Food For The Machine

I have an acquaintance named James who just got sent to jail for four months.

James and I have a mutual friend named Judy, who called me yesterday, absolutely frantic. James had already gone to be an Involuntary Guest Of The State, he had no way to prepay four months’ rent on his small garage apartment, and unless Judy could find a way to get the rest of his possessions to a storage facility, everything James owned would either be dumped out on the curb or sold for back-payment of rent.
I was able to help Judy get the remainder of James’s furniture moved to a 10’x10’ storage space that she and another friend had rented. Had those two ladies not been willing to do this, James would have been released from prison owning absolutely nothing.

Think about that for a minute….starting over with a criminal record, and owning nothing. Then think of having to face a plague of counselors, probation officers, parole officers and other leeches, all with their hands in your pockets, trying to collect their Oversight Fees, payments for counseling sessions, payments for drug tests, and other legal rip-offs.

James will probably spend the rest of his life as food for this vile machine, ensuring that some Civil Service lifer is able to collect a good pension at the age of 50.

So what did James do to deserve such treatment?

Did he injure someone with his vehicle, the way Ted Kennedy did, and then leave his victim to drown?
Did he try and fail to blow up some buildings, like Bill Ayers?
Or did he drug and rape a 13-year old, like Roman Polanski?

James didn’t do anything to harm anyone else, the way those three guys did. He's only guilty of doing something that our last three presidents have done.

James was pulled over because of his license plate or inspection sticker was expired. The cops used that as an excuse to rip his car open from bumper to bumper. They finally found an ounce of marijuana and hauled James to jail.
Unlike presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, or contenders like John Kerry, Al Gore, and Sarah Palin, all of whom have smoked weed, James is in jail.
Unlike Barack Obama, who did cocaine as a teenager, James is in jail.

Chances are, you have voted for at least two of the politicians listed above. Why is it that you don’t hold drug use against presidential candidates and will support them in their efforts to be Leaders Of The Free World, but if a night-shift welder is caught with 4 joints’ worth of marijuana, you believe he should go to prison and then have to spend years explaining himself to, and being monitored by, government munchkins?

We have a higher percentage and a higher raw number of prisoners than any other country on earth. We are devastating the male African-American population for the sole purpose of “saving and creating jobs” in the counseling, drug-testing, prison-building and law enforcement industries.

Mexican drug lords are destroying their country - all for the right to be monopoly drug suppliers for the United States. The parallels between 2010 and our failed 1920's alcohol prohibition experiment are too obvious for even the most dense politician to ignore. Al Capone and a plethora of other gangsters grew wealthy supplying something that everyone wanted. Grandmothers started making their own bathtub gin. Lawlessness erupted around the border – but in this case, it was our border with Canada!

In places where we legalized alcohol, the bootlegger violence stopped. Alcohol usage didn’t skyrocket, it merely moved out into the open again, and there was no sudden increase in alcoholism.

There are only two politicians of note who are willing to go on record stating that they favor marijuana legalization – Republican Ron Paul (TX) and Democrat Jim Webb (VA).
The other politicians no longer have ignorance as an excuse. They aren’t misguided or misinformed, and they aren’t looking out For The Children®.

They are evil.

Judge Mark Ciavarella - "Hell Is For Children"

I've long believed that our prison system is an entrepreneurial activity. Since I have several employees who've been Involuntary Guests Of The State, I get to hear the stories. Yes, a lot of those stories are bullshit. But there are enough common threads running through their rants that some consistent trends begin to emerge.

So I wasn't surprised to read this story about Judge Mark A. Ciavarella in this month's issue of Reason magazine:

In 2004, responding to concerns about the unusually high rate and cost of incarceration in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. told the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, "I'm not in the business to determine whether placement rates are up or down, I'm in the business of trying to help these kids".

For a tidy profit, that is. In January, Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan, president judge of the Luzerne County Court of Common Please between 2002 and 2007, admitted receiving $2.6 million from the operators of two juvenile detention facilities and conspiring to hide the money from the Internal Revenue Service....

This portion is from Jacob Sullum's Reason magazine's Hit & Run department :

First, the judges helped the detention centers land a county contract worth $58 million. Then their alleged scheme was to guarantee the operators a steady income by detaining juveniles, often on petty stuff.
Many of the kids were railroaded, according to allegations lodged with the state Supreme Court last year by the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center, an advocacy group.
In asking the court to intervene in April, the law center cited hundreds of examples where teens accused of minor mischief were pressured to waive their right to lawyers, and then shipped to a detention center.
One teen was given a 90-day sentence for having parodied a school administrator online. Such unwarranted detentions left "both children and parents feeling bewildered, violated and traumatized," center lawyers said.


There's also been a lot of interest in decriminalizing marijuana, since we've now got the highest incarceration rate on the planet. Do you think someone's profit motive might be standing in the way of decriminalization of weed? Click here to find out which groups lobby hardest against it. If you've hired many ex-cons, you won't be surprised. Much credit for bringing this issue to light goes to Virginia Senator Jim Webb.


Side note, slightly off-topic: Here's a bizarre video based on Pat Benatar's song "Hell Is For Children", apparently put together by someone close to the Ciavarella situation. I think that's a picture of the Luzerne County Courthouse alternating with pictures of The Vatican???? The video ends with a painting of Jesus sitting in the clouds looking depressed over the whole situation. But if Christian fundamentalists are to be believed, he shouldn't. He's the one who invented the literal Hell For Children.