Thursday, March 12, 2009

Does a Broken Country Have a Future? The Criminal Injustice System


By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, March 11, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Excerpts from article which can be found at:
http://www.creators.com/opinion/paul-craig-roberts.html

The criminal justice system...is a massive producer of injustice. The agenda is to clear court dockets and to produce high conviction rates...achieved through coerced plea bargains.

Law and order conservatives think of the police in god-like terms...Conservatives could gain more perspective if they watch some of the videos on You-tube of gratuitous police violence, such as this one of a police officer delivering a brutal beating to a 15-year old girl. http://www.prisonplanet.com/two-police-officers-assault-a-15-year-old-girl-in-a-cell.html

A Google search for You-Tube videos of police violence lists 485,000 entries, and these are just the acts captured on camera. How many cops are psychopaths who constitute a greater danger to the public than do criminals? SWAT teams are notorious for breaking down doors at the wrong address and murdering innocent citizens.

Cops are also notorious for framing people as it is easier than doing serious investigation of crimes and collecting evidence. Even the guilty are often framed as that is easier than convicting them on the evidence.

Libertarian free market types believe that the private sector can do everything better than the public sector. This ideology causes libertarians to be blind to the dangerous incentives created by the privatization of prisons.

On 2/12/09, CBS reported that two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with sending kids to privately operated detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in payoffs.

Just think of all the kids whose lives have been ruined by the greedy judges and private prison operators. The judges have been sentenced to seven years on reduced charge plea bargains.