We have no desire to edit anyone’s comments, as this is a website bent on allowing the awakening public to express their views in an allowing and uplifting setting.
You’ll see that all of your comments get through and aren’t edited in any way, as long as they aren’t spam or loaded with hate.
Much Love!
Wes 🙂
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That is entirely reasonable. Thank you for addressing my concern.
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Happy to, David. It’s important that free expression be established in as many places as possible.
Much Love,
Wes 🙂
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I erred when referred to confesssionals from the “entertainment world”, as the source of the confessionals you cite was unclear to me. Who are some of the entertainment industry noteworthies who are invested in privately-owned prisons? And are they aware of their investments?
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To everyone commenting that they dont think they were all black kids,Did you read the Headline it specifically states Judge gets 28 years for sending Black kids to jail..underline BLACK KIDS…case closed geniuses.
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Is it being suggested in comments here that, because white kids are not included as victims of this scoundrel judge, in his dark role as supplier of human chattle to privately-owned detention facilities, the report is somehow bogus?
Couldn’t one just as easily hypothosize that this judge, being an active member of the white power structure, somehow felt more comfortably inclined towards locking up black youth?
Would it be a “first”? Really?
It’s as valid a hypothesis as any presented thus
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I read headlines and think that it mist be true! You’re an idiot.
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Has the “issue” of whether white or hispanic kids were victimized, along with black youth, and imprisoned for profit by this judge, been resolved?
I feel reasonably sure that the author of the article wrote about the situation as it occurred, rather than jeopardize his credibility, but I have no proof one way or the other concerning the his accuracy…just as no one else posting comments here can offer proof that the author was not telling the whole story.
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Your posts have been among the most insightful concerning this issue, David. Apologies to anyone who feels the article was biased, but the reality seems to be that many within the upper class have been keeping the lower class down.
My aim isn’t to feed an “us vs. them” mindset, but just as David pointed out, this judge made money off of gross prison sentences for teenagers who couldn’t speak out or do anything about it, regardless of their race. If the teenagers were of a certain “class” they could likely get away with any crime they wanted.
The overall issue being expressed and reported on relates back to what we hear about all the time: those in power keeping those in a lower class down simply because the lower class can’t do anything about it.
This is what needs to change in regards to the way our planet is run, and if the will of the general public had anything to say about it, those teenagers would’ve received the proper sentences for their crimes.
Much Love all,
Wes 🙂
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The problem people are having is that “black children” are specifically mentioned in the headline. If you mean to say children and encompass all races, then all you need to say is “children”.
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i hope that piece of shit rots in there.
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very good
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his sentencing record is public and while he did not exclusively sentence black kids the ratio was way out of range something like 10 to 1 blacks sentenced
i would say this indicates a definite bias against blacks .
a lot of white folks here are very foolish and or disingenous to downplay how institutional and personal white attitudes and actions deeply affect blacks and the black community
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This is horrible. I hope the compnay he was working with gets just as much time. Our community is still suffering after all this time.
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it’s too bad this so called justice dept can’t seem to indict or prosecute anyone in the IRS for targeting conservative political groups……justice my foot !!
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I hope he see’s the Light and leaves the dark behind…
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$1 million in restitution for 4000 convictions? That makes $250 for each on average. Not much if they got months or years too long prison sentences.
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