It's an iceberg on the horizon. A vicious Pac-Man chomping larger and larger chunks out of the state's upcoming spending plans. A massive gorilla lurking the hallways of the Pennsylvania Capitol.

The commonwealth's pension liability for public employees is about to make state budgeting even more of a nightmare, and Republican Gov. Tom Corbett has put pension reform next on his to-do list...

A top state senator says the government needs to consider reducing the future benefits of employees to help soften a massive pension cost spike, even if it means challenging state constitutional law.

Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Jake Corman said Monday that he hopes a major pension reform plan will be in place with the annual state budget that is to be assembled one year from now.

Long-established legal interpretations dictate that pension benefits promised the day of hire to school employees and government workers may not be reduced....

Mike Wereschagin is a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review staff writer and can be reached at 412-320-7900, via e-mail or on Twitter.

After decades of explosive growth, prison systems face some of the same cost-cutting pressures as other parts of state budgets.

Gov. Tom Corbett proposed no increase in prison funding in next year's budget, which — if the state Legislature agrees — would stop a decades-long trend of rapidly rising costs. Similar cost pressures in other states prompted a private prison company to set aside $250 million to buy and run state prisons...

THE TRIAL of Mark Ciavarella Jr. took 10 business days.

He was represented by counsel, testified in his own defense, had his fate -- guilty on 12 out of 39 charges -- decided by a jury of his peers.

He was accorded, in other words, due process. As it happens, that is precisely what Ciavarella, a former juvenile court judge in Luzerne County, Pa., denied children who came before his bench...

Saying it is owed $7.3 million, Aramark Corp., the Philadelphia food-services provider, has sued a New Jersey operator of correctional facilities.

In the suit, Aramark contends Community Education Centers Inc., of West Caldwell, N.J., has been in default on bills since at least June 2008. Locally, Aramark services Community Education Centers facilities in Philadelphia, Delaware County, Reading, and Trenton.

Aramark's lawsuit, filed Feb. 18 in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, said Community Education Centers was overdue on $5.2 million of the total, and it requested that a judgment, including interest, costs, and attorney's fees, be entered in its favor...

Red ink-smeared budgets are pushing an array of states — Virginia, Kentucky, California, Alabama, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina among them — to consider early release of hundreds, possibly thousands of convicted criminals. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter even wants to close down two prisons.

As Josh Goodman writes in Governing magazine, "Budget crises have a way of making the politically impossible suddenly possible." Even more significant, though, may be a wave of reassessment, from localities to state governments to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, about the effectiveness of America's vast criminal justice enterprise…

Two Pennsylvania judges charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers are expected to plead guilty to fraud.

Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are scheduled to appear at a federal court hearing Thursday afternoon

Prosecutors say the two judges took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC…

A recent visit to the U.S. Federal Penitentiary at Lewisburg raised his concern for the well-being of prison workers, U.S. Rep. Chris Carney said, and reinforced his belief that the federal government needs to spend more to reduce the inmate-to-staff ratio.

"While state facilities like Texas, California, Florida and Michigan have staff inmate ratios at 3.33 to 1," Carney said in a statement, "the Federal Bureau of Prisons has a 4.92 to 1 ratio, the highest-ever during modern times and up from 3.57 to 1 a decade ago.

"The BoP would have to hire an additional 9,000 employees just to get back to the 3.57 level," said Carney, D-10 of Dimock. "Bureau facilities are currently 37 percent overcrowded, and at some facilities, that number is as high as 76 percent…"

HIV rates are declining in prison, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, but AIDS activists paint a different picture of the disease's prevalence both in and out of prison.

Laura M. Maruschak, a statistician for the bureau, studied statewide HIV rates for 2005 and 2006, and found that the number of HIV positive prisoners decreased by a little more than three percent (from 22,676 to 21,980). Despite this drop, the overall AIDS rate among prisoners was 0.46 percent compared to 0.17 percent for the U.S. general population.

The report, "HIV in Prisons 2006," further indicated that the number of AIDS-related deaths in state and federal prisons dropped to 167 from 203; and the states with the largest numbers of AIDS related deaths were Florida (28), New York (14), Pennsylvania (13), Georgia (10) and Louisiana (10).

The data does not include information on the flow of HIV positive inmates in and out of prisons, and the Justice Department has no idea of where inmates go when released, but is exploring ways to get that data. There are also times when some states fail to submit year-end data—mostly because states do not have the facilities to track the numbers…

Too many inmates are dying at Delaware County's jail.

Since 2005, at least eight inmates have died at the George W. Hill Correctional Facility in Thornton, the only privately run jail in Pennsylvania. The latest fatality is Kenneth Kallenbach, 39, who died April 24 after contracting pneumonia at the lockup. He had been held there awaiting trial since mid-March. Last year, a woman died at the jail after being held there for six weeks. She suffered from a thyroid condition; her family said she was not receiving her medication. In 2005, five inmates died in five months. Two were apparent suicides; one was a heroin overdose.

GEO Group, which operates the facility, has faced lawsuits over these deaths. It has problems elsewhere. In Texas, where GEO runs more than a dozen prisons, it has come under criticism for alleged mismanagement and foul conditions. One inspector called an adult facility in Texas operated by GEO the worst he'd ever seen…

A state appeals court on Thursday revoked unemployment benefits for a prison guard who did not try to stop four prisoners from attacking another inmate or report a fellow correctional officer who encouraged the beating. D. Lee Martin Jr., of Greencastle, was fired from his $14.90-an-hour job at the Camp Hill state prison after the July 2005 beating, which badly injured inmate Eric Charles Brown. Martin, fearing retaliation, hadn't reported the attack.

Martin sought and obtained benefits from the state's unemployment agency, but a Commonwealth Court panel said Martin's fear of retribution did not justify failing to notify supervisors.