# JAILING kIDS FOR CASH



## dirtyfacedan (Feb 26, 2009)

I just read this article, and was amazed. This is nothing new, police culture has been doing it for years. 

Jailing Kids for Cash | Mostly Water

By Amy Goodman; February 19, 2009 - Znet
ZNet - Jailing Kids

Source: Truthdig

As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.

Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration:

"I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word."

Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up ... because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible."

She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: "I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program." She was hospitalized three times.

Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella.

As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: "Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court." The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC's case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud.

They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.

This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, "the United States is the world's leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation's prisons or jails—a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years." The Wall Street Journal reports that "[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails." For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out).

Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is "built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration."

Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, "It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we're supposed to look up to and trust."

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the "Alternative Nobel" prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December


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## Komjaunimas (Feb 26, 2009)

Oh the law in the states is pretty fucked up as everywhere :/ 
Before the new years eve i smashed the skull and crushed the nose of my neighbour in a "little incident", i didn't even get a fine, all charges were dropped because there was lack of evidence ... i wonder what would i have gotten from these judges ? 25 to life?


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## spud (Feb 26, 2009)

can anyone say that their supprised


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## Angela (Feb 26, 2009)

Unfortunately I'm not surprised. The prison system in the United States has been fucked up for a very long time and privatizing them is just one more thing to make them even more fucked up.


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## dirty_rotten_squatter (Feb 27, 2009)

fucked up!! thats the way the government is though, the united hate of america...


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## dirtyfacedan (Feb 27, 2009)

More info on the story..

Pennsylvania's Kickback Judges
Ruining Young Lives for Profit

By NICOLE COLSON; February 27-March 1, 2009 - Counterpunch Weekend Edition
Nicole Colson: Ruining Young Lives for Profit

"I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare. All I wanted to know was how this could be fair, and why the judge would do such a thing."

Hillary Transue had good reason to question how the judge overseeing her case could have to come to the decision he did.

In 2007, after a hearing lasting just 90 seconds, the 17-year-old found herself hauled away from court in handcuffs and thrown into a juvenile detention center. She was sentenced to three months for the crime of harassment after she created a mock site on the social networking Web site MySpace that made fun of the assistant principal at her high school.

The sentence was incredibly harsh considering that Hillary was a stellar student who had never been in trouble before--and that she put a disclaimer on the site itself stating that it was a joke.

But now, it's clear why Hillary and hundreds of other kids like her received sentences in a juvenile detention center that were totally disproportionate to their crime.

In a word: money.

Earlier this month, two Luzerne County, Pa., judges--Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan--pled guilty to taking $2.6 million in kickbacks in exchange for throwing juveniles into two for-profit private detention centers, PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. Under a plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and be disbarred.

* * *

BEGINNING IN late 2002, Conahan, as the president judge in control of the budget, and Ciavarella, overseeing the juvenile courts, moved to close the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was run-down. They argued that the county had no choice but to send juveniles to the then newly built PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care.

The two facilities, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "are [partially] owned by Greg Zappala, brother of Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. and son of former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Stephen A. Zappala Sr."

Conahan apparently secured contracts worth tens of millions of dollars for the two facilities to house juveniles, while Ciavarella made sure the centers stayed full--by railroading vulnerable teens into the centers after trials that sometimes lasted just a minute or two.

In the state of Pennsylvania, juvenile proceedings are closed to the public, and teens can waive their right to counsel at trial. It appears as though some of those who appeared in front of Ciavarella unknowingly waived their right to counsel--only to find themselves suddenly locked up after the abbreviated hearings.

In one case, a 17-year-old who stole a bottle of nutmeg appeared without a lawyer before Ciavarella--and ended up spending more than seven months at three different detention facilities.

Jamie Quinn, was sent away to PA Child Care and several other detention centers for 11 months when she was just 14 years old, after she got in a fight with a friend, and they both slapped each other. "[A]ll that happened was just a basic fight," Quinn told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman. "She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word."

The effect on her life was devastating. "People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long," Quinn said. "My family started splitting up...because I was away and got locked up. I'm still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places is just horrible."

