U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money:
Two judges pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth detention center in Pennsylvania in return for giving hundreds of youths and teenagers long sentences…..
When someone is sent to a detention center, the company running the facility receives money from the county government to defray the cost of incarceration. So as more children were sentenced to the detention center, PA Childcare and Western PA Childcare received more money from the government, prosecutors said.
Teenagers who came before Ciavarella in juvenile court often were sentenced to detention centers for minor offenses that would typically have been classified as misdemeanors, according to the Juvenile Law Center, a Philadelphia nonprofit group…..
One 17-year-old boy was sentenced to three months’ detention for being in the company of another minor caught shoplifting.
Others were given similar sentences for “simple assault” resulting from a schoolyard scuffle that would normally draw a warning, a spokeswoman for the Juvenile Law Center said.
The Constitution guarantees the right to legal representation in U.S. courts. But many of the juveniles appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney because they were told by the probation service that their minor offenses didn’t require one.
Marsha Levick, chief counsel for the Juvenile Law Center, estimated that of approximately 5,000 juveniles who came before Ciavarella from 2003 and 2006, between 1,000 and 2,000 received excessively harsh detention sentences….
This horrifying but unsurprising story raises a lot of specific political questions: about judicial corruption, the war on crime, the war on drugs, civil rights, civil liberties, our increasingly authoritarian legal system, the for-profit prison industry, the political influence of prison-guard unions, and the racism of a growth industry paying mostly-white people to restrict the freedom of mostly-black people.
But it also raises a question more important than any of these, or all of them put together: what has America become? The story above sounds like something that happened under colonial rule, or in a corrupt third world country, or in an authoritarian dictatorship. But it happened in America.
And neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party wants to change anything. The Republicans think that our present system is fine. (They caught the bad judges, didn’t they? And we need to be tough on crime!). And the Democratic Party leadership, at best, refuses to touch these questions. We need to be tough on crime!
That’s why it feels good to be a troll now instead of a Democrat.
When George W. Bush said “America doesn’t torture”, when everyone knew that America does torture, everybody understood what he meant. He was like the enforcer waving a baseball bat saying “I hear you’ve been going around calling me a thug. I’m not a thug, OK?” Bush’s smirky taunts were one of the things that most endeared him to his authoritarian base. What he was telling us was “Whatcha think you’re gonna to do about it, buddy?”
It’s true that when some people say “America doesn’t torture”, they mean something entirely different. What they’re saying is “Yes, America is torturing right now, but that’s not the real America.” And if this affirmation is accompanied by an active determination to put a stop to American torture, this is a perfectly fine bit of aspirational rhetoric. But if nothing really changes, it just becomes denial and bad faith.
I came of age in 1967, and more than half the time since then Nixon, Reagan, or George W. Bush has been President. All three of them did a lot of harm, and the damage done by Nixon and Reagan was never even half undone by their successors. Nobody knows what will happen under Obama, but he doesn’t seem to be setting his sights very high, and those of us who supported him are at risk of helping ratify George W. Bush’s transformation of America — by setting our own sights too low, and by pretending that the small victories we end up winning are much bigger than they really are.
We really have to consider the possibility that America has been transformed, and that Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush are what America really is now. A significant chunk of normal Americans would laugh gleefully at the story I posted, under the assumption that it was black kids who were being put in jail. Many other normal Americans would automatically claim, without any evidence, that this event was a rare exception and just a single incident. Only a minority of Americans would be willing to acknowledge the terrible significance of the episode. Bad governments make bad people, and conversely.
Many citizens of other states do realize how bad things are here. Maybe America has become unexceptional, just one state among all the others. Maybe, as so many states have done before, we’re becoming one of the bad guys of history.
And if the U.S. goes into economic decline while militarily remaining the most powerful nation the world has ever seen (as seems very possible) — what happens then?
Trollblog 
February 14, 2009 at 11:57 am
It’s useful to reflect every now and then that, given all of the appalling things we hear about death penalty cases, there is no part of our jurisprudence that is as sound as death penalty jurisprudence.
