Prison Industry Wants It's Own Judge Seated For Life
Thu Mar 13, 2008 at 01:55:18 PM PDT
Bush in his infinite wisdom has nominated Gus Puryear IV to a lifetime appointment on the bench. As with most if not all of Bush's choices this one has serious flaws in judgement. Leaving out the fact that Puryear is good friends with Cheneys son-in-law we can still find numerous reasons to reject him without a second thought.
Puryear recently confronted tough questions about his conduct, experience and potential conflicts of interest from Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which must approve him before a full Senate vote. Now, a former CCA manager tells TIME that Puryear oversaw a reporting system in which accounts of major, sometimes violent prison disturbances and other significant events were often masked or minimized in accounts provided to government agencies with oversight over prison contracts. Ronald T. Jones, the former CCA manager, alleges that the company even began keeping two sets of books — one for internal use that described prison deficiencies in telling detail, and a second set that Jones describes as "doctored" for public consumption, to limit bad publicity, litigation or fines that could derail CCA's multimillion dollar contracts with federal, state or local agencies.
While I'm not sure that is totally illegal, if is at the least questionable ethics if not worse, and certainly not the kind of behavior befitting a Judge. It doesn't seem to stop there either. CCA is our nations jailer when we consider how many of the private prisons they own and run, over 50% in the US. That means they have control over the lives of 70,000 plus prisoners.
We and the prisoners are lucky to have Ronald T. Jones, the former CCA manager, who has be willing to let some of the truth out from behind the walls of the prisons executive offices. The story he tells is beyond just cronyism, he gives us a real insiders look at the games being played with the lives of those the gov. is charged with taking care of while in our custody.
In 2006, for example, Jones says CCA had to lock down a prison in Texas to control rioting by as many as 60 inmates. Despite clear internal guidelines defining the incident as a ZT ("zero tolerance"), Jones says he was ordered not to label it that way. Instead it was logged as, "Altered facility schedule due to inmate action". And this was not unusual, says Jones: "Information was misrepresented in a very disturbing way concerning the company's most important performance indicators, which included escapes, suicides, violent outbreaks and sexual assaults." Scrutiny for a Bush Judicial Nominee
Funny, it was just a few weeks ago Bush invited all those nominees to the White House for a private tea trying to shame the Dems in the Senate into having a Mass Vote to approve all Bushs questionable choices. Since then several of those people have withdrawn their names having seen the light. Thankfully Sen Leahy and others on the Judiciary Committee are not push-overs when it comes to bad nominees. They refused to seat "Waterboard Willie" Haynes, the Torture Judge, last year, and this year they held firm against Bradbury, the illegal acting head of the OLC, the office that produces the opinions that Atty Gen. Mukasey and Bush base the Muskasey Paradox on. It was Jonathan Turley that coined the term " The Mukasey Paradox " in a OpEd in the LATimes a week or 2 ago. In case you haven't seen that OpEd I'm posting the paradox, as weak as it is, below.
In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers. Jonathan Turley on The Mukasey/Nixon Paradox
Bush has done enough permanent damage to our Judicial System with some of his choices like Roberts, and Alito on the SCOTUS and the other judges he managed to slip in over the years. We don't need to let him do any more. Enough is enough when it comes to judges. I cannot do justice to the insight this article gives without violating the "fair use" rules so I want to make sure you go read the short but damning details yourself. Next time you feel like blasting away at Sen. Leahy or others, remember to thank them for what they have also done right.
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