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  The judges’ single-minded pursuit of using PA Child Care raised eyebrows around the courthouse, and it was whispered in the corridors that Conahan and Ciavarella must have some vested interest in the new facility. But Conahan kept a full-nelson grip on the court staff by populating it with his political cronies and relatives. Together, Scooch and the Boss imposed a reign of terror on the century-old courthouse, where questionable practices went unquestioned—and became accepted practices. Justice and the Luzerne County Juvenile Court had parted company.

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  MINDING THEIR OWN BUSINESS

  Within a few months Ciavarella was filling up beds at the new PA Child Care Center with assembly-line efficiency, and zero tolerance picked up a tailwind. A fifteen-year-old boy was held there five days without a hearing on charges growing out of a family argument. He was eventually charged with a misdemeanor for showing disrespect to his grandfather and placed on probation. A seventeen-year-old boy was charged with violating his probation by staying out past his curfew. Without a lawyer present and without allowing the youth to speak at his hearing, Ciavarella sentenced him to six months in PA Child Care. A fourteen-year-old girl who drove her mother’s car around the block spent thirty-three days at the facility—even though her mother did not press charges and the probation officer recommended probation rather than incarceration. A seventeen-year-old boy arrested for shoplifting spent three days there before he got a hearing. Another seventeen-year-old boy got into a fight and was charged with simple assault in 2003; Ciavarella sent him to PA Child Care for three months.

  One of the first children detained at PA Child Care was sixteen-year-old Rachelle, who appeared before Ciavarella in December 2002 on aggravated assault charges involving an incident at school. She was accompanied by her mother and an attorney—even though she had been warned by the court’s probation officers that having counsel would “make matters worse” before the judge. She was initially sent to a boot camp, but then Ciavarella sentenced her to the just-opened PA Child Care center for ninety days. Rachelle immediately began suffering from acute separation anxiety, and within a few days she attempted to kill herself. She had nightmares about her experience for years after her release.

  Another early detainee was sixteen-year-old Jeffrey, who was sent away by Ciavarella for operating a motorized trail bike on a highway shoulder while intoxicated. His father explained that Jeffrey had borrowed the vehicle from the family garage and ridden it to a friend’s house, where a group of boys drank alcohol for several hours. As he was returning home after dark, Jeffrey was stopped by a policeman because the bike did not have any lights, and subsequently he was charged with driving under the influence. His father said Jeffrey had been acting strangely, hearing voices and experiencing paranoia, for several months. “When I looked into his eyes, I knew something was wrong and I wanted to get him some help,” his father recalled. Two months later Jeffrey stood before Ciavarella, rocking slowly back and forth. When the judge asked him if he was pleading guilty, he just nodded affirmatively and kept swaying. His father tried to intervene and tell Ciavarella that his son needed mental health counseling, but the judge would not let him speak. The boy did not have a lawyer, and Ciavarella did not explain—as required by law—the consequences of being unrepresented or of pleading guilty.

  Jeffrey spent eight and a half months in detention, including two and a half months at PA Child Care. Here he was evaluated by Dr. Frank Vita, who would conduct hundreds of such appraisals during Ciavarella’s tenure as juvenile judge. Vita was Conahan’s brother-in-law and designated court psychologist under a noncompetitive contract with the court. Vita did about eleven evaluations per month. Often the youths were detained in PA Child Care for a week or more before seeing the psychologist. Vita’s recommendations were nearly always the same—“placement,” meaning incarceration.

  Jeffrey first went to PA Child Care and then to a private school for troubled boys in nearby Wyoming County, Pennsylvania. Here he was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder and returned to his home. At the age of twenty-three, Jeffrey was still living at home without a job or a high school diploma. “I would drive him to school, drop him off at the door, but he’d just walk out and come home,” his father said. “He has few friends. He still goes out and gets into trouble drinking. He refuses to take medication for his mental problems, and he refuses to go to therapy. He doesn’t trust anyone because he’s afraid if he agrees to treatment they will lock him up. He’s terrified of that.”

