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- In 2007, a teenager in a depressed county of Northeastern Pennsylvania, recently bereft of its industrial and coal mining jobs, was sentenced to 3 months in juvenile detention. Her crime was spoofing her principal. Judge Michael T. Conahan found her guilty of harassment.
The epilogue to this Kafkaesque discharge of justice is that Conahan and a colleague pleaded guilty to receiving kickbacks of $2.6 million over 5 years from two private juvenile detention centers. The private child prisons bribed judges to dole out harsher sentences and send more children to prison. As many as 5,000 children may have been unjustly sentenced during the judges’ tenures as sock puppets for the private prison industry. As always, corporations are people with pockets, but not people with responsibilities. Conahan caught a 17-year sentence for receiving the bribes, but no one has been charged for offering them.