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In Luzerne County the prison industry is thriving.

In recent weeks, two Pennsylvania judges, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Judge Michael T. Conahan, have been charged with wire fraud and tax evasion, in what is being called the biggest courtroom scandal in Pennsylvania's history. Under the judges' reign, thousands of juveniles, many of them accused of minor and nonviolent crimes, were sent to private detention facilities in exchange for millions in kickbacks. 

Call me nutty, but the most egregious part of this story is not that two judges appear to have swindled thousands of children out of their constitutional rights, not that they were paid to do so by friends in the prison industry, but that there is a prison industry in America at all. And that it's thriving.

But why shouldn't it? If ever there was such thing as a recession-proof industry, that's got to be it.

Once we get past the irony of judges being sent to prisons full of prisoners they helped send down the road themselves (one hopes their views of the judicial system will be altered somewhat when they are released), we must come to grips with the fact that for-profit prisons are by their very nature a bad idea. Sure, in theory, they seem to work. But you know what else works in theory? Communism.

As far as I can tell, the reasoning goes that private companies motivated by profits will do a better job than the government could because they have more to lose. And should crime rates ever fall, and America rise to meet the promise of its dreams, well, I'm sure the CEO's of those companies will tell you they'd be more than happy to shut their doors and move on to some other line of work. I mean who wouldn't be happy to shut down their billion-dollar a year industry if it meant the city streets would be safe for all?

Yeah. Right. Government Grants have a better chance.

To be fair, as long as there are laws, there will be those who break them and need to be rehabilitated separate from the general population. But something is wrong when America accounts for a full 25% of the world's prisoners.

Now, this is not all the prison companies' doing, of course. The war on drugs, institutionalized poverty and failed school systems account for much of this. But when there is money to be made from locking people up, it stands to reason that the people who profit from it will do all within their power to maximize their profits, even, in the rare case, if it means breaking the law to do so.

Another point, made by Thomas Frank in a scathing satirical essay in The Wall Street Journal, is that this is the logical end of decades of Americans demanding our legal system to be tougher on crime, be it drugs, violence or shoplifting a jar of nutmeg. As he puts it, the accused Pennsylvania judges “have merely taken to heart the unvarying message of 40 years' worth of election results—that more people, many more, need to go to jail—and have come up with an entrepreneurial solution to the problem.”

Along with Ciavarella, Conahan and those who paid them so handsomely for sending kids to jail, we are at fault here, too. Until America comes to its senses and demands not tougher laws and judges, but an end to the judicial system that sees not only one out of every 31 adults behind bars, but also one out of every nine African American males aged 25-34. The solution is not a simple one, certainly, but the need for change has never been more apparent, and with so much talk of change these days, what better time to start than now?