  Jeffrey’s parents were assessed $5,925 for their son’s ordeal—$4,500 for the detention expenses, $1,200 in court costs, and $225 in probation fees. The money was deducted from his father’s disability check and garnished from his mother’s paycheck. Similar charges were assessed against the parents and guardians for hundreds of other juvenile defendants.

  Indeed, between 1999 and 2004, Ciavarella ran a kind of special “fines court” that would send children to detention centers until their parents could pay outstanding fines imposed by magisterial district judges. One of the victims was eleven-year-old Ryan, whose troubles began in May 2004 when he got into an argument with his mother after he left home without permission to play basketball. When his mother locked him out of the house to teach him a lesson, the boy called the police. When she explained to the responding officer that she was having behavior problems with young Ryan, he suggested that she allow him to cite the boy for harassment. She agreed after being assured there would be no fine, and so when she got a letter several weeks later asking her to pay a fine, she refused. This got her and her son before Ciavarella.

  “Ryan, how old are you?” asked Ciavarella.

  “Eleven.”

  “Do you have $488.50?”

  Ryan shook his head in the negative.

  “Very good,” Ciavarella said. “He’s remanded. He can stay there until he pays the fine.”

  Ryan’s mother then informed the judge that there was an additional fine outstanding on a separate charge.

  “We’ll get that,” Ciavarella said. “By the time he gets out he’ll be able to go back for the next one. You’re having a great day. Put the cuffs on him and get him out of here.”

  Ryan was handcuffed and placed in leg shackles. He stood four foot two and weighed sixty-three pounds. His shocked mother tried to speak, but Ciavarella silenced her with a dismissive wave. She never got to tell the judge that Ryan had not committed any crime and that it was he who called the police in the first place.

  Ryan spent the next two months in Camp Adams, the wilderness camp for delinquents in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Within a few days, he was twisted into an emotional pretzel. He told counselors he was going to have a mental breakdown. He became so incensed while he was there that he tried to stab another resident with a plastic fork. Four years later, he had stayed out of further legal troubles, but he was still angry, bitter, and did not trust the legal system.

  Ciavarella ignored the fact that the goal of the juvenile court is markedly different from that of adult court. The juvenile justice system is supposed to be the shallow end of the pool, a place where bad habits can be corrected before they become ingrained behavior. Being mature, after all, is like hitting a baseball or driving a car. It takes practice. While adult court is about punishment, juvenile court is about rehabilitation, tied inextricably to accountability and community protection. Its twin pillars are treatment and rehabilitation that will redirect children toward responsible adulthood. Juvenile courts even have their own terminology. There are no trials, only hearings; instead of convictions, there are adjudications; sentences in juvenile court are called dispositions; adjudicated children are called delinquents rather than criminals, and their punishments are called placements rather than imprisonments.

  There has always been a disparity, sometimes a cleft, sometimes a chasm, between this ideal and the reality. From the very beginning of the juvenile court system in 1899, society has wavered in its approach to youth crime. The pendulum has swung between the go
als of child welfare and community safety, emphasizing one, then the other. But another source of disparity is that juvenile justice is local. There are fifty-one juvenile justice systems in the United States, and each one has its own rules, procedures, structures, and philosophies. Within many states, including Pennsylvania, there are significant differences from one county to another. Moreover, juvenile judges are accorded enormous power and wide latitude in dealing with the children who come before them.

