(4blackyouth.com) Gone are the days of getting a small fine and a slap on the hand for horsing around with your friends.  In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania in 2005, 14 year-old Jamie Quinn was thrown into a juvenile detention center for almost a year for slapping her friend in the face who had slapped her first.  Another case in the same county involved teen Hillary Transue, who was jailed for three months for making a mock Myspace page of her assistant principal.  These cases recently came to light after Judges Mark A. Ciavarella and Michael T. Conahan pleaded guilty to receiving $2.6 million dollars in kickbacks for throwing kids into private jails. 

How did this all begin?  In this 1980s, many federally-run and state-run correctional facilities were replaced by privately-run jails.  Since then, the private jail system has grown into a multi-billion dollar business and the jailed population has quadrupled.  Although the US makes up 5% of the world population, our nation makes up 25% of the world's incarcerated.  Simply put, the privately-run prison system in our country is not planning to lower the number of incarcerated citizens.  Black people and Latinos are disproportionately imprisoned, the rehabilitation that's provided is a joke, and prison conditions remain terrible.  But business is booming.  Even large investment banks like Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs and Co. have stakes in private prisons. 

The recent scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, involving Judges Ciavarella and Conahan who jailed kids for cash, brought this shameful industry to the limelight.  At least 5,000 children have appeared before these two judges since 2002, when Conahan shut down the state-run detention center in the county and used county money to fund a multi-million dollar lease for a private detention facility run by Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corporation.  Kids and their parents were made to sign a waiver in most cases to appear without an attorney but little did they know that doing so put them at much greater of risk of being placed in a detention center. 

Transue, who was sent to a detention center for making a mock Myspace page of her assistant principal as a joke, recalls that her hearing in front of the judge lasted less than two minutes.  Like many other cases of kids before her, her mother had been persuaded to waive her right to an attorney.  After hearing of Transue's unjustly harsh sentence, the Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia took the case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.  The FBI led the subsequent investigation but the Mid Atlantic Youth Services Corporation hasn't been targeted because of their cooperation in the investigation.

So what will the future bring for private jails?  This recent case in Pennsylvania involved a relatively small private jail corporation.  But what about the large private prison industrial complex in our nation that has unjustly imprisoned millions of others?  Our current prison system is fueled by greed, putting anyone at risk for receiving a harsh sentence for even the pettiest crime.  We need to work as a nation to put the justice back into our justice system so we can give kids opportunities for education, not incarceration. Think about it.