This is happening more than it should. Lots of hands are reaching into the private prisons industry's resources (cheap labor). Some towns are investing HEAVILY in private prisons. The prisoners that are "good" get to work making products that can easily undercut any competitor.
When a whole county is dependent on a private prison, well, the whole system in the county has a vested interest in throwing as many people in jail as possible. Corruption all the way up AND down.
As an example, Arizona's immigration policies were written by lobbyists for the private prison system, and said lobbyists that they hired have pushed for similar bills in every state that they can get to listen.
Another travesty is that the people impacted by this become felons and in many places lose their right to vote. (In many states - Florida being a star example - this is because Republican politicians did the math and see it as an easy way to get rid of Democratic voters. Voter suppression is supposedly illegal, but it has been happening forever and nobody seems to care as long as it happens to dislikable people.) Thus the people who are most painfully aware of the extent of the abuse are removed from the democratic process - and those close to the victims wind up with an entirely rational fear that if they speak up too loudly about it, they will get targeted as well.
And as Aaron Swartz famously discovered, even if you have reasonable financial resources, you probably don't have enough to even try to defend yourself against this machine. Just think of how much worse that is for people who start out poor!
If this is true, it's a serious breach of legal ethics. It might be worth someone's while to get some reputable lawyers in Portland interested in the issue with an eye towards filing a complaint with the Oregon bar.
I'm not going to say that shady things don't happen in prosecutor's offices, but the ones I've seen tend to be political (trying hard to nail someone for a high-profile case because it would look bad to come up empty handed). State bars don't like to second guess discretionary authority in situations like that. Clear-cut conflicts of interests like this one, on the other hand, are the kind of thing state bars like to make examples out of, because they are easy to verify.
My past experiences say that a lot of crazy stuff happens in rural areas, and nobody hears about it.
Am I reading this right? Are you saying that they charge you for time you spend involuntarily in prison?
That surprised me as well.
I'm not saying that's the way things do work, in practice. But it seems the counter-point to their argument that the prisoner should pay for this imprisonment.
I hope some competent and socially-minded lawyers turn this into a multi-million dollar settlement. (Of course, they wouldn't make out so badly in that, either.)
It's also a strong argument, I think, for outlawing the privatization of prisons. When government determines imprisonment is needed, there should be no shirking directly executing that duty. And when government turns out to be wrong, it should pay -- for starters, the direct costs of its mistake, not to mention appropriate compensation to the wronged party.
This would also mean DA's could not directly invest in the prisons they are filling. Disgusting.
There should be a Constitutional amendment specifically banning this practice.
Honestly it should already be there under cruel and unusual punishment (obvious), due process (the process eventually said he was innocent so how can he be punished?) or attainder (punishing someone for something other than an illegal action). But since it's apparently not obvious, it wouldn't hurt to spell it out.
Where is the ethics committee on this one?
I know about it because the guy was married to my half-sibling's half-sibling. Unsurprisingly, they are now getting divorced. My family is involved in various ways, including a custody battle.
The whole thing is a clusterfuck that I want to keep my distance from, but can't help hearing about. I'll just say that if you run into a statistic like, "70% of natives on that reservation are alcoholics" - well there are REASONS why they are driven to drink. :-(
As an example, in a recent case that I'm familiar with in Oregon, a man that I personally know was unjustly charged with 4 criminal charges that the DA knew were unjustified. He fought. He won. He now has, in addition to a crushing legal bill, a bill for the time he spent locked up in prison on trumped up charges?
Why did this happen? Various reasons. When bf unexpectedly comes home to find his gf having sex with the husband of the house that they're house surfing at, the upset bf can get the gf to make up a rape case. (The guy shouldn't have been having the affair, but it wasn't rape.) When said husband is a Native American in a rural area, the DA knows that given racism and the fact that the guy was doing something dislikable, there is a reasonable chance of winning no matter what the facts happen to be.
But in my opinion the biggest single factor is that the DA in question is an investor in the private jail to which he sends people. When the DA can use the powers of the state to send people to prison, and PERSONALLY PROFITS from this, abuse of power is only to be expected. And even when the DA loses - as in this case - the prison still gets paid. And if the bill doesn't get paid, care to guess whether a hard line will be taken...?
I have no idea how widespread this type of conflict of interest is. I suspect that it is much more widespread than most people think (because the people who run private jails are well aware that getting the DA on board generates profits). But as long as it mostly impacts poor people that nobody cares about, it won't be a political issue.