  Unlike adult court, the juvenile systems of all states except Washington have no guidelines for dispositions. This is intended to afford young defendants the benefit of a doubt, but it also leads to significant variances in penalties from one court to another for the same offense. Juvenile judges are given extraordinary leeway in Pennsylvania, as they are in most states, and there are fewer checks and balances on their official behavior than there are on adult court judges. This makes them ripe for abusive practices. Ciavarella carried this discretion to the extreme, virtually setting his own rules. He took full advantage of his broad discretionary powers, and kids guilty of nothing more than adolescent mischief, who should have been been sent home under supervision instead ended up in detention facilities like PA Child Care. He also extended his influence to the probation officers, giving him even more power to impose injustice on so many children. He was supposed to take into account a variety of factors, including the youth’s family situation, schooling, and the presence of drug abuse. But as long as he could claim that he was doing what was in the best interests of a child before him, he was free to punish unfairly—so long as no one spoke up. In Ciavarella’s court, juveniles got the worst of both worlds because they were denied both proven rehabilitative treatments and legal due process.

  It is an irony that Pennsylvania became the site of the worst juvenile justice scandal in American history, for the state has a national reputation among professionals for progressive policies in dealing with young offenders. The state actually has a relatively low rate of incarcerating young people, and its system of balanced and restorative justice aims to protect society and compensate victims while helping errant children transition into successful adulthood. When many states responded to popular demands for more punitive juvenile laws, Pennsylvania resisted the trend and kept its eye on the wiser goals of treatment and rehabilitation. Much of Pennsylvania’s separation from the pack was the result of the relentless efforts of Juvenile Law Center.

  In 2004—just one year after the first million-dollar kickback was paid in Luzerne County—Juvenile Law Center was designated by the MacArthur Foundation to lead a juvenile justice reform effort in Pennsylvania called “Models for Change,” designed to make juvenile justice fairer and more effective. Among the project’s primary goals were diverting children from formal juvenile court processing, establishing community-based alternatives to incarceration, and improving legal representation. Pennsylvania was one of only four states initially chosen by MacArthur, and the Luzerne County ignominy, though an aberration, was acutely embarrassing to the state’s juvenile justice professionals.

  Despite Ciavarella’s frequent claims that he believed he was acting in the best interests of the children he was sending into placement, a mountain of evidence proves that he was acting contrary to the best interests not only of the juveniles, but also of the community and the taxpayers.

  George D. Mosee Jr., a deputy district attorney in Philadelphia who heads the juvenile division, says his office makes a sharp differentiation between violent and nonviolent offenders: “If a child hurts someone, or if they even use a gun or a knife, the response is to protect the community. But these are a minority of the cases. With most kids, we look for the least restrictive means that we can to deal with them. What can we do to keep them out of the system and increase the odds that they will not become a problem as an adult? We are always looking for opportunities to keep them out of the system.” Research over the past thirty years shows that detaining young offenders far from their homes and families is almost a guarantee that they will repeat their bad behaviors and become criminals as adults. Incarceration has lasting and detrimental affects on teenagers, disrupting their educations, socialization, job prospects, and passage into adulthood. “If you send a kid away, you take him out of his normal development trajectory,” says Juvenile Law Center’s Robert Schwartz. “Send kids away who scare you, not kids who annoy you.”

  Yet studies across the nation show that the majority of adolescents in detention are sent there for substance abuse, property crimes, and so-called status offenses like running away from home. Ciavarella carried this misguided policy to an extreme in Luzerne County. Sixteen-year-old Daniella spent fourteen months in detention centers, including nine at PA Child Care, for simply failing to pay a $286 fine imposed after she got into a fight with another girl in school. When he was twelve, Eric took his mother’s car for a joyride and crashed it. His mother only pressed charges because her insurance carrier refused to pay a claim without a police report. Ciavarella—even though he himself had gotten off free after he took a stolen car for a joyride when he was fifteen—sent Eric away for two years. Alissa got into an argument with her grandmother when she was thirteen. Although her grandmother did not file charges, Ciavarella sent Alissa to PA Child Care for three weeks, the start of a downhill spiral that ended with the girl being incarcerated for nearly four years for substance abuse and probation violations.

