You clearly didn't read the article - this excerpted directly from article:
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Children and Youth: A wall of protection for Jerry, not kids
In its tax returns, Second Mile would list its mission simply as, "Children & Youth."
All these community leaders involved with Second Mile could not suspect, nor would they want to suspect, that Sandusky perhaps had started it all, among other benevolent reasons, so that he could sexually molest a fresh supply and steady stream of young boys.
This was perhaps the second-most diabolical part of Sandusky's long-running crime spree.
In knitting together his cozy and well-connected network of prominent university, business and community leaders, Jerry Sandusky, wittingly or not, built a thick and nearly impenetrable wall of protection around him.
Who would suspect, or want to suspect, that all these good and well-meaning community leaders were in reality sending thousands of helpless children to Penn State's main campus to be picked out and sexually molested under everyone's noses by Jerry Sandusky?
Years later, in his opening statement at Sandusky's 2012 trial, Pennsylvania attorney general prosecutor Joe McGettigan would tell jurors,
"The Second Mile, no matter what it’s reported purpose, was a victim factory for the defendant, an assembly line for adolescent children to be abused, sodomized, and anally raped."
What prosecutor McGettigan neglected to mention was this: The Second Mile may have been an assembly line, but the
parts suppliers, incredibly, included the state's children and youth agencies, and school guidance counselors.
The Second Mile may have been an assembly line, but its
showroom and front office was aided, abetted, and even staffed by an unknown number of officials and contractors at Penn State, the Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, and prosecutor McGettigan's own attorney general's office.
To run its programs for its stated mission -- "Children & Youth" -- the Second Mile, and Jerry Sandusky, needed, well,
children and youth.
In a subterfuge Dickens himself would dare not write, county children and youth agencies and officers throughout Pennsylvania, as well as school guidance counselors, were enlisted
to refer and send kids to the Second Mile, and Sandusky.
All these children and youth officers and guidance counselors would, over the coming decades, pack off
thousands of unsuspecting kids to Sandusky's summer overnight camps and programs, like the Summer Challenge Camp.
For decades, these hundreds of children and youth officials and school guidance counselors failed to realize that they were in fact supplying victims to a child molester.
Think about it: Your job is to
protect and help kids. You naturally are not particularly keen nor are you eager to have it widely advertised or known that you instead for decades actively went out of your way to
turn kids over to a child predator.
This too for a long time would work in Sandusky's favor.
The depth and diabolical nature of his crime would help make it increasingly difficult to believe, and so to stop.
The Second Mile's -- and Sandusky's -- unholy connections to CYS agencies and officials didn't stop with county children and youth offices.
Sandusky and the Second Mile
for decades enjoyed and benefited from close connections with state officials within the state attorney general's office, the Pennsylvania Department of State, and the Department of Public Welfare in Harrisburg.
As a charity, the Second Mile was registered with the
Department of State.
But the real job of policing and investigating charities like the Second Mile fell to the state attorney general's office
Charitable Trusts and Organizations Section.
That office in recent years would also fail to adequately ferret out trouble in other state charities involving kids, like the Hershey Trust.
The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare, like the AG's office, not only failed to protect kids in the Sandusky and Hershey Trust cases, but also failed its mission in the long-running Luzerne County court's Cash for Kids scandal, where some
6,500 kids for years were sold down the river to private detention facilities whose owners had bribed county judges.
The Sandusky, Hershey Trust, and Luzerne County Cash for Kids scandals all have this in common: kids in Pennsylvania had been reduced to commodities.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania since the early 1980s licensed the Second Mile's stand-alone foster home on Bernal Road in State College.
Over the years Sandusky and his wife Dottie personally were approved to adopt six kids, and to serve as a foster parent, activities which by law ultimately are
overseen by the state.
As the ties of these regulatory agencies to the Sanduskys grew closer, the ties between the agencies and to the kids they were meant to protect grew ever more distant and abstract.
These ties between Second Mile and the regulators didn't stop with the Sanduskys.
By 1998, Second Mile's fulltime executive director and president, Jack Raykovitz, earned a $76,000 salary from the charity
. By 2011, Raykovitz would be making a salary of $132,000. His wife, Katherine Genovese, would be making more than $100,000.
Raykovitz was a licensed child psychologist who at the same time held a side contract with Centre County's Children and Youth agency to conduct examinations of children.
Raykovitz was working for and advising both the regulated and the regulators.
The DPW and CYS regulators have yet to be called to account for any of this.
That should change.
-- Bill Keisling
Posted January 26, 2013
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