Category: Corrections

What Has Happened to America?

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It appears that one of the consequences of privatizing prisons is that these private companies are renting out prison labor for a profit:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Seriously, our country is becoming something profoundly disturbing.

Our Military-Industrial Complex in a Nut Shell

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So, the USAF decides to buy a few dozen Global Hawk Block 30 drones to replace its existing inventory of U-2 spy planes, and finds out that they are more expensive and less capable than the 5y year old platform, so they are mothballing the drones:

It has been quite an expensive week for the US Air Force. Not only did Congress halt funding on a surveillance blimp project that they already invested $140 million in, but now the Pentagon says $3 billion worth of drones could be canned as well.

The United States military has already ordered a dozen unmanned surveillance drones at a combined cost of $3 billion, but realizing that the stealth, high-tech spy crafts aren’t as capable as the antiquated, old-school planes already in their arsenal, the Pentagon is pulling the plug in terms of acquiring any more.

In addition to ending the acquisition of Global Hawk Block 30 drones that the military had planned for, the Air Force will take the 18 they’ve already received, leaving them to hang around the hangar for now.

Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley told a Senate committee this week that between acquiring any more drones and maintaining upgrades and repairs on those and the ones already purchased, the military would practically go bankrupt. Gen. Schwartz says that the new plan will save the Pentagon $2.5 billion, but will also lead the Defense Department to let the $3 billion worth of surveillance drones already under their command to just collect dust from now on.

“This was a choice [where] we had an asset that can do the mission as it’s currently specified and could do it overall at much less cost,” Schwartz said before the Senate this week. “Sustaining the U-2 was a better bet.”

So, they spend billions on a system that is more expensive and less capable than its predecessor, and somehow or other, the contractor will sill get paid for the unusable crap that they delivered.

This is an Epic Prank

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Righteous!

Something to add my rules to live by: Don’t use prison labor to do graphic design for law enforcement:

How did an image of a pig — the infamous ’60s-era epithet by protesters for police officers — wind up on a decal used on as many as 30 Vermont State Police cruisers?

State officials Thursday pointed to the failure of the quality assurance office within the Vermont Correctional Industries Print Shop in St. Albans to detect a prisoner-artist’s addition made four years ago to the traditional state police logo. A spot on the shoulder of the cow in the state emblem was modified into a pig.

An investigation has begun into how the computer program was improperly modified to insert the image, Vermont Corrections Commissioner Andy Pallito said.

I really hope that whoever did this does not get caught.

Yes, Some of these Folks are Actually Guilty of Bad Things

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But it’s right to dismiss charges against all the kids that the cash for kids judges sent up:

A judge brought in to clean up after a “kids for cash” scandal has expunged every juvenile court case decided by a Pennsylvania jurist convicted of corruption.

Senior Judge Arthur Grim was selected almost three years ago to review juvenile court cases decided by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, who’s serving time in jail for his involvement in the corruption case.

As a result of Grim’s efforts, records have been expunged for more than 2,000 juveniles sentenced by Ciavarella.

Ciavarella and another ex-judge are serving federal prison sentences for sending juveniles to for-profit youth detention centers in return for money.

Grim called the handling of juvenile cases in Luzerne County a judicial process “run amok,” and he gave recommendations to prevent such renegade justice again.

Pennsylvania State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron Castille said Thursday that Grim has suggested many reforms that require legislative action, but the courts have already changed certain rules to treat kids more fairly.

When the checks and balances fail so badly that judges manage to get kickbacks for sending kids to private prisons, and no one says anything for years, expunging every conviction is least that we owe them as a society.

Background here.

And the Debt Deal Keeps On Giving

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There are now serious concerns that Obama’s debt capitulation, which is rather similar to much of the Republican agenda passed in Wisconsin in the last two months, is likely to demoralize potential voters and volunteers.

It’s bad enough that the Republicans are once again corruptly trying to misinform voters and suppress voting, but now the we’ve got Obama’s cave to further discourage the Democratic party grass roots.

