This criminal scheme organized by a judge was arguably one of the news bits which made the biggest impression on me. Maybe because it perverted something so incredibly important. 28 years and 1200000 $ seem not much for what he has done.
In any case I think it should kickstart a debate about the role of private prisons and the bad (terrible) incentives it creates. I'm not quite up to date but the US prison business is huge, with practical no counterpart in the rest of the world. It is of course no normal business which can happily left mostly to our dear efficient markets as the supply-side is completely controlled by state, with the profits of private prisons obviously getting financed by the taxpayer. Everything is set up to have the scope of the rule of law getting distorted into a very narrow direction. A good citizen tends to a be a bad citizen or 'private good' from the prison investor's point of view even if it is obviously excellent for the state as a whole.
The lack of lawyers for those kids is just amazingly disgusting, the arrogance of the rogue judges and the especially silence around them is shocking. The mafia has little on them. The US is a very wealthy nations can take sustain a lot of damage inflicted by such criminal behaviour and ideological idiocy. The war on drugs would have been long given up by not so wealthy nations which would have been unable to continue to throw more and more money at the problem and into the drain. Sometimes less ressources force more and better thinking.
Bourbons argument about the legal lobby is perfectly valid and reminds me of an old saying which roughly goes 'The scandal is not so much what gets done illegally, but what can be done legally'.
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