...it might be a good idea to bear
this BBC story from the US in mind. Two judges in the state of Pennsylvania, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, have admitted taking kickbacks from private prison operators in return for sending more people to their institutions and for longer sentences.
... Campaigners have complained that Mr Ciavarella gave out overly harsh sentences for minor offenses.
A spokeswoman for the non-profit Juvenile Law Center said 1,000-2,000 juveniles who came before the judge between 2003 and 2006 received excessively harsh sentences. Many of the children were first-time offenders and had no lawyers to defend them.
The judge sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centres from 2003 to 2006, compared with a state average of one in 10, the AP reported.
The profit motive and the administration of justice don't appear to sit well together. Texas has had
serious problems with private prisons due, in large part, to the state corrections administration being consistently lax in monitoring compliance with contracts. Perhaps a few kickbacks have been going on there, too. Not unique to Texas by any means, the US has many private prisons and the insight this BBC story provides may help us understand why they are so keen to hand out long sentences and at the same time have the highest proportion of their population in prison of any country in the world.
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