He’s the Manchurian Democrat.  Cuel Tom Tomorrow:

Yes, This is a War Crime, and Barack Obama is Authorizing It

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So now alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning is forced to stand outside of his cell naked for extended periods:

Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week – against the recommendation of the jail’s forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.

During this time, Manning was forced to stay in his cell around the clock, stripped to his underwear, the lawyer said. His prescription eyeglasses were taken from him, except for the hour of television he is allowed to watch or when he was reading, Coombs added.

The circumstances of Manning’s confinement have drawn public attention. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said he submitted to the State Department a formal inquiry about Manning’s treatment.

You know, the other stuff, covering up the war crimes by Bush and His Evil Minions™ is a secondary crime, an accessory after the fact.

This is something different. This is him authorizing torture on his own, because he is at the top of the chain of command, and he knows it is going on, and he is allowing it to happen.

I’m with Mark Kleiman on this, “This is a total disgrace. It shouldn’t be happening in this country. You can’t be unaware of this, Mr. President. Silence gives consent.“

There is a part of me who wants a Republican to win the 2012 election, who then prosecutes Obama  for war crimes.

Of course, they won’t, because it would apply to them then, but the fact that there have not been cabinet level prosecutions over this is a travesty.

Judge Who Accepted Bribes to Jail Children is Convicted

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Mark Ciavarella, Jr. who took kickbacks from private prisons to sentence children to confinement, has been found guilty of racketeering, money-laundering conspiracy, fraud and filing false income tax returns, though not of bribery:

A federal jury on Friday found a former Pennsylvania judge guilty in a so-called kids-for-cash scheme, in which he took money in exchange for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit detention centers.

………

The jury found him not guilty, however, of seven counts of extortion and 10 counts of bribery.

The former judge faces a maximum sentence of 157 years in prison. The jury also ruled he must forfeit $997,600.

I think that the jury felt that they had to find proof that he would not have sent these kids away if he hadn’t been paid, i.e. what was in his head at the time, which is impossible.

Maybe I’m a bit old fashioned, but the fact that hid the money, that whole money laundering and racketeering bit, is pretty good evidence that he knew what he was doing is illegal, but I wasn’t in the court room.

Here is hoping that the judge sentences him to the max.  What Ciavarella did was truly beneath contempt.

The Most Morally Repugnant Industry on the Face of the Earth

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It’s the private prison industry, which is lobbying for draconian immigrations laws, like Arizona’s “Papers Please” law, because more people in detention means more money for them:

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

The story leads off with a private prison pitching an immigration detention facility for women and children in Benson, Arizona.

There are certain functions that cannot be fobbed off on the private sector, and this is perhaps the most sterling example.

Apologies to Declan McCullagh

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In an earlier post, regarding an article where a quote:

“Don’t be silly,” McLaughlin responds. “No one’s backed away from anything. . . . Isn’t . . . the author of the article, an anti [net neutrality] zealot?”

I put 2 and 2 together, and got 5. I said that it was clearly CNET reporter Declan McCullagh.

Well, it was not Mr. McCullagh.

It was someone else, and here is (my best guess) his article.

It sounded as if was something that came from Mr. McCullagh, who is a somewhat-saner-than-Rand-Paul libertarian, but I was wrong.

I had an exchange with the author, Roger Parloff, who told me who the author was, and that he felt that naming the author would require space for a response, which would have crowded out other information in an article with a limited length.

Perhaps the solution here is for online articles from dead tree publications, Fortune Magazine in this case, would be better served by providing links under such circumstances.

It’s bloggy, but I’ve always been a fan of hyperlinks, or their old school predecessor, the footnote.

In any case, I was wrong, and I apologize to my reader(s) and Mr. McCullagh.

A Correction:

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In the story of the SEC filing charges against Goldman Sachs, I said that Magnetar was likely the firm that was lobbying for crappy CDOs.

