One More from the Gipper

Right around the time the nation was commemorating the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth came a story out of Allentown, Pennsylvania that had the makings of great comedy – if it weren’t true.  It had to do with a judge who apparently pocketed $2.8 million in bribes in exchange for sending kids to a privately operated detention center run by a friend.  Now, the late president was never mentioned in the reporting of these events because, of course, he’s long dead and obviously had no direct involvement in them, but he really should be remembered because without Dutch Reagan the story would probably never have happened.

The Honorable Mark Ciavarella, it seems, was a seriously committed privatizer.  According to prosecutors, the former judge (he and a co-defendant left the bench after charges were filed), engineered the closure of a county-operated juvenile detention center and helped steer an eight figure contract to a private facility called Pennsylvania Child Care, operated by a friend of his.  What could be wrong with a place called Pennsylvania Child Care?  Well, it seems that in order to fill his friend’s facility – and justify the awarding of the state contract – the judge pretty much started acting the role of the boogeyman some parents used to threaten their kids with:  Play with fire and you know what’ll happen to you?  You’ll go to jail for arson. And indeed Ciavarella sent a 10 year old girl to “Child Care” when she accidentally set her room on fire.  Along with the one who gave a cop the finger.  And the one who made fun of the assistant principal on MySpace.

For the most part, the judge doesn’t actually dispute that the money passed into his hands.  Says he considered it a “finder’s fee.”  Says, “I was told it was legal money. I was told it was something that I was entitled to.”  Most likely he got that opinion from another judge, I’d guess.

No, not that Gipper!

So what’s all this got to do with the Great Communicator?  Well, if you’re old enough to remember his presidency, you may also remember that when he took office this story couldn’t have happened because private prisons were something out of history.  To the extent that Americans knew anything about them it was from movies about the Confederacy and the Reconstruction Era South.  Again, Reagan himself had nothing personally to do with the first modern private prison takeover in Hamilton County, Tennessee in 1984, but it’s no accident that it happened on his watch.

First off, Reagan was also a seriously committed privatizer, although in his case the commitment was based on ideology rather than personal profit.  Taking the lead from his friend, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan established the first White House Office of Privatization.  He also set up a Commission on Privatization whose list of 78 recommendations included contracting out the management of prisons, jails and detention centers.

Probably of equal importance to our current story, however, was the boost Reagan gave the War on Drugs.  He may not have been the one to first declare it (Richard Nixon did that) but it was he who established the Office of National Drug Control Policy and his White House rallied the troops in that “War” on a level not seen in any other administration.  Remember Nancy Reagan and “Just say no”?

Predictably, the escalation of the War on Drugs brought an increase in the number of prisoners taken.  There were about half a million total in the correctional system when Reagan took office.  But the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that he signed in 1986 brought on mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and soon the number jailed would start to exceed the capacity of the nation’s existing criminal justice system.  And since the Reagan Administration railed against government spending in general, when prison capacity was exceeded, rather than engage in raising the money required to build new facilities, some governmental entities started turning to the private sector to build them – just as the Reagan’s people said they should.  Today private corporations manage about 200,000 prisoners, nearly ten percent of the total prison and jail populations that are now four times what they were when he took office.

As we have seen, Judge Ciavarella’s continuing legal education seems not to have been up to snuff, so he may well not be up on his history either and may not have been grateful to the Gipper for the “finder’s fees” he was pocketing – but he should have been.