February 14, 2009 at 3:37 pm
What are you talking about? America hasn’t become unexceptional, it’s always been unexceptional. Why would it be exceptional?
February 14, 2009 at 4:03 pm
Don’t play dumb, Abb1. Exceptionalism is taken for given by most Americans, including well-intentioned liberals and even some leftists. (Some of the biggest exceptionalists were recent peasant arrivals from Europe ca. 1900, though some of them ended up disillusioned.) Sometimes exceptionalism leads people to try to improve problems seen as out of character, and sometimes it leads people to excuse, ignore, or deny problems.
I don’t reject exceptionalism out of hand, incidentally. I can easily make a case for Swedish exceptionalism, Japanese exceptionalism, or Swiss exceptionalism. Exceptionalism can be good or bad, too.
One good thing about dumping American exceptionalism is that it puts America somewhere on the normal scale of capitalist imperialist nations. From a historical point of view, the British or the Germans, or the Russians or the Chinese or the Iranians ot the Turks, or even the Swedes or the Swiss or the Czechs aren’t able to say much more than “Our turn has come and gone, and it’s America’s turn now.”
February 14, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I can easily make a case for Swedish exceptionalism, Japanese exceptionalism, or Swiss exceptionalism
You seem to be using “exceptionalism” as a synonym for “some unique characteristics”, but it is, in fact, more like religious fundamentalism. Can you make a case for One God and One Prophet named Jesus or Mohamed or Moses or Joseph Smith, Jr.?
There’s nothing, of course, especially shocking in corruption; that’s quite common in any hierarchical structure, government, military, church or whatever. I don’t think individual presidents are to blame. Just human nature.
February 17, 2009 at 10:09 pm
Maybe, as so many states have done before, we’re becoming one of the bad guys of history.
“Becoming”? Dude, we were killing millions in Southeast Asia back when Dubya was doing bong hits at some Yale frat house. Of course we’re one of the bad guys of history. An empire is an empire is an empire, no matter how many stars and stripes and grand slogans you drape over it.
February 19, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Stras, Abb1, if you look at my piece again, what I’m doing now is abandoning the aspirational rhetoric. I’m no longer going to pretend to be a patriot in order to have a voice, and as a result I’m not going to have a voice.
The reason I did this is that I just decided that nothing’s going to get better. This is not primarily because of Obama himself. It’s because, looking at the American people and American institutions, I realize that Obama couldn’t get away with doing anything better than what he’s doing.
There are more Blue Dogs than ever before, and they believe that their day has come. They were helpless against Bush, but if Obama doesn’t cater to them, they will be able to hurt him and will. And Obama knows that, so he’s now playing their game on “paygo”, the same way he played the Republicans’ game on the stimulus. (I’m pretty sure that in the end, his Israel-Palestine policy will play out much the same).
Sometimes you guys seem to think that if enough people tell the truth loud enough, people will wake up. I don’t believe that. The Left is feeble, factionalized, and obsessed with bullshit lifestyle issues, and whatever populism there is in the Republican party or extreme-right groups.
The Democratic Party is controlled by influence peddlers and mild-mannered, slightly-liberal academics who hate the uneducated. They all believe that populists are inevitably either Nazis or Communists, and by gaining control of the Democratic Party and crushing their enemies within it, they’ve been very successful in making theat self-fulfilling prophecy come true.
February 19, 2009 at 5:59 pm
To be clear, I’m not saying that Obama is innocent. He’s not different than the others. I’m not saying that he deceived us, either. He told us what he was going to do. What I’m saying is that if Obama were a better man, he’d be immediately destroyed.
And for the mainstream Democrats tuning in, I’m always delighted when events prove me wrong. Make it happen!
February 20, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Sometimes you guys seem to think that if enough people tell the truth loud enough, people will wake up.
When have I said that? I’ve maintained for at least two years now that the most likely outcome is civilizational collapse, with possible extinction down the line.
We’re largely splitting hairs here; it’s just that the language of American exceptionalism – even one that merely alludes to some mythic, lost age when we used to be Good Guys, before The Fall – is inevitably going to rankle.