Judge who took bribes in return for locking up children given clemency by Joe Biden

Embed from Getty Images

Joe Biden had managed to grant a pardon more controversial than the one he gave to his son Hunter..

Democracy Now explains:

Biden announced nearly 1500 commutations and pardons last week in what the White House described as the largest single-day act of clemency from a president, but among those whose sentences were reduced is former Pennsylvania Judge Michael Conahan - one of two judges in the notorious "kids for cash" scandal. 

In 2011, Conahan was sentenced to 17.5 years for accepting nearly $3 million in kickbacks for sending 2,300 children, some as young as 8 years old, to for-profit prisons on false charges. His co-conspirator, former Judge Mark Ciavarella, remains in prison.

Offenders guilty of sexual or violent offences were not eligible for this clemency. An exclusion should also have been made for judges convicted of conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice.

This kids for cash scandal was shocking, but should not have been surprising in a prison system designed to generate private profit. 

I have tended to see things this way since reading Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie.

Kids For Cash: Inside the Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal

Yesterday I posted on the latest developments in the scandal in Pennsylvania over judges locking up juvenile offenders in return for payment from the operators of detention facilities.

This video tells you more about that scandal. There are interviews with two of the (now adult) victims of the scandal and the mother of one who took his own life.

Then from 44:50 we hear from a lawyer who helped bring the corrupt judges to justice and from the director of a film on the scandal.

A final word from Ethics and Psychology:

The psychologist brother-in-law of disgraced former Luzerne County judge Michael T. Conahan has given up his license for “gross incompetence, negligence or misconduct” carrying out his past work evaluating juveniles in the county court system, state officials said Wednesday.

The Pennsylvania Board of Psychology said Frank James Vita, of Dorrance Township, “grossly deviated from ethical and professional standards” after reviewing 76 of the cases he had handled.

Vita once was linked to the county’s “Kids for Cash” judicial scandal in a civil suit that alleged he conspired with Conahan and fellow former judge Mark Ciavarella to perform evaluations that led to juveniles being incarcerated in facilities in which the judges had a financial interest.

Enormous damages awarded to victims of Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal

Embed from Getty Images

It was back in 2009 that the Kids for Cash scandal broke in Pennsylvania, but this development appeared on AP News only yesterday:

Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks were ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Conner awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to nearly 300 people in a long-running civil suit against the judges, writing the plaintiffs are “the tragic human casualties of a scandal of epic proportions.”

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

I don't know how they will raise the money - unless judges have to take out sentencing insurance. Ciavarella, 72, is serving a 28-year prison sentence in Kentucky, with a projected release date of 2035. Conahan, 70, was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison, but was released to home confinement in 2020 with six years left on his sentence because of the Covid pandemic.

Whenever I read of the way that commercial providers now run most British children's care homes, I think of this scandal. There is a danger that the profit motive will warp the debate on the care of vulnerable children, given the incentive to see more of them cared for away from their families.

The Kids for Cash scandal in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

One of the most remarkable stories I ever reported on this blog was the Kids for Cash scandal in the city of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania.

As the Wikipedia page on the scandal says:

In 2008, judges Michael Conahan and Mark Ciavarella were convicted of accepting money in return for imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles to increase occupancy at for-profit detention centres.

Many of the children and teenagers were locked up for trivial offences and kept behind bars for years.

In 2013 Robert May released a well-received documentary, Kids for Cash, on the scandal. That film is not online, but you can watch May talk about the film in video above.

Usefully, he talks about the ways of dealing with children and teenagers in school and the legal system that made the scandal possible as well as about the cupidity of the two judges.

When blogging about the scandal at the time, I refereed more than once to the book Crime Control as Industry by Nils Christie.

A review for the Prison Policy Initiative usefully summarises his argument:

Christie traces the extent to which crime control has come to dominate the economic structure by absorbing the unemployed into the roles of keeper and kept and then supplying services to each. Limited by space, let me highlight two of Christie's many sharp observations. 

First Christie argues that the applicable political economy to describe prisons is not slavery, but of the old work-houses, where the objective was not profit for the State, but for private parties to relieve the State of its unwanted population at the lowest cost possible. 

The second sharp observation is that justice itself has been mechanized to cope with the influx of raw materials and remove a democratic restraint upon growth. Mandatory minimums and the sentencing guidelines have served to remove discretion from judges, turning them into little more than secretaries for the legislature. 

While judges are in a unique position to learn details about victims and the accused; and could adopt sentences to match the needs of the offender and the community; that takes time. Time costs money, and the industry's conveyor must be kept moving, hence the removal of judge's discretion.

Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal: Judge got 28 years

Three years ago I wrote several posts on this blog and a House Points column in Liberal Democrat News to a scandal in Pennsylvania.

Judges in juvenile courts were revealed to be taking payments from the operators of juvenile detention facilities in return for ensuring that a steady supply of youngsters were given custodial sentences even if their offences did not warrant them. You can find all those posts labelled Pennsylvania scandal on this blog.