  The removal of children from their homes, families, schools, and friends often is accompanied by shame, guilt, and anxiety. Desirae was a Girl Scout and a cheerleader when she was arrested at the age of fourteen for possession of a controlled substance. As her mother stood by numb with disbelief, Ciavarella had her shackled and taken to PA Child Care. She left the courtroom screaming, “I’m sorry, Mommy.” Desirae spent thirty-one days in the Pittston detention center. It was the first time she had ever been separated from her mother, who says her daughter never recovered from the experience. She dropped out of high school. Five years after her time in PA Child Care, she suffered from depression and feelings of worthlessness and was unable to keep jobs or maintain relationships.

  The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice released a study in 2009 showing that expensive institutional placement, regardless of how long, produced few beneficial results for the community at large and that less costly rehabilitative services were just as effective in reducing recidivism. “Longer stays in juvenile facilities do not appear to reduce offending,” the foundation said. “However, continued probation supervision and community-based services provided after a youth is released do make a difference.”

  In 1992 the Annie E. Casey Foundation launched a Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative that has shown that there are safe alternatives to incarceration of kids in most cases. “Youth are often unnecessarily or inappropriately detained at great expense, with long-lasting negative consequences for both public safety and youth development,” according to the Casey Foundation.

  Unnecessarily locking up young miscreants is not only bad social policy, it’s bad business. Under Ciavarella, for example, Luzerne County was paying out about $16 million a year to juvenile detention facilities. One day at PA Child Care could cost as much as $300. After he left the bench and fewer kids were sent away, these costs plummeted to about $4 million with no rise in juvenile offences.

  Nationally, the average daily cost of juvenile detention is around $250. The Justice Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, estimated in 2009 that some $5.7 billion in public funds was being spent to imprison children, most of whom committed nonviolent offenses. The institute estimates that cheaper home- and community-based alternatives to incarceration would save billions of dollars and result in substantially fewer juveniles going on to become adult criminals.

  It often took many years for the full consequences of Ciavarella’s zero tolerance policy to be realized. Shane first appeared before the judge when he was thirteen years old
. It was February 11, 2002, and Ciavarella was in the process of working out details with Rob Mericle to launder the $997,000 finder’s fee by first sending it to Robert Powell, who would get it to the two judges in a roundabout fashion. When Shane stood before Ciavarella, construction of PA Child Care had just begun, and it would not open for a year. A few months earlier, Shane and two of his friends had explored a long-abandoned elementary school building that was not far from their homes. They pried a plywood cover from a window opening, climbed in, and turned on a flashlight. State police officers arrived on the scene and arrested the boys. They were charged with criminal trespassing and Ciavarella sent them to Camp Adams for two weekends. When informed that Shane was a seventh-grade honor student, Ciavarella told his mother that he “could be ‘smart’ at camp.” Shane and his fellow trespassers spent two winter weekends at the wilderness camp, joining other delinquents from all over eastern Pennsylvania who were there for dealing drugs, burglary, and other similar offenses. That spring Shane got into trouble again when he and his friends found a backpack containing paintball equipment. The owner of the backpack did not press charges, but since Shane was still on probation from the trespassing charge, he was sent back to Camp Adams for another weekend.

  His mother recalled his departure: “Shane cried. He was dropped off at the juvenile detention center on River Street on Friday at 3:00 p.m. A bus would come and take him to camp in Jim Thorpe. They slept outside, the temperature was in the teens. No showers for youths that were there for just the weekend. My son came home on Sunday afternoon dirty, smelly, and starving. He is not a picky eater. He was spit on by the youths who were staying there for months. They did have a pavilion they slept under in army surplus sleeping bags.”

  Once Shane’s weekends at the detention center became common knowledge, some parents of his friends forbade their children to associate with him. “It tightened up who I could hang out with,” Shane said. “There weren’t too many good people around me after a while.” He failed to pass the ninth grade, and then in 2005 he and other boys broke into a bar and were arrested. Ciavarella sent Shane to Camp Adams for three more months and then placed him on probation. By this time, he was a sixteen-year-old alcoholic and drug addict. He was in and out of juvenile detention centers until he was eighteen, when he began ending up in adult prisons.