This is not true. It was Paulson & Co. Inc., run by John Paulson, the protagonist of the book The Greatest Trade Ever: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of How John Paulson Defied Wall Street and Made Financial History, about his fabulously successful shorting of the subprime market.

My guess is that he’s going to seem a Paulson, no relation to the former Treasury Secretary, will find his star dimmed a bit, particularly since the SEC has made it clear that he is under investigation as well.

I guess he sounds a bit less like a brave hero now.

Remember the Judges Who Took Kick-Backs to Lock Up Kids?

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Well, they are also mobbed up:

Reputed mobster William “Big Billy” D’Elia and former Luzerne County President Judge Michael T. Conahan were longtime friends who partied together, used courthouse employees as personal couriers and met frequently to talk court cases over ham and cheese omelets at a Perkins Restaurant & Bakery, witnesses testified Wednesday at a hearing over allegations the men conspired to fix a $3.5 million defamation verdict against The Citizens’ Voice newspaper.

Background here.

If He Were a Democrat….

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Now it turns out that it appears that the man who allegedly shot 4 police officers in Tacoma was granted clemency by Huckabee, allowing for his pardon.

This guy’s rap sheet is unbelievable in chronological order, we have:

  • Sentenced at 18 to 60 years for robbery, theft, burglary, aggravated robbery, posession of a gun on school property.
  • After his parole, it was two more armed robberies, and other assorted crimes.
  • Punching a police officer during a domestic dispute.
  • He has a pending charge of 2nd degree child rape.

Let’s make this clear, sentencing people to prison, and paroling them is a crap shoot. Some people don’t need to be in prison a day, some will never, ever be safe to put on the streets.

So, governors will get this wrong, but Huckabee has a particularly bad record, see also the earlier case of Wayne DuMond, where Huckabee seems to have engineered his release because it was a relative of Bill Clinton’s who was raped, and reports that he was more likely to pardon someone when, “evangelical leaders attested that a prisoner had found Jesus“, and it appears that the accused, Maurice Clemmons, used the language of Evangelical Christianity in his appeal for clemency to Huckabee, which likely had something to do with that decision.

There are also cases that seem to be tied to his personally knowing the prisoner, because they worked at the governor’s residence (WTF is up with that?), and because they had personal ties to him.

So, it’s not just that he’s made a mistake, it’s that he’s been a real horror show on this.

Of course, if he were a Democrat with a gig as a new host, someone like Roger Ailes, who created the Willie Horton ads, would be on him, and on the network to dump him, but this won’t happen, because Roger Ailes runs Fox News, and has hired him as that host:

Back in 1988, when it came to light that Willie Horton committed fresh crimes while out on a weekend furlough program backed by then-Gov. Mike Dukakis of Massachusetts, Republicans used it to help destroy Dukakis the presidential candidate. It may even have cost him the election.

“The only question is whether we depict Willie Horton with a knife in his hand or without it,” said a gleeful Roger Ailes, then a media consultant to Republicans.

Ailes now runs Fox News. If they decide to hold the politician accountable for early release of a violent felon linked now to a death of four police officers, they know where to find him – in studio, as a Fox News host.

Consequence free lifestyle, all you have to do is to be a Republican politician…..Damn….I just cannot do that.

A Clarification and an Apology

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In my earlier post on the Taliban severing ties to al Qaeda, I said the following:

Al Qaeda was never particularly popular in Afghanistan, where the people are, after all not Arabs, and they have about as much love for rich Arabs as we in the United States do.

Bin Laden was there because the Taliban wanted his money, not him.

When they were in control of Afghanistan, not only were they not fierce protectors of him, but they were trying to find a way for help the US make him dead in a way that gave them some plausible deniability.

As Sortition notes (In the comments of the previous post. BTW, read his blog, Pro Bono Statistics), this could be construed as an endorsement of bigotry against Arabs. This is not my intent.

To the degree that some people in Afghanistan or the West dislike “Arabs”, it is an indictment of those people, who are exhibiting bigotry toward Arabs.