This afternoon Neil Monnery wrote about the case, revealing that last year Mark Ciavarella Jnr, a former judge, was sentenced to 28 years for his part in the affair.

He went on to quote Ciaverella, who seemed to blame the media, rather than his own criminality, for his fall:

Despite being found guilty the former judge wasn’t repentent and decided to turn on the media for fanning the flames that led to his conviction by the jury, “Those three words (kids for cash) made me the personification of evil,” he told the court, according to the Associated Press. “They made me toxic and caused a public uproar the likes of which this community has never seen.” 

So instead of apologising he was incensed that the media had dubbed it the ‘kids for cash’ scandal. Despite you know the fact that he was taking cash in return for sending kids to a juvenile detention facility when it wasn’t deserved. I actually think it might have been a fair headline and catchphrase by the media you know…

Neil does not give a source for these quotes, but you can find them in a USA Today news report from August 2011.

The Pennsylvania experience exposes in the starkest way possible the dangers of turning the judicial system into another profit-making industry. Those dangers were exposed by Nils Christie in his book Crime Control as Industry (reviewed here on the Prison Policy Initiative site):

Christie traces the extent to which crime control has come to dominate the economic structure by absorbing the unemployed into the roles of keeper and kept and then supplying services to each. Limited by space, let me highlight two of Christie's many sharp observations. First Christie argues that the applicable political economy to describe prisons is not slavery, but of the old work-houses, where the objective was not profit for the State, but for private parties to relieve the State of its unwanted population at the lowest cost possible. 

The second sharp observation is that justice itself has been mechanized to cope with the influx of raw materials and remove a democratic restraint upon growth. Mandatory minimums and the sentencing guidelines have served to remove discretion from judges, turning them into little more than secretaries for the legislature. While judges are in a unique position to learn details about victims and the accused; and could adopt sentences to match the needs of the offender and the community; that takes time. Time costs money, and the industry's conveyor must be kept moving, hence the removal of judge's discretion.

Back to the Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal

Back in February I began to write about the scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. There two judges have admitted taking money from the operators of private juvenile detention facilities in return for providing them with a stream of new inmates.

The first post is here and you can find them all here.

Pennlive.com explains another twist in the scandal: familes were charged for their children's imprisonment:

Overwhelmed parents, many of whom had no legal counsel, were given an assessment to pay for the room and board of their children while they were staying at the two detention centers run by PA Child Care and a related company, Western PA Child Care, that are under cloud.

The money was collected by the county, which then pays for juvenile detention services. As Robert Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center said, families essentially helped finance the alleged corrupt system that was keeping their children locked up.

And the website goes on to say:

The ripple effects from the judges' decisions have had an enormous financial impact on families. Many were already on the edge of a steep cliff living paycheck to paycheck and quickly fell off it once they were required to make support payments.

The dangers of private enterprise in the prison system

When I first wrote about the Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal I mentioned the Norwegian criminologist Nils Christe and his warning about the danger of involving private companies in the prison system.

Writing for AlterNet, Donald Cohen shows how right he was:

The Prison industry also flexes its growing political muscle to increase the number of people sent to - and kept in - prison.

Lobbying dollars and campaign contributions are used to push "tougher" laws such as "three strikes", mandatory minimum sentencing, and "truth in sentencing" - all of which increase the duration of sentences.

And they support conservative think tanks such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to be the "independent" voice advocating tougher sentencing policies throughout the United States.

George Monbiot writes on Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal

This blog's favourite scandal has been taken up by Monbiot in Dissident Voice:

The corrupt judges were paid by the private prisons not only to increase the number of child convicts but also to shut down a competing prison run by the public sector.

Taking bribes to bang up kids might be novel; shutting public facilities to help private companies happens — on both sides of the water — all the time.

Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal latest

Time to catch up with the latest news and comment on this scandal from the US.

Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Clarence Page shares my analysis:

the judges are only the tip of a scandalous iceberg that has been floating around juvenile detention systems for years. Critics have long complained that private prisons create perverse incentives to throw non-violent offenders in jail even though they might be handled better and more cheaply in community-based alternative programs.

He also asks why this affair has received so much less attention in America than the New York Post's chimpanzee cartoon.

And Law.Com reports that one of the judges appears to have uncomfortably close connections with organised crime.

House Points: Those Pennsylvania judges again

Today's House Points column from Liberal Democrat News.

In the slammer

It’s half term at Westminster, so let’s report a story from the USA. Two judges have pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2.6 million in bribes from a private youth detention centre in return for giving hundreds of youths and teenagers long sentences.

Soon, no doubt, judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, will be unwigged (or whatever happens to corrupt judges) and find themselves in the hoosegow. But their actions have wider importance because they are the logical outcome of allowing the profit motive into the judicial system.

