Today, many of the prisons in the US are corporate, for-profit operations.
In Kids for Cash, Pennsylvania judges took millions in bribes from prison owners, and in return imprisoned kids, to keep the juvenile halls full.
Imprisoning kids is much more profitable than imprisoning adults. For a juvenile, the prison owner can get a much as $150,000 per kid per year. For adult, up to $50,000 per year (plus the income, derived from forcing adults to work for corporations).
As noted in the piece below, the trial of the corrupt Pennsylvania judges is dragging for years. Past experience shows that such cases may eventually be dismissed, when public attention is lost.
jz
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Shannon P. Duffy of The Legal Intelligencer offers
this report:
Even the doctrine of absolute judicial immunity proved to be too weak a defense for the two disgraced former Luzerne County judges who are the leading figures in Pennsylvania's "kids-for-cash" scandal.
A federal judge has ruled that the pair -- Michael T. Conahan and Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. -- are immune only for actions they took in court or while ruling on cases, but that they can still be sued for their roles in an alleged conspiracy to take kickbacks from the owner and builder of a privately run juvenile prison. Conahan had also asserted a defense of legislative immunity, arguing that some of the allegations lodged against him stemmed from the funding decisions he made in his role as president judge.
SOURCE:
http://www.section1983blog.com/2010/08/kids-for-cash-judges-denied-absolute.html
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