Arabs are people like everyone else, and they love their families, just like everyone else, and while there are shortcomings in the governance of most Arab states, these are issues of complaints against the ruling elites.

So, a criticism of the House of Saud (or Mubarak in Egypt, or Qaddafi in Libya, or the Al-Sabah’s of Kuwait, or the Zayed’s of the UAE, the Assads of Syria, al Bashir in Sudan, King Mohammed of Morocco, etc.), or its policies is no more a criticism of the Arab people than criticism of the rulers of America, Goldman Sachs, would be a criticism of the American people.

Remember My Earlier Post on Judges Taking Kickbacks to Send Children to Jail

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The post, from February, is here.

In any case, a judge, the aptly named Arthur Grim, has reviewed the case files, and come away shocked:

The judge who studied Luzerne County’s “cash-for-kids” scheme said yesterday that children’s constitutional rights had been denied and justice perverted “in ways that I would never have dreamed possible.”

 Judge Arthur E. Grim of Berks County, who reviewed transcripts of about 100 cases of juveniles caught up in the scheme, said the scandal grew out of “unfettered power, greed, opportunity, and intimidation.”

here is the kicker though:

Lawyers, court employees, and school officials knew of the scheme, but winked at it for convenience or self-preservation, Grim testified.

This isn’t just a couple of bad judges. Pretty much every lawyer, and every school administrator in Luzerne County ad to know about it.

What’s more, the school administrators used it for their petty vendettas:

He said many school officials supported Ciavarella’s “zero-tolerance” policies toward teenagers no matter how minor the offense.

“When a misbehaving kid was brought to school authorities, they immediately picked up the phone and called the police,” Grim testified. “They did this because they knew that if they did, that child would go before Judge Ciavarella and would be out of their hair as a problem.”

When Hillary Transue was sent before the judge by a vice-principal who pressed charges of harassment about a spoof Facebook page that had her [the vice-principal] collecting Johnny Depp’s used underwear, this person, educator is not the right word, and whoever in the DA’s office who decided to continue with this, knew, that this was going to get a girl thrown in jail because the judge was taking bribes.

The Judge Grim notes:

“We know the people in this community did not consciously choose to stand on the side of injustice at the expense of children. But what was it that made it so hard to do the right thing? Were people afraid? Were they intimidated? By whom? What protections would they have wanted? Where would they have wanted to take the information they had?”

The judge has it wrong. People wanted this. This is what “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance” means. It means disproportionate, destructive, evil application of the law, and judges Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan could do this because this is what the people of Luzerne County wanted.

The prosecution loves a “hanging judge”. The principals wanted judges would make problem children go away. The voters wanted “tough on crime” and “zero tolerance“.

They all wanted to hurt children, so long as it was someone else’s child.

Atrios calls them, “Really awful people.” I’m not sure if he means just the judges, or the DA’s office, or perhaps also the school administrators.

Me, I mean everyone in that whole damn county.

If that vice-principal is still working for the school district, the good people of Luzerne county, both of them, should organize an angry mob.

These have Epic Fail Written All Over Them

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In order to deal with budget issues, Mayor Daley of Chicago is considering selling its water system to private operators, and allowing them to charge whatever they want.

So he gets the money, and succeeding generations get the revenue loss and more expensive water.

Also, the state that has so many bad ideas that it gave us both Barry Goldwater and John McCain is looking to turn over operation of their prisons to a private firm.

This one is a little different though, because private prisons have already been tried, and failed, with some of the institutions going so far as to bribe judges to send children to them for minor crimes.

This will not end well.

A Correction

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In an earlier post, I quoted the late Edwin Newman, when I said that something “buggers the mind.”

It’s from his book, Strictly Speaking, Will America be the death of English?

The quote is accurate, but the reports of Mr. Newman’s demise, to quote Mark Twain,* “Are greatly exaggerated.”

He is 90 years old, and still very much alive.

*Who actually is dead.