For those of you who don't believe the prison industrial complex is real here is a case that will blow your minds. I know it blew my mind. However, I wasn't shocked. A judge was convicted in a kids for cash scheme. Throwing KIDS in jail for cash. No wonder why the US has more people in prison than in any other industrialized nation.
Presently the US has more people (2.1 million) in prison than any other country in the world. In fact we recently exceeded China, which has 1.6 million people in prison, despite having four times the population. Statistics also show that nearly half (one million) of our prison population are inside for non-violent offenses.
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http://open.salon.com/...)
That's one way of being able to compete with China, India, Vietnam's labor force. I'm hoping that the fiasco that is going on in Wisconsin will wake up the American people so that they will see that the shrinking of the middle class is no accident and push to take our country back from those who only want to steal our treasures.
This is so sad. CBS News.com has an article regarding a judge who has been throwing KIDS in jail for corporate profit (http://www.cbsnews.com/...)
Former juvenile court judge Mark Ciavarella was convicted in an alleged "kids for cash" scheme that accused him and another judge of sending youth offenders to for-profit detention centers in exchange for millions of dollars in illicit payments from the builder and owner of the lockups.
The 61-year-old Luzerne County ex-judge left the bench in disgrace two years ago after prosecutors charged him with engineering one of the biggest courtroom frauds in U.S. history by using juvenile delinquents as pawns in a plot to get rich.
The judge, known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom demeanor, filled the beds of the private lockups with children as young as 10. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed thousands of juvenile convictions issued by Ciavarella, saying he ran his courtroom with "complete disregard for the constitutional rights of the juveniles," including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.
Thanks goodness for Sandy Fonzo. She is a mother of one of the children who was sentenced by former Judge Ciavarella (first time offense). Her son ended up killing himself. Take a listen to her story:
We've got to fight back. We've got to do better.