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  KIDS FOR CASH

  KIDS FOR CASH

  Two Judges, Thousands of Children, and a $2.8 Million Kickback scheme

  WILLIAM ECENBARGER

  The New Press gratefully acknowledges the

  John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

  for supporting publication of this book.

  © 2012 by William Ecenbarger

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced,

  in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:

  Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2012

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Ecenbarger, William.

  Kids for cash : two judges, thousands of children, and a $2.8 million kickback scheme /

  William Ecenbarger.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  ISBN 978-1-59558-797-8 (hc.)

  1. Juvenile detention—Pennsylvania—Case studies. 2. Juvenile courts—

  Pennsylvania—Case studies. 3. Juvenile justice, Administration of—

  Corrupt practices—Pennsylvania. 4. Bribery—Pennsylvania—Case

  studies. 5. Corruption—Pennsylvania—Case studies. I. Title.

  HV9105.P22E34 2012

  365'.4209748—dc23

  2012021136

  Now in its twentieth year, The New Press publishes books that promote and enrich public discussion and understanding of the issues vital to our democracy and to a more equitable world. These books are made possible by the enthusiasm of our readers; the support of a committed group of donors, large and small; the collaboration of our many partners in the independent media and the not-for-profit sector; booksellers, who often hand-sell New Press books; librarians; and above all by our authors.

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  Composition by dix!

  This book was set in Fournier MT

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  For Angie and Bill

  Listen! If everyone must suffer in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should pay for the harmony with their suffering.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  1.Matthew, Angelia, Lisa, and Charlie

  2.Barons and Godfathers

  3.Scooch and the Boss

  4.Minding Their Own Business

  5.The Elephant in the Courtroom

  6.The Cash Flows

  7.Hillary and Jessica

  8.Disgrace and Infamy

  9.The Trial

  10.The Hearings

  11.Our Lock-’Em-Up Society

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Most of all, I am grateful to the kids and parents who agreed to talk to me about their experiences in the Luzerne County Juvenile Court. Among this group, I am especially indebted to Laurene Transue, who showed Mark Ciavarella and his accomplices in injustice that one of the most dangerous places in the world is between a mother and her child.

  This book could not not have been written without Juvenile Law Center and its two leaders, Bob Schwartz and Marsha Levick, who set out some four decades ago to change the world and did. They, along with their colleagues Marie Yeager and Laval Miller-Wilson, educated me in how a juvenile justice system ought to work. I thank them for their intelligent suggestions and patience.

  As a journalist for a half century, I have covered many “blue ribbon” panels that were set up to study serious problems and then proceeded to ignore them. The Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice is a sterling exception. Chairman John Cleland is a judge who, unlike Conahan and Ciavarella, takes his oath of office seriously. He and several of his colleagues on the commission were steady, trusted presences in the process of writing this book.

  Special thanks also to Thomas Baldino, Thomas Crofcheck, Richard Gold, William Kashatus, Bart Lubow, Chester Muroski, Robert Wolensky, and Clay Yeager.

  Susan Stranahan, my onetime colleague at the Philadelphia Inquirer, read early drafts and made her usual perceptive criticisms.

  I am also grateful to those individuals who agreed to talk to me on condition that I not use their names. You know who you are, and so do I.

  My thanks to two esteemed institutions for their generous support toward the writing of and production of this book: the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.

  Anita Bartholomew, my agent, encouraged this project right from the beginning and connected me with The New Press and executive director Diane Wachtell, whose immediate enthusiasm for the project persuaded me to go with The New Press. Over the next year, she persevered through great personal tragedy to shape my manuscript into its final form. Marc Favreau, editorial director at The New Press, also made important suggestions that were heeded.

  Finally, writing a book is a solitary, consuming experience and therefore hard on the people the writer lives with. No one knows this better than my wife Susan, who not only put up with me but served as my first-read editor, making constructive suggestions, aligning verb tenses, eliminating misspellings, blocking unwise metaphors, and knocking down pretentiousness.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I was on a magazine assignment in the Peruvian Amazon in January 2009 when the kids-for-cash story broke, and I didn’t catch up with it until early March when I read Ian Urbina’s page one article in the New York Times. As I read and re-read the article, it called to mind Mark Twain’s dictum: “The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction must be believable.”

  Over the spring and summer of 2009, I was distracted by other matters, and the story was only at the rim of my awareness, until one night in October 2009 when I got a call from Vernon Loeb, the deputy managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. A staffer in the Harrisburg bureau had become ill, and he needed coverage of an important hearing the next morning. Could I fill in? I had spent most of my career covering state government at the Inquirer and had recently started writing freelance pieces for it. But these were feature articles, and this was hard news: the first hearing by a special committee created to look into the judicial debacle in Luzerne County. “Sure,” I told Loeb. The story would occupy me for the next two and a half years. I interviewed more than two hundred people, including forty-three of the judges’ child victims and their parents, juvenile justice experts, prosecutors, defense lawyers, state officials, federal agents, victims’ advocates, and local attorneys, politicians, teachers, and judges (though not the two miscreants themselves). I covered hearings, trials, and sentencings, and I read thousands of pages of court documents.