While in detention, Quinn was forced to take medication and began to suffer depression. She resorted to cutting herself. "I was never depressed," she said. "I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn't even know what they were. They said if I didn't take them, I wasn't following my program."

Jesse Miers appeared before Ciavarella when he was 17. He had tried to return a stolen gun after seeing a friend's 13-year-old brother wave it around. When he couldn't find the owner, he turned the gun over to his boss, who later handed it over to police.

A year later, Miers was a passenger in a car that was pulled over for a moving violation--and when police checked his name, he was surprised to find he had a warrant for his arrest. Though Miers says he asked for a public defender, none was present at his hearing in front of Judge Ciavarella.

Because he had heard of Ciavarella's reputation for not letting defendants have a chance to speak, Miers asked to be allowed to write a letter to the judge. "I wanted to state my case, but they only gave me five minutes to write it, and the judge didn't even read it anyway," Miers said.

"I had maybe 45 seconds in front of [Ciavarella]," he told the Post-Gazette. "He just said 'Remand him,' and they put me in shackles. I was shackled for 13 hours while I waited for them to take me" in a van from the Luzerne County Courthouse to the juvenile detention center in Allegheny Township, 270 miles away from his home.

* * *

ACCORDING TO the New York Times, youth advocates had been raising concerns about Ciavarella for years. Between 2002 and 2006, Ciavarella sent juvenile defendants to detention centers at [a] 2.5 times greater rate than the state average. Fully a quarter of the children who appeared before him were locked away, and he routinely ignored pleas for leniency, even when they came from prosecutors and court probation officers.

In all, some 5,000 juveniles were sentenced by Ciavarella since the kickback scheme began in 2003. As the Times noted, "Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention."

Moreover, when the Pennsylvania-based Juvenile Law Center began investigating after being contacted by Hillary Transue's mother, it found that Luzerne County had half of all waivers of counsel by young people in juvenile court in Pennsylvania. Despite the fact that the juvenile court in Luzerne County processes about 1,200 juvenile defendants a year, there is just one public defender on staff for juveniles.

"I've never encountered, and I don't think that we will in our lifetimes, a case where literally thousands of kids' lives were just tossed aside in order for a couple of judges to make some money," Marsha Levick, an attorney with the Juvenile Law Center, told the Associated Press.

Clay Yeager, the former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Pennsylvania, told the Times that Ciavarella and Conahan shouldn't have gotten away with railroading kids for as long as they did.

Although juvenile hearings are usually kept closed to the public, "they are kept open to probation officers, district attorneys and public defenders, all of whom are sworn to protect the interests of children," said Yeager. "It's pretty clear those people didn't do their jobs."

While both Ciavarella and Conahan are now headed to federal prison, the case exposes the way in which the trend towards privatization in the U.S. prison system has made money for some, at the expense of justice.

For-profit privatized prisons have become commonplace around the U.S. since the 1980s, when an explosion in the prison population due to the "war on drugs" left state facilities overcrowded. Today, corporations like GEO Group, Corrections Corporation of America and others run private facilities that promise to house prisoners for less than states are able to--by paying guards lower wages and fewer benefits, and cutting costs on inmate housing and care.

Whether anyone affiliated with PA Child Care or Western PA Child Care will face punishment for their role in locking up thousands of kids remains to be seen. So far, no official from either detention center has been charged with any crime. In fact, a letter sent last week from U.S. Attorney Martin Carlson to attorneys for the two detention centers stated that their corporate clients aren't the target of a probe and won't be indicted by a grand jury.

Although two class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the teens who were wrongfully imprisoned, real justice won't be served as long as PA Child Care and other detention centers like it are allowed to remain open--and as long as the U.S. justice system is set up to prioritize profit over the lives of young people.

Nicole Colson lives in Chicago, where she works as a reporter for the Socialist Worker.


