Kids for Cash Page 2

  The next day she was before Ciavarella again, shackled, handcuffed, and weak from her trauma. As her mother held her upright, she remembered Ciavarella saying, “There’s people with worse illnesses in jail. Don’t think I won’t throw you back.” He then released Angelia from detention and placed her under house arrest. However, despite the fact that Angelia had been an A student, Ciavarella refused to allow her to return to her school for three months as part of her punishment. She managed to finish her freshman year with Bs and Cs. But throughout high school Angelia suffered from her brief encounter with Judge Ciavarella.

  “She rarely left the house in her teen years,” her mother said. “I had to force her to go to her own prom just to have some kind of high school experiences. She never went to football games, never went to anything. And I feel it was from what happened that one time, the very first time she got into trouble. You know, she should maybe have gotten a little bit of punishment, but not an ax thrown at her. It’s taken a lot of years for her to come out of that shell. And I blame him for that.”

  Angelia said she believed her youthful experience changed her outlook permanently: “I’ve learned that people we put in power just aren’t always the ones we should trust. Judge Ciavarella, I thought maybe he could see I wasn’t a bad kid. Yes, I did deserve a slap on the wrist. Yes, I did deserve to be punished. Did I deserve what I got? No. Was I punished too harshly? Yes. I just think I was punished too harshly, and I just don’t think it was very fair.”

  Nevertheless, eight years after her encounter with Ciavarella, she was about to graduate from college and planned to pursue a doctorate in sociology so she could teach at the college level.

  In November 2003, some members of the literary club at Crestwood High School decided to pull a prank designed to get one of them summoned to the principal’s office. It was an asinine idea—the kind of thing adolescents sometimes do. Sixteen-year-old Lisa penned a note that said: “I like to shoot, shoot, shoooot young men. I will tell you now of my Evil Plans. On Nov. 26, I will bring my father’s 5 PM semiautomatic handgun to school. I will shoot the kneecaps of innocent young men.” Lisa signed the name of another club member. The note was left on a table for easy discovery. It was senseless and insensitive, foolish and foolhardy—especially for someone with a 3.8 grade point average who had never been in trouble before. Lisa was quickly identified as the true author, and by the time she got to the principal’s office, she realized she had “done something really stupid.” She was contrite, wept, and even offered to get on the school public address system to apologize. Her mother and her grandmother came in, and it was agreed that she should be suspended for three days.

  Lisa was ashamed—it was the first time she was ever disciplined in school—but she thought that would be the end of it. Who would actually take her threat seriously? Her father lived in another state, no one else at her home owned a handgun, and there’s no such thing as a 5 PM semiautomatic. Lisa was an unlikely terrorist. She often carried spiders and insects outside her house and released them, rather than killing them inside. She didn’t believe she had the right to kill anything.

  But the next morning she was seated at the dining room table studying her geometry textbook when the doorbell rang. Only her grandfather was home, and he was upstairs, so Lisa went to the door. She was surprised to see two uniformed police officers, who said they were taking her into custody. They stepped into the kitchen, handcuffed her, and as her grandfather stood by helplessly, began to escort her outside. It was cold, and she asked to wear her jacket. Because she was handcuffed, she had to wear it like a blanket. They perp walked her out to the cruiser and ducked her head as they guided her into the backseat. Her eyes brimmed with tears, and then spilled over when she passed her high school. Her friends were inside, sitting in class. She was in the back of a police car in handcuffs.

  Lisa was taken to PA Child Care to await a hearing before Ciavarella. But it was the day before Thanksgiving, and the court had closed until the following Monday. She was locked in a room, behind a dead-bolted metal door, for the night. Lisa lay down on her cot and sank into her thoughts. She wasn’t afraid. She wasn’t angry. She was just lonely. She questioned her self-worth. What did everyone think of her? Would her friends be her friends when she returned to school next week? Did everyone hate her? Did they laugh when they heard what happened to her? The next day she had a cafeteria-style turkey dinner with canned carrots and peas. She sat next to a girl named Michelle who the previous night had tried to carve her name into her forearm with a nail file but had succeeded only as far as “MICH.”