  Because it is the clear intent of the juvenile justice system that children be treated differently from adults, a euphemistic terminology has grown up that avoids some of the harsher words of the adult courts. In Pennsylvania, this gentler, softer language includes words like “delinquent” instead of “criminal,” “disposition” rather than “sentencing,” and “placement,” not “imprisonment.” I have tried to be sensitive to this issue, but I have not always followed these strictures. For example, “placement” is not always adequate to describe the process by which a child has his or her freedom taken away and is placed behind locked doors, and so I have from time to time in this book called it “incarceration.” My defense is that, in an effort such as this, it is always more important to be understood than it is to b
e polite.

  I have chosen to use only the first names of nearly all the juveniles who came before Judge Ciavarella. Many of them have had their full names published in news accounts, but their court records were sealed and now have been expunged, and there is no need to perpetuate their unfortunate encounters with the Luzerne County Juvenile Court between 2003 and 2008. Exceptions to my rule are Hillary Transue and Jessica Van Reeth, whose status as lead plaintiffs in Juvenile Law Center’s landmark suit make them special cases. In addition, they have consented to having their full names appear in this book.

  1

  MATTHEW, ANGELIA, LISA, AND CHARLIE

  At the age of thirteen, Matthew was a quiet boy whose benign, gentle features seemed to demand that a violin be placed in his hands. But inside, the seventh-grader was strung taut between his mother and his father, who had been in a protracted custody battle over him since he was ten. Four days after Thanksgiving 2004, Matthew got into a disagreement with his mother’s boyfriend. There was some shoving and angry words, but it wasn’t much of a contest. Matthew stood four foot three and weighed eighty-two pounds. His adversary was six foot two and weighed about 210 pounds.

  No one was injured in the momentary scuffle. Nevertheless, his mother called the police, and an officer came to Matthew’s bedroom, pushed him against the wall, and jabbed a finger at him: “You think you’re tough, but you’re not. I’ve dealt with people like you before, and it’s no big deal.” Then his mother told the officer that Matthew had thrown a piece of steak at her beau, and she wanted to file assault charges against her son.

  A month later, three days after Christmas, Matthew was in the dark-paneled Courtroom Four of the Luzerne County Courthouse. He was accompanied by his father and the lawyer his father had retained. Matthew had been assured that even if he was found guilty, his punishment would be light because he had no prior record of offenses. The boy knew he had done nothing wrong, and he believed the justice system would work and treat him fairly. Even so, Matthew’s senses were on full alert because he was standing before Judge Mark A. Ciavarella, who had already spoken at Matthew’s school three times and warned students that he would be tough on any child who came to his courtroom.

  The lawyer told Ciavarella that the incident was part of an ongoing dispute between Matthew’s parents, and he asked that Matthew be placed in his father’s custody. But his mother and her boyfriend testified that Matthew had thrown the steak. Matthew kept shifting his feet and pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. Ciavarella doodled absently on a scratch pad during the testimony and seemed to regard the entire proceeding as an intrusion. Finally, the judge turned to Matthew and asked if he threw the piece of meat. Matthew, his voice squeaky with adolescence, said he had not. Words of explanation formed in his throat, but Ciavarella cut him off and said, “Remanded!” The word hung in the air for a few seconds. Matthew, bewildered, didn’t even know what it meant.

  Suddenly, two officers, each grabbing an elbow, were escorting all eighty-two pounds of him to an adjacent holding room. He was saucer-eyed with disbelief as they patted him down for weapons. Then they were putting handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his ankles. Both sets of restraints were attached to a belt around his waist. His mouth went cottony with fear, and he started crying. The restraints were too tight and little darts of pain shot at his wrists and ankles. He begged his captors to loosen the cuffs and the shackles, and they finally did. Then he shuffled out to a waiting van with another boy and two girls, and was driven away. He wondered if this was really happening to him. He reached out and touched the wire mesh barrier in the van. It was real.

  About twenty minutes later, the van drove into what appeared to be a garage. But then the door went down behind the vehicle and locked as another door opened in front and the van drove forward and stopped. Because his father was a prison guard and had told him about them, Matthew knew this was a sally port, an entry point to a secure facility that was once a feature of many medieval castles. In modern times, they are used for prisons. Matthew had been taken to PA Child Care, a privately owned, for-profit juvenile detention facility in Pittston, Pennsylvania, that had been opened just two years earlier. It was a state-of-the-art “juvie,” but to Matthew it was an ugly jail.