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## dirtyfacedan (Feb 28, 2009)

I have been locked up as a youth, and forced into treatment (mental health..so they said) in provincial institutions, against my will, first when i was 14, and was for one year. For simply refusing to live in my "placements", all places paid well to "care" for children. The street was my prefered location. I was in several more institutions (never jail..luckily) by the time i was legaly an adult. I was a temporary ward of the provincial governemt from the age of 3, my mother being an addict. We were both to be punished by an intolerant society. no justice thier either. I was made a permanent ward when I was 13, and was in more than 36 different foster homes, a few amazingly brutal and abusive, others loving and nurturing, by the time I was 17. That doesn't include crisis shelters. I was a record holder...something for the provincial child welfare system to be ashamed of. Not much has changed, children still suffer in a machine that has grown massive, and they get chewed up badly. All of these government actions were at the hands of court judges, and social bureaucrats, all worm gears, and cogs in a machine that does not know how to care for children, only to elect a new leader, apoint a new judge, and hire a new consultant....train a new social worker. I don't like to talk about my problems, my story to much, especially on an internet forum.... it's just a similar story I know very well to what continues to happen to children today, although i bet it's worse for them now. I don't like pity, although empathy, and understanding are welcome. The point is, we as a community need to be the ones who decide what punishment, and what rewards fellow people need. Children should not be jailed like this, treating them like hardend outlaws will make them hardened outlaws. It's conditioning them for it at an early age. Some asshole on an ivory bench cannot possibly do justice for the community, when they are not in touch with the community. Justice cannot be legislated, enforced, made law or otherwise. Justice cannot be dispenced by government, nor it's supporters, they are simply not capable of it. My freedom is my only course of action now, and i support prisoner justice, in all it's forms. I have no patience for a man who would have power over another, especially from the other side of iron bars. Or an ivory bench. Our freedom in the face of the machine IS justice!!!!


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## compass (Feb 28, 2009)

Damn, makes me want to see the term "hanging judge" in a different light.


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## Dmac (Mar 1, 2009)

they keep the county lockup here beyond its rated capacity. trurns out that they get a cash substity from the federal government based on the amount of people jailed! they just got done with a huge addition to the corection center, and it was filled as soon as it was done. f-ing cops and polotititions. they are the ones who should be locked up.


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## Ravie (Mar 1, 2009)

this pisses me off on a completely new level. Here's your fucking land of the free!


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## dirtyfacedan (Mar 7, 2009)

More reading on the subject.. http://www.counterpunch.org/ward03062009.html


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## jukeboxromeo (Oct 9, 2009)

Apologies for bringing this old thread back to life, but I'm compelled to reply because I'm from the area. It's so fucked up. I know kids personally who have stood before the same judge and I could tell stories for hours. It wasn't a surprise when this made the front page of the newspaper a few months ago. It's been going on for years. I remember when I was in elementary and middle school when kids would go in front of him and end up in camps ALL THE TIME, for something as small as a fistfight at school. (Not to say that they merely deserved a slap on the wrist, but what the fuck?!)

I'll tell you the story of a friend of mine. Two years ago (she was 14 or 15 at the time) she was caught with a few kids who had set fire to a local vacant building. I'm pretty sure they had pot on them at the time which didn't do much to help the situation.

at her trial (which lasted only a few minutes), ciaverella had asked her if she was guilty or not, and she said yes. and then he asked her where she'd like to go to camp. after professing her confusion, he informed her that she'd be going to the local girls juvenile camp thing pending the outcome of her drug test (what a surprise!). she came out CLEAN but was sentenced to 6mo probation, 30 hours comm service, 30 hours of fire setting counseling (THAT EXISTS?), had to pay various fines, and tried to charge her with arson, criminal trespass, and misconduct of some sort. 

eventually all charges got dropped in the end. she ended up doing 8months probation and had to take drug tests every single week. she somehow ended up going to an hour total of fire setter's counseling because...imagine that...she had nothing to do with the fire. 

she has a happy ending to her story, but not everyone has been so lucky.



It's funny because these figures were always so well-regarded in the community because they were so harsh with the sentences, and everyone believed that they were sincerely interested in putting the juveniles back on the right track...haha, what bullshit!



Just so this post has some substance an update: 

http://www.thetimes-tribune.com/conahan_ciavarella_face_new_charges


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