  After five days in PA Child Care, Lisa, shackled and handcuffed, was taken to the courthouse for a hearing before Ciavarella on charges of making “terroristic threats.” Did she write that note, Ciavarella asked. Lisa said she did. She started to explain that she never intended to harm anyone, but the judge silenced her with an admonitory finger. Her attorney told the judge Lisa’s note was “a bad prank” and asked the she be placed on probation. Ciavarella interrupted him and sentenced Lisa to an indefinite term at a wilderness camp for girls. The entire proceeding took less than five minutes.

  At the camp, some of the girls were tough, inner-city teenagers convicted of violent crimes. But others were there for stealing their father’s credit card to buy clothes and for unintentionally bringing a pocketknife to school. At one point while among a group of girls cleaning portable toilets, she began singing the orphanage song from the Broadway musical Annie:

  “It’s a hard-knock life, for us! It’s a hard-knock life, for us!”

  Before long, most of the other girls had joined in.

  “Steada treated, we get tricked. Steada kisses, we get kicked!”

  Nine days after Lisa arrived in detention, Ciavarella ordered her released following appeals from school authorities and recommendations from camp counselors. She had missed two weeks of school, and she had a criminal record. She was ashamed and embarrassed in school. She withdrew from activities. She felt guilty. Some of her former friends and their parents said she deserved what she got and should have been kept in detention for months. She lost her driver’s license for a year, and when she got it back the insurance company raised her rates because of her record. She didn’t apply for a job if the applications asked for arrests and convictions.

  But Lisa graduated from high school, went to college, got a teaching job after earning her BA degree, and got married. Then she and her new husband applied to the Peace Corps. Lisa’s application was flagged and put on hold. Sixteen months and many questions later, the couple was finally approved, and in September 2011 they began their assignment in Mozambique. Lisa is still embarrassed about her ill-advised misstep at the age of sixteen.

  Charlie had a passion for motors and vehicles, and when he spotted a used motorbike for sale in the summer of 2006, he wanted it. It was a bright red Greenline “beach cruiser.” It was only $60. At fifteen, Charlie was a troubled, anxious boy. “We thought it might cheer him up,” his mother recalled, “so we bought it for him. He was overjoyed.” Like his father, Charlie had considerable mechanical aptitude, and he alternately rode and tinkered with his new possession.

  But several weeks later, two police officers knocked on the door of his house. Charlie was home alone and thought he was in trouble for riding the Greenline without a helmet. Instead, the officer told him the bike was stolen. They said they’d be back later. When Charlie’s parents came home that night, the police returned. The adults tried to explain that they thought they had legitimately purchased the bike, but all three of them were arrested. Later, the charges were dropped against the parents, but Charlie was ordered to appear before Ciavarella.

  Charlie thought he would just explain what happened to the judge, and his problems would be over. Probation officers advised his parents that he did not need an attorney. But as he and his mother sat on folding chairs outside the courtroom awaiting his hearing, his mother noticed a disturbing pattern: Parents were going into Judge C
iavarella’s courtroom with their children, but only the parents were coming out. A low-watt anxiety surged through her. Each time the door opened, his mother heard a jangling sound. She didn’t realize it just then, but it was the sound of shackles. Concern turned to panic when they got before the judge and found out Charlie had been charged with receiving stolen merchandise—a felony.

  Charlie, a shy, pudgy, bespectacled youth, stood there with his hands in his pockets and fear on his face for the entire three-minute hearing. Even though he had had no prior run-ins with law enforcement authorities, Ciavarella adjudicated him a juvenile delinquent. Charlie was neither advised of his right to a lawyer, told of the consequences of pleading guilty, nor given a chance to explain how he had innocently come to own the motorbike. If Charlie had been an adult, he would have received a sentence of either probation or a maximum of one month in prison under state sentencing guidelines. But as a juvenile, Charlie received an indeterminate sentence. As it turned out, he would be locked up for most of the next three years for a crime he did not commit.