  Matthew, his face frozen into a fright mask, was hustled inside, where a woman at a desk took all of his personal items, including his wallet, keys, and a religious medal that said, “I Am a Catholic. Please Call a Priest.” He was handed gray sweatpants, a gray sweatshirt, and black plastic flip-flops, and directed to a room to change his clothes. He was ordered to take a shower and wash his hair with an anti-lice shampoo. That night he lay on his bed and stared at the ceiling. Tears rolled down his temples and into his ears.

  Ciavarella had sent Matthew to PA Child Care to await a psychological evaluation. In the interim, Matthew went to classes, which he found very easy. They used stapled photocopies of textbooks rather than the books themselves. Fridays they watched movies. Time creaked along, the days passing by like centuries. Finally, on the sixteenth day, Matthew met with the psychologist for about an hour, and the therapist’s eventual conclusion was that Mattthew was depressed. “Who wouldn’t be?” Matthew asked plaintively years later. Because he blamed her for his predicament, Matthew steadfastly refused to speak to his mother. County probation officers told Matthew he would not be released until he did.

  But a week after Matthew’s incarceration, his father launched an all-out, frantic effort to get his son out of PA Child Care. He tried to contact his local congressman, state legislators, county officials, the office of Governor Ed Rendell, the state Judicial Conduct Board—anyone who might help. He knocked on doors, wrote letters, made phone calls, and sent emails. He also got in touch with the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader, which eventually ran a story outlining Matthew’s plight. Five days after the article appeared, Matthew got another hearing before Ciavarella. He was brought to the courthouse in shackles, and as he got off the elevator a woman waiting to step on exclaimed in amazement, “Look at that little kid! What could he have done?” Matthew was released and placed on probation. He had been deprived of his freedom for forty-eight days.

  During his seven weeks at PA Child Care, Matthew saw the movie Napoleon Dynamite three times. He came to hate it. When he was not in class, he was confined to his room. He was not allowed to lay on his bed during the day and instead had to sit on a backless stool at a metal desk. “Being in jail is a terrible thing,” he said. “I was locked up like an animal.”

  Matthew returned to the seventh grade and worked hard to get his grades back up to the B level. Many of his former friends avoided him. “Their mothers didn’t want their sons hanging around with a juvenile delinquent,” he recalled bitterly. He graduated from high school, but seven years after his confinement he still jousted with depression regularly. He wants to be an airline pilot, but he is unable to take the first step toward higher education. “I picture myself in college,” he says, closing his eyes with the imagining. “But I just can’t do it.” At the age of twenty, he is estranged from his mother and lives with his father. He works full-time in a restaurant, making pizzas and serving takeout pasta. There is a lost look about him, as though he has been permanently startled.

  When Angelia was fourteen, she and a friend scrawled “Vote for Michael Jackson” on five stop signs with a black felt marker. There had been a spate of stop-sign graffiti all over her hometown, and police decided to charge the girls with all of the offenses—eighty-six counts of vandalism and defacing public property. When Angelia’s mother protested that she was only responsible for a few stop signs, she said the officer told her that unless her daughter pled guilty to all of the charges, “he’d make sure she’d see Judge Ciavarella on a day Penn State lost the previous weekend because Judge Ciavarella sends all juveniles to jail if Penn State loses.”

  Penn State’s football season was over by the time Angelia and her friend got into Ciavarella’s courtroom, but most of the twenty-minu
te hearing was taken up by discussions among the judge, court officials, and local police about the National Football League playoffs. The previous weekend, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles had won divisional playoff games, and there was talk of an all-Pennsylvania Super Bowl.

  Ciavarella seemed to resent being distracted from the gridiron speculations, and he ignored conflicting testimony from an alleged eyewitness who described Angelia as having short black hair. Angelia’s long blonde hair reached down to her waist. Angelia and her co-defendant admitted vandalizing five of the signs, but said they had nothing to do with the other eighty-one. Nevertheless, the judge said that even though it had not been proven that the girls had defaced all eighty-six stops signs, he was going to use them as an example to deter others. He ordered them shackled and taken away by juvenile probation officers.

  Angelia’s mother protested that her daughter was epileptic and subject to seizures under stress, and she shouted to the probation officers leading her away, “She can’t go without her medication!” But by this time Ciavarella was part of a rising tide of repartee over the Super Bowl, and he ignored the frantic mother. At PA Child Care, Angelia was placed in a locked room with a bunk and a stool. It felt like a prison. Her mother contacted officials at PA Child Care and warned them Angelia’s seizures were brought on by stress. “Her stress level is too high, and I know she’s going to have a seizure,” she said.

  On her second night at the detention center, Angelia’s muscles suddenly contracted and she lost consciousness. Her body violently alternated between relaxation and rigidity. The savage muscle contractions lasted about two minutes. When she regained consciousness, she had a throbbing headache. Angelia had had a grand mal seizure. She had banged her head against the cement wall next to her bed so hard that she cracked her dental braces.