Kids For Cash: The loathsome judges who accepted bribes to jail children
The responsibility that falls on judges is truly insane. All of us place our trust in the judgment of other humans to make sure that those who commit crimes face the proper punishment for them, despite the fact that humans are such fallible beings.
To be clear, it’s also the best option available. The moment we start trusting AI or computers to dole out punishments is the moment society is truly lost (and it’s coming sooner than we think). Still, to me, it’s insane that we can just know that one judge can be overly harsh, and another can be overly sympathetic towards a certain type of person. Meanwhile, another can be easily swayed by a sob story, and that’s not just a part of our judicial system but the very backbone of it.
Those are just the mild cases, as well. The severe end of the spectrum is when judges show the worst sides of human nature and are truly shocking, like the scandal that rocked the American judicial system in 2009 concerning Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella.
Conahan and Ciavarella were both judges at the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and both seemed like respected figures in their field.
There’s harsh, and then there’s sending kids to a juvenile detention facility for mocking one of their assistant principals on Myspace. Or for trespassing in a vacant building. The kind of thing that most would get off with a slap on the wrist for, Conahan and Ciavarella were bringing the hammer down for. Was this just rough justice? Did they believe that sparing the rod spoiled the child?
No. They were being paid for it.
What happened to these two judges?
It turns out that Ciavarella and Conahan had a reputation already. They were first investigated for corruption back in 2000. Then again in 2004. Then again, in 2008. But, no action was ever taken against them despite the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Centre having hundreds of requests for help regarding cases that they’d overseen. It wasn’t until 2009 when both the FBI and the IRS descended on the two judges that their true, shocking corruption came to light.
It turned out that Ciavarella and Conahan had been accepting kickbacks from the owners of a private prison operated by PA Child Care. In return, they filled those prisons as much as they could. Sending any child who’d so much as sneezed when they weren’t supposed to into a literal prison. Conahan ended up being sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy. Ciavarella thought he had a chance on trial. He got 28 years in the slammer for his troubles.
The bitter truth of this, though, is that Ciavarella and Conahan are far from the only people responsible for behaviour like this.
The prison industrial complex is one that has a history of alleged agreements like this between willing representatives from the judicial system and the money-men in charge of private prisons. It’s not that it was useless to hold Ciavarella and Conahan accountable for their actions, far from it, but, worryingly, they weren’t alone in it.