  Before he even understood what had happened to him, the boy was being shackled and handcuffed. His mother reached out to comfort him, but he was hustled away from her and out of the courtroom to a crowded holding cell with other children. Indeed, there were so many other youths in the room that all of the benches were filled and Charlie was obliged to stand against the wall. Later, a sheriff’s van sliced through an angular, sleeting rain and took everyone to PA Child Care. A psychological evaluation there concluded that Charlie suffered from anxiety and depression. His parents were charged $250 for the evaluation. When they asked for a second opinion from a physician covered by their medical insurance, they were turned down by county authorities.

  After six weeks in PA Child Care, Charlie was sent to a “boot camp” designed to teach wayward adolescents discipline. He was placed in a cabin with boys who had been convicted of drug dealing and gun-related offenses. Here his mental state worsened. He couldn’t sleep, and he said he didn’t speak to anyone for three months. The camp doctor placed him on the mood stabilizer Seroquel, and he showed some improvement. Three months later, he was released and returned to high school. But he had fallen behind his junior-year classmates, and his grades dropped. He was shunned as a troublemaker and delinquent by many of his former friends. When his infant niece was killed in a tragic apartment fire, his anxiety and depression returned. He began using drugs and missing appointments with his probation officer. Soon he was again before Ciavarella, who sent him to back to PA Child Care. He would be in and out of detention facilities for three years. When he was finally released, he sent a plaintive Twitter message to his friends: “i am about to go home from being in placement for 3 years for something i didn’t do i can’t wait.”

  Charlie got out of the juvenile justice system when he turned eighteen, but as an adult, he has had more trouble with the law, including receiving stolen goods and using fraudulent credit cards.

  •••

  Matthew’s, Angelia’s, Lisa’s, and Charlie’s cases were not deviant, aberrant miscarriages of justice. They were part of a routine and systematic form of child abuse that took place in the juvenile court of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, between 2003 and 2008. During that time, several thousand young defendants were needlessly handcuffed, shackled, and summarily dispatched to incarceration that typically lasted between one and three months. After the briefest of hearings, parents who had accompanied their children to court and expected to return home with them, left instead stunned and bewildered, alone.

  Seldom was Ciavarella’s tough-love justice tempered with mercy. No matter how young the defendants, no matter how clean their records, no matter how cringing their hesitancy, no matter how wobbly-voiced or jelly-kneed they appeared in his courtroom, most left shuffling in their shackles to vans that took them away.

  While these proceedings were closed to the public, they were witnessed by assistant district attorneys, public defenders, other lawyers, probation officials, and court officers, including clerks and messengers. Often police officers, teachers, and school administrators were also present. The air was heavy with unspoken words and unacknowledged guilt, yet for six years, through thousands of hearings, no one spoke out effectively in opposition.

  In failing to do so, public servants, educators, and others charged with protecting our children served as enablers for one of the worst judicial scandals in American history. For as he meted out these injustices, Judge Ciavarella and his behind-the-scenes co-conspirator, Judge Michael T. Conahan, were being paid millions of dollars by the owners of PA Child Care. In exchange, the judges provided the owners a steady stream of inmates. Children became commodities in a kids-for-cash scheme.

  The scandal became public when federal prosecutors held a news conference on January 26, 2009, detailing the kickback scheme that had allowed two judges to wrongfully imprison thousands of children for the judge’s own financial benefit. Initially, however, there was little negative reaction in northeastern Pennsylvania among community leaders—educators, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, or even the Luzerne County Bar Association. Indeed, two administrators at the Wilkes-Barre Area Vocational Technical School wrote a letter to the editor of the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader praising Ciavarella. “His dedication to working with our students created a bond of trust and confidence among him, the students and the staff,” the administrators wrote. “Students who had personal experiences with the judge have expressed gratitude for his involvement in their lives. His concern for their well-being after adjudication is what makes him so special. He has made a tremendous difference in the school’s educational process.”

  But as the breadth and nature of the kids-for-cash wrongdoing spread beyond the immediate area, other voices rose. Robert Schwartz, executive director of the nonprofit Juvenile Law Center, which was instrumental in bringing the scheme to an end, said, “Children in Luzerne County were treated as commodities, with a for-profit provider as purchaser, and the juvenile court as supplier. The Luzerne County juvenile court was in the business of inventory control. This was done publicly and without comment from other professionals in the room. This is hard to believe.”

