Well, you gotta admire his entrepreneurial spirit...

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) — Kids in Luzerne County had a powerful incentive to stay out of the courtroom of Mark Ciavarella, a fearsome, zero-tolerance judge who tossed youths into juvenile detention even when their crimes didn't warrant it.

Ciavarella ordered a 13-year-old boy to spend 48 terrifying days in a private jail for throwing a piece of steak at his mother's boyfriend during an argument. An honor roll student who had never been in trouble before was sent to the same jail, PA Child Care, because she gave the middle finger to a police officer. A girl who accidentally set her house ablaze while playing with a lighter languished in PA Child Care for more than a month — forced to shower naked in front of male guards, she says, and prohibited from hugging her family during rare visits.

She was only 10 years old.

PA Child Care's beds were filled with young offenders who didn't belong there, prosecutors allege, because its owner was paying kickbacks to Ciavarella. On Monday, the disgraced former judge will stand trial in one of the biggest courtroom scandals in U.S. history — a $2.8 million bribery scheme known as "kids for cash."

Say what you want about Judge Ciavarella's ethics, but his business sense? That's hard to criticize. In fact, this whole scheme was about as clear an illustration of unfettered, free market capitalism as you can get.

Privatize your prisons, and you create an economic incentive—indeed, imperative—to fill them, through legal or other means... just like the private bail bonds industry has generated a powerful lobby intent on crushing pretrial release programs and other reforms that threaten their margins.

Read your Adam Smith; profit is a powerful motivator. And its a motivator that virtually assures that whatever our safeguards, the more we privatize essential government services, the more private interests will profit at the expense of public.