Sunday, March 01, 2009

Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal latest

Time to catch up with the latest news and comment on this scandal from the US.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page shares my analysis:
the judges are only the tip of a scandalous iceberg that has been floating around juvenile detention systems for years. Critics have long complained that private prisons create perverse incentives to throw non-violent offenders in jail even though they might be handled better and more cheaply in community-based alternative programs.
He also asks why this affair has received so much less attention in America than the New York Post's chimpanzee cartoon.

And Law.Com reports that one of the judges appears to have uncomfortably close connections with organised crime.

1 comment:

dreamingspire said...

As someone in Indonesia was heard to say to an English reporter on BBC World Service (IIRC) yesterday when looking at an area of slum housing that had just been bulldozed: that is what democracy does for you. Apparently the occupants had all been illegal immigrants (seemingly from another part of Indonesia) - but they ARE still human beings.