  Within weeks, the international press took notice. The Sunday Times of London ran a 750-word article headlined, “Judges Took Bribes to Jail Teenagers,” calling it “one of America’s most sinister judicial scandals of recent times.” The Economist magazine headlined its piece “The Lowest of the Low.” In Sydney, The Australian proclaimed, “Judges Paid off to Keep Jails Full,” and the New Zealand Herald announced, “U.S. Judges Jailed Kids for Cash.”

  In early March, the New York Times ran a front-page article by Ian Urbina, which began: “Things were different in the Luzerne County juvenile courtroom, and everyone knew it. Proceedings on average took less than two minutes. Detention center workers were told in advance how many juveniles to expect at the end of each day—even before hearings to determine their innocence or guilt. Lawyers told families not to bother hiring them. They would not be allowed to speak anyway.”

  How could two judges conspire over five years to deprive thousands of children of their most basic constitutional rights and send them off in shackles to detention centers in which these judges had personal financial interests?

  There were many ingredients in the Luzerne County judicial scandal—official evil, greed, opportunity, public indifference, secrecy, and place: Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, has a history of corruption, nepotism, and mob-related violence dating back decades, so perhaps it should not be a surprise that the juvenile justice system there was corrupt as well.

  Although the Luzerne County kids-for-cash scandal resulted from a unique confluence of factors, it was allowed to thrive in part because of a dangerous, nationwide opacity in America’s juvenile justice system. Matthew, Angelia, Lisa, and Charlie were among the approximately one hundred thousand American children who, on any given day, are either confined to correctional faciliti
es or held in detention centers awaiting trial or placement. Fewer than one-third of these youths are being detained for serious, violent crimes. Many of the rest, like Matthew, Angelia, Lisa, and Charlie, are incarcerated for nonviolent infractions, including behaviors common among adolescents in our society.

  Some of them, like Angelia and Lisa, rebound and begin productive lives. Others, like Matthew, suffer prolonged emotional stress, long-term psychological damage, truncated educations and careers, and develop deep disdain for a justice system that failed them. And many of them, like Charlie, become adult criminals. The lack of transparency at the court level as well as inside juvenile detention centers—particularly those run as private, for-profit companies—is a recipe for abuse and an environment in which scandals such as Luzerne County can be perpetrated out of public sight. Rather than affording extra protections to the most vulnerable among us, we have set up a system of justice for children in this country that too often criminalizes standard adolescent behavior, treats adolescents more harshly than if they were adults committing similar infractions, and is not open to public scrutiny.

  The egregious miscarriage that took place in Judge Ciavarella’s courtroom offers a chilling and telling caricature of a system prone to abuse, yet nonetheless entrusted with the care of millions of American children.

  2

  BARONS AND GODFATHERS

  Forty years I worked with pick and drill

  Down in the mines against my will

  The Coal King’s slave, but now it’s passed

  Thanks be to God I am free at last.

  —Gravestone of Condy Brisbin (d. 1880), Saint Gabriel’s

  Catholic Cemetery, Hazleton, Pennsylvania

  A freak of geology placed nearly all of the world’s supply of high-grade anthracite coal—“hard coal”—inside an area of some 1,700 square miles at roughly forty-one degrees north latitude, seventy-five degrees west longitude in the crescent-shaped Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania. Anthracite was formed some 300 million years ago and lay undiscovered until around 1800. Local folklore has it that a farmer named Necho Allen dug a hearth in the earth, and when he set a campfire, it burned untended for weeks. Some versions are that this miracle occurred on Christmas Eve 1795. By whatever means anthracite came to human attention, by 1830 it had become a popular source of heat among local residents. It burned cleaner and gave off more heat than conventional bituminous coal, which comprised 99 percent of the nation’s supply. Already bankers and other financiers from Philadelphia and New York were buying up vast parcels of farmland and forest beneath which the miracle fuel lay. To find a wider market, anthracite needed transportation, and so these first “coal barons” built railroads. Thus they prospered doubly—first from mining anthracite, then from moving it.