http://www.officer.com/interactive/2009/09...-profit-police/

i'll go one better:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsy...corrupt.judges/

I just love my home state....

Social implications aside; lol, awesome.

-milk.

Do a little more digging and see how hilarious the situation gets.

was only a matter of time before one came into being. The scaremongers on that site happily neglect to mention that the courts aren't corporate owned, and will act as a filter as they always have for guilt or innocence. They also forget the levels of corruption that are present in civic police force making it seem like corporate cops would be worse. It's possible that corporate cops might get paid high enough and be easier to fire(unless they still allow the Police Unions) allowing the corp to clear itself of corrupt cops easier than going through the IA/Union debacles.

First we privatized military force, and now police. Shadowrun is the AT&T of PnP fortune-tellers

Original article aside, I find the idea of corporate run prisons here in Pa. to be absolutely horrifying. As in my previous link, the private company bribed judges to convict kids to up their head count. To date, the ONLY people charged in this massive corruption scandal were the judges themselves. Nobody on the corporate side has been charged, and the prosecutors office and local cops (who SHOULD have wondered why they had a 100% conviction rate) got away with looking away from the blatant corruption.

In a lot of ways, that's a very 'shadowrun' situation. combine my local corrupt judge/prison scam with the OP and his private corporate police department and you've got your next shadowrun campaign.

The comments that follow the article are just as interesting, maybe more so.

EDIT: Man. I gotta type faster and post only after checking what others have replied. I wrote this seeing only the OP!

I honestly don't see the problem with a private police force, except the "human greed" part. The Private secor has always and will always do a faster and more efficient (cost or otherwise) job at anything when compared with governments of any size.

I have a very large problem with outsourcing law enforcement to a private corporation. Look what happened with my state - the private corp running the prisons goes around bribing judges to fix cases so they can get more people into their jails (and thus increase their profits). And look at the debacle around 'for profit' traffic cameras - those SOBs violate the law and stick people with tickets for things they didn't do, then rake in the money. Not to mention that these companies all tend to form political action committees to re-elect tough 'law and order' zero tolerance jackholes into local and state offices.

that ain't cool man. not at all.

Again, except for human greed, it is much better than standard government. I can almost guarantee you that a private corporation simply can't hide the corruption as well as a government. Governments need to hide their corruption in order to survive, and they've been at it a lot longer, so of course they're better at hiding it than the private sector.

The whole thing is looking more and more like a scam perpetrated by a Serbian con artist, who registered the domain through GoDaddy and built a shitty website full of stolen boilerplate from Triple Canopy, Sandline, and Xe, and images saved from /k/. Should be interesting to see where this story goes in the coming weeks.

Anytime someone with money is attached to the courts, there is corruption. in the case of Weaver95 instead of the celebrities and big time money makers getting off scott free we've also got people paying the judge off to get more people into the jails. As much as it sucks to be originally convicted, that's also why there are an array of appeals to traverse before you are S.O.L. Hopefully the PA case gives precedent to more closely audit for profit jails.

Nope - my local state legislature has largely ignored the issue. And the local prosecutor wants the tainted convictions to stand (it'd mess up her record if they were overturned and she's running for re-election in 2010).

Only in Pennsylvania could someone actually fight to keep wrongly convicted kids in a jail cell just to further their political career...and actually have a chance of it working!

Not necessarily wrongly convicted... from what I read it seemed more wrongly sentenced.

I don't think greed is the issue. I think the issue is that the goal of a private company is to maximize profits. That's all. The goal of a company that operates prison or replace the police won't be to operate prison or to replace the police but to maximize profits.
So, in my opinion, you can't exclude what you call "human greed" (which I'd rather call "business rules") from the idea of company handling social services. But then again I'm in what you'd call a socialist country with socialist ideals so this might just be my cultural bias.

The issue I have is that of the government (in this case, local) handing off their responsibilities to a for-profit corporation. I'm not a cop myself, but I still consider the most significant tool they posses to be a pair of handcuffs. (Symbolically, of course.) There is no way in hell I'd let the government pass off that sort of sovereignty to what amounts to a bunch of mercenaries.

