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Lock 'Em Up: Jailing kids is a proud American tradition

Over the years we have
embraced all sorts of instruments ensuring that
more people got locked up for longer and longer
stretches. The records of these two corrupt
judges for locking up juveniles is truly
reprehensible. They found it profitable to keep
private prisons filled with children at all
times.

By Thomas Frank

At first glance, the news from Luzerne County,
in northeastern Pennsylvania, is not good. In
what is known locally as the "kids for cash"
scandal, two judges have pleaded guilty to
accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks from a for-
profit juvenile correctional facility -- a
privately owned jail for kids, essentially.

And here is what the judges delivered,
according to the charges of the U.S. Attorney
overseeing the case: In 2003 one of them, Judge
Michael Conahan, who had authority over such
expenses, defunded the county-owned detention
center, channeling kids sentenced to detention
to the private jail -- along with the public's
money.

For good measure, the feds charge, Mr. Conahan
also agreed to send the private facility $1.3
million per year in public funds. Over the
succeeding years, the private jail, along with
a second lockup-for-profit that had opened in
another part of the state, won tens of millions
of dollars in Luzerne County contracts,
allegedly with the two judges' help.

What has drawn the media's attention, though,
is the remarkable strictness of the judges'
judging. Mr. Conahan's alleged partner in the
scheme, Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr., reportedly
sent kids to the private detention centers when
probation officers didn't think it was a good
idea; he sent kids there when their crimes were
nonviolent; he sent kids there when their
crimes were insignificant. It was as though he
was determined to keep those private prisons
filled with children at all times. According to
news stories, offenses as small as swiping a
jar of nutmeg or throwing a piece of steak at
an adult were enough to merit a trip to the
hoosegow.

Over the years Mr. Ciavarella racked up a truly
awesome score: He sent kids to detention
instead of other options at twice the state
average, according to the New York
Times. He tried a prodigious number of
cases in which the accused child had no lawyer
-- here, says the Times, the judge's
numbers were fully 10 times the state average.
And he did it fast, sometimes rendering a
verdict "in the neighborhood of a minute-and-a-
half to three minutes," according to the judge
tasked with reconsidering Mr. Ciavarella's
work.

My question is, what have the Luzerne County
judges done that deviates in the least from our
American political traditions? These jurists
have merely taken to heart the unvarying
message of 40 years' worth of election results
-- that more people, many more, need to go to
jail -- and have come up with an
entrepreneurial solution to the problem.

We the people say it loud and clear every
Election Day, in high-crime periods as well as
peaceful stretches: More of our population
needs to be behind bars. We love retribution so
much we make hits of TV shows in which
society's ne'er-do-wells come in for lectures
not only by stern, righteous judges, but by
tattooed, mulletted bounty hunters as well.

And over the years we have embraced all sorts
of instruments ensuring that more people got
locked up for longer and longer stretches:
Three strikes laws, mandatory sentencing laws,
zero-tolerance policies. Maybe they aren't
"fair," but they've helped to make the U.S.
number one in percentage of population in the
clink -- in fact, as Virginia Democratic Sen.
Jim Webb pointed out in Parade magazine on
Sunday, America has an amazing 25% of the
world's prisoners.

Taking this path has not always been easy. In
the 1990s, when we started to realize that
child crooks were "superpredators" who needed
to go to prison along with everyone else, some
were unwilling to act. Others stepped up.
"We've got to quit coddling these violent kids
like nothing is going on," said Sen. Orrin
Hatch (R., Utah) in 1996. "Getting some of
these do-gooder liberals to do what is right is
real tough. We'd all like to rehabilitate these
kids, but by gosh we are in a different age."

But taking law and order to the next level in
this different age required money, by gosh.
Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a
step in the right direction, but what we didn't
have -- until recently -- were proper
instruments for incentivizing the judiciary.
That's what the "kids for cash" judges were
apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as
"kickbacks," but before long we will see them
as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws
governing lobbying and campaign contributions
have struck the right balance between the
wishes of the people and those of private
industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that
the same great results can be achieved by
putting the government's justice-dealing branch
on the same market-based course?

The public will get to see their neighbors'
kids go to jail, the judge who sends them there
will be able to afford a nice condo in Florida,
and the company that satisfies the public's
desire for punishment will make a handsome
profit. It will be a win-win result for
everyone.

Write to thomas@wsj.com



— Thomas Frank
Wall Street Journal
2009-04-01


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