As Rumpole used to remind us, a great many comfortable professional careers are built on the backs of Britain’s criminal classes. But treating Crime Control as Industry, to quote the title of Nils Christie’s 1993 book, is dangerous.
As Christie argues:

Only rarely will those working in or for any industry say that ... we are big enough, we are well established, we do not want any further growth. An urge for expansion is built into industrial thinking, if for no other reason than to forestall being swallowed up by competitors. It follows that once commercial interests are allowed into the system, there will be pressure for more prisons to be built. And to find the prisoners to fill them.

Which is why teenagers in Wilkes-Barre, PA, found themselves banged up for trivial offences like blacking someone’s eye in a playground fight or setting up a MySpace page critical of a teacher.
It’s hard not to cheer when a parent says: “It’s horrible to have your child taken away in shackles right in front of you when you think you’re going home with him. It was nice to see ... [the judges] sitting on the other side of the bench.”

But Ciavarella and Conahan were only taking the commercialisation of crime control to its logical conclusion.

******

A couple of weeks ago I quoted an eloquent speech on the need for reform of the Commons and Lords, attributing it to David Howarth. It was in fact made by David Heath.

Apologies to all. Speaking as someone who joined the Liberal Party in 1978, it is wonderful that we have so many MPs that you get them confused.

More on the Pennsylvania juvenile justice scandal

Democracy Now! has a video (with transcipt) about the scandal in Pennsylvania:

An unprecedented case of judicial corruption is unfolding in Pennsylvania. Several hundred families have filed a class-action lawsuit against two former judges who have pleaded guilty to taking bribes in return for placing youths in privately owned jails.

Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan are said to have received $2.6 million for ensuring juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care. Some of the youths were jailed over the objections of their probation officers.

An estimated 5,000 juveniles have been sentenced by Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2002. We speak to two youths sentenced by Ciavarella and to Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center.

I have written more about this story here and here.

Pennsylvania judges admit taking bribes to jail teenagers

On Wednesday I reported that two Pennsylvania judges had been accused of taking bribes from a company that ran a juvenile detention centre in return for sending them plenty of inmates. It turns out the story is everything it seemed.

Reuters reports:

Two judges pleaded guilty on Thursday to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth detention center in Pennsylvania in return for giving hundreds of youths and teenagers long sentences.

Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, entered plea agreements in federal court in Scranton admitting that they took payoffs from PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare, between 2003 and 2006.

"Your statement that I have disgraced my judgeship is true," Ciavarella wrote in a letter to the court. "My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame."

Conahan, who along with Ciavarella faces up to seven years in prison, did not make any comment on the case.

The story goes on to explain that hen someone is sent to a detention centre, the company running it receives money from the county government to meet the cost of incarceration. So, prosecutors said, as more children were sent to their centre, PA Childcare and Western PA Childcare received more money from the government.

So teenagers who came before the juvenile court in Wilkes-Barre were often sentenced to detention for minor offences. One 17-year-old boy was sentenced to three months' detention for being in the company of another minor caught shoplifting.

Reuters continues:

The Constitution guarantees the right to legal representation in U.S. courts. But many of the juveniles appeared before Ciavarella without an attorney because they were told by the probation service that their minor offenses didn't require one.

Marsha Levick, chief counsel for the Juvenile Law Center, estimated that of approximately 5,000 juveniles who came before Ciavarella from 2003 and 2006, between 1,000 and 2,000 received excessively harsh detention sentences. She said the center will sue the judges, PA Childcare and Western PA Childcare for financial compensation for their victims.

"That judges would allow their greed to trump the rights of defendants is just obscene," Levick said.

There is full coverage of this scandal at the Scranton Times Tribune site. And a good report in the New York Times too.

Finally, a big hello to the anonymous commenter on my original post who mentioned the Wilkes-Barre variation of the Two Knights Defence.

Pennsylvania judges accused of locking up children for cash

Many years ago I reviewed the first edition of Nils Christie's book Crime Control as Industry for Liberator. As a review of the third edition by Peter Wagner says:

Crime Control as Industry ... tracks how an industry has arisen to manage crime. And like any industry, the crime control industry is not about to say on its own: "Stop, we have enough of the market. We don't need to grow."

Wagner goes on to summarise two more of Christie's important arguments:

First Christie argues that the applicable political economy to describe prisons is not slavery, but of the old work-houses, where the objective was not profit for the State, but for private parties to relieve the State of its unwanted population at the lowest cost possible. 

The second sharp observation is that justice itself has been mechanized to cope with the influx of raw materials and remove a democratic restraint upon growth. Mandatory minimums and the sentencing guidelines have served to remove discretion from judges, turning them into little more than secretaries for the legislature.

As the the profit motive has invaded the judicial system to such an extent, and judges have lost their status, we should not be surprised by stories like this one from the Associated Press:

For years, the juvenile court system in Wilkes-Barre operated like a conveyor belt: Youngsters were brought before judges without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent off to juvenile prison for months for minor offenses. 

The explanation, prosecutors say, was corruption on the bench. 

In one of the most shocking cases of courtroom graft on record, two Pennsylvania judges have been charged with taking millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.