Nope - some of them were indeed wrongly convicted. anyone - ANYONE - who got scooped up for any reason was convicted and sentenced. all of them were denied council and/or substantive due process too. soon as the cop brought them into court, they walked out with a conviction.

I have only read this article from above but I have not read through the comments and 'sound off' section.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/02/23/pennsy...corrupt.judges/
So if I am missing other references/articles, I do appologize.

It seems to say that a lot of people were waiving their rights to representation.


It also seems like there were a number of checks and balances that were bypassed.


The article also gives examples of three different 'violations' (the bulleted points) and while two of them are pretty weak (but probably still unlawful), I think the 17 year old helping someone steal DVDs from Walmart knew what he was doing was definitely against the law.

I am going only on what is in that article, if there was another one that sheds more light on the findings, I would be interested in reading more on the topic.

- Jay

there's a couple months worth of background articles on what those judges did - and no, those kids didn't waive their right...they were never allowed to make that decision. In a number of cases, parents only learned about the trials after their kids had already been sent to jail!

private corporations have been running prisons for quite some time now. using private security as public law enforcement has not yet, to my knowledge been done in the United States, for obvious reasons.

Neraph, you argue as if you believe corporations and governments are different entities, or at least do not work in concert. Neither sphere works without active cooperation from the other, even in the United States.

Have a look at The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein, for an interesting and amazingly well-researched study of, among other things, the relationship between the two spheres over the years.

There's some question if it would even be allowed were it to be attempted.

Some functions are what's known in US law as "inherently governmental functions" that cannot be delegated or contracted to private entities - only performed by the government, at whatever level.

Defense is the biggie - you can use contractors in support roles, but not in the inherently governmental function of offensive combat. (I admit that this is honored more in the breach in the real world, but it's there.) You may contract random bits of governmental administration to private entities, but something like tax collection is almost certainly not something you could contract out. Prisons? Well, the common law has plenty of examples of prisoners being contracted out. It presents interesting constitutional issues as far as oversight of the prisons goes, but you can sort of do it.

Actual law enforcement, cops on the beat? Um, there's no way a court could reasonably claim precedent for that. Municipalities may contract to other municipalities for essential services like that, but the courts would be highly unlikely to allow private entities to take over such duties.

Plus, here's a disturbing thought.

One of the characteristics of a sovereign state, under customary international law, is that it has exclusive control over the principal means of internal or external violence within the state. IE, it controls the cops, it controls the army, those forces are pretty much top dog.

Which raises an interesting question: At what point does a state become non-sovereign because it isn't the exclusive "violence provider" in a territory?

It's not about the state being the "exclusive violence provider" but having exclusive legal use of force.
So as soon as some groups unaffiliated with the government (a gang or a rebel faction for example) starts using force legally in some place, the state is non-sovereign in that place.

Yeah because they don't have to pay for the executive stock options, golden parachute, provide a decent rate of return on the stockholders investment, spend money on drumming up business and providing lobbyist, and campaign donations and other incentives to keep that contract.

And credit unions and electric co-ops provide so much less service for the money and charge such high fees.

And private health care is so much more cost effective than public.

I love playing Shadowrun, but I don't want to live in that type of world.

Give me a non-dystopian future any day.

If it isn't in control of it's territory it isn't sovereign. For example, if country A has people on it's territory that are openly attacking country B there are only two allowed explanations: Country A is committing acts of war against country B, or country A is not able to prevent someone from carrying out attacks against country B from it's territory and hence country A is no longer sovereign over that territory.

If country A is no longer sovereign country B doesn't have to follow certain niceties under international law, as they are essentially dealing with pirates. As an example, see Pakistan. The "State" doesn't control about half the country, which is why the USG regularly blows up AlQ and Talliban honchos in non-sovereign Pakistan.

The news says the whole original plan reference by the OP has melted down, apparently when someone discovered that the company is owned by a an ex-con with a history of fraud. I can't see what could possibly go wrong.....