Private prisons that fight to lock up America’s children

Every year, 2 million young people are arrested in the United States, and half-a-million spend time in detention centres. In Pennsylvania, two judges thought they could make some money out of this repulsively strict juvenile justice system. Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received more than $2.6m in bribes for sentencing children to time in privately-run juvenile detention centres. Now they're spending the next seven years in jail themselves.

In one case, 15-year-old Hillary Transue was sent to a detention centre for making a fake MySpace page which belittled the deputy headmaster at her school. In another, 14-year-old Phillip Swartley was packed off to reformatory school for petty theft. It wasn't easy. "Sometimes they'd have you standing there for hours with the staff yelling in your face. They expect you not to make any facial expressions, not to look away or look down", Swartley recounted.

"Once he got released home", his mother said, "every time I'd try to get him to go to school he'd curl up in a ball and become physically sick."

Jamie Bryk was sent to court after she got into a fist fight with another girl after an argument over a boy at a bowling alley. It was her first offence, and her parents assumed that she'd get a slap on the wrists, so they didn't think they'd need an attorney. As it was, the hearing with Ciavarella lasted all of 60 seconds, and Jamie left in handcuffs.

She was locked up for 10 months in total at a detention centre. Then, whilst at an institution run by Vision Quest, her mother says Jamie learnt to self-harm: "Prior to her cutting herself she told me of how kids there were cutting themselves and then, lo and behold, she started cutting herself."

Detention centres are promoted as part summer camp, part motivational seminar

The places these kids were sent to are all privately-run. So like any other business, they have to make money. Generally, this means they recruit cheap, inexperienced, and hastily-trained staff, and, by monitoring the inmates with state-of-the-art CCTV systems and getting architects to design buildings that reduce the need for wardens, keep the number of people that they have to pay to a minimum.

The push for profit also means, as it would in a hotel, filling beds, which is where Ciavarella and Conahan, the two disgraced judges, had the chance to earn their money.

And to get business, private prisons have to promote themselves to the judges, probation departments, defence attorneys and social workers who decide where to place the children. The very idea may seem distasteful, but the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp (MAYS), the parent company of two institutions involved in the Pennsylvanian scandal, has a website which promotes it as a cross between summer camp and a motivational seminar.

The photo of the smiling young girl on its homepage looks more