AI
Thursday, March 05, 2009 3:06:21 AM
Penn. Judges Get Kickbacks for Placing Youths in Privately Owned Jails
[video of segment embedded, view at source link first below (links to Real Video and Real Audio streams and MP3 download also included)]
Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
February 17, 2009
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.
Guests:
Bob Schwartz, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Juvenile Law Center, which helped expose the corrupt judges and is now involved in the class-action suit brought on behalf of the jailed youths’ families.
Jamie Quinn, spent more than eleven months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella.
Kurt Kruger, spent more than four months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner in Pennsylvania reading his commentary “With Judges Like These” (Prison Radio Project)
Rush Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: 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 that juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Some of the young people 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.
In addition to the jailing of the youths, the judges also admitted to helping “facilitate” the construction of private jails. The US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Martin Carlson, unveiled the charges last month.
MARTIN CARLSON: These payments were made to the judges, it is alleged, in return for discretionary acts by the judges favoring these businesses, acts relating to the construction, expansion, operation of these juvenile facilities and acts relating to the placement of juveniles in these facilities.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Judges Ciavarella and Conahan entered guilty pleas on charges of wire fraud and income tax fraud. They’re currently free on a $1 million bail bond pending sentencing. Their plea agreements call for jail sentences of more than seven years. No charges have been filed against the private prisons that paid the bribes.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has appointed an outside judge to review all the cases tried by Ciavarella and Conahan. But the case has prompted calls for broader reforms of the juvenile justice system in Pennsylvania and nationwide.
We’re joined now by two of the thousands of youths jailed by the corrupt judges. On the line with us from Scranton, Pennsylvania, eighteen-year-old Jamie Quinn is with us. She spent more than eleven months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella as a first-time offender. Also on the line in the nearby town of Wilkes-Barre is twenty-two-year-old Kurt Kruger. Another first-time offender, he spent more than four months in a privately run prison—juvenile prison camp after also being sentenced by Judge Ciavarella.
And joining us in a studio in Philadelphia is Bob Schwartz. He is a co-founder and executive director of the Juvenile Law Center, which helped expose the corrupt judges and is now involved in the class-action suit brought on behalf of the jailed youths’ families.
We asked PA Child Care, the main private jail company linked to the bribes, to come on the broadcast. We were directed to an attorney who didn’t respond to our request.
Bob Schwartz, let’s start with you. When did all this begin to be revealed? How did it all happen?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Thanks, Amy, and thanks for having Kurt, Jamie and me on your show.
This has been going on, we believe, in Luzerne County since 2003. It came to Juvenile Law Center’s attention a couple of years ago, when we heard from the mother of one of the girls whom we ended up representing, a young woman named Hillary Transue, who was brought into court, found guilty, sent away for an internet parody of an assistant principal at her high school. Her mother found us, and when we were able to bring a habeas corpus petition on Hillary’s behalf, she told our attorneys that she wasn’t the only one who had been locked up by Judge Ciavarella, that there were lots of other kids in the same situation. That was a couple of years ago.
And we began investigating and found that Luzerne County had half of the waivers of counsel in Pennsylvania of all the cases in which lawyers were waived by young people in juvenile court. 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. So, she was sent away. We investigated and last year, about a year ago, brought a petition before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court asking them to take a look at all of the cases in which kids were tried and adjudicated delinquent and many sent away without a lawyer. We thought that was the problem. That turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. When we filed, it turned out that the FBI began its investigation and found the corruption that you spoke about at the top of this segment.
AMY GOODMAN: And just very briefly, Hillary—explain what she did. A cartoon?
BOB SCHWARTZ: She had done a—I think a MySpace parody of her—of an assistant principal, a paragraph or two, with internet humor of an adolescent variety, finishing by saying, “I hope that Mrs. Smith”—or Jones—“has a sense of humor.” It turned out that the assistant principal didn’t, we gather, at least, complained to the police, who filed a harassment petition against Hillary. This is the kind of case, like Kurt’s and like Jamie’s, that never should have been in court in the first place, let alone get to a trial. Juvenile court is not designed for this kind of adolescent misbehavior. The cases should have been diverted entirely. Instead, Hillary and Kurt and Jamie and thousands of others were used by the court for profit, while many people over many years stood by watching.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Jamie Quinn right now. Jamie, welcome to Democracy Now!
JAMIE QUINN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Are you speaking to us from your house?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were in jail for almost a year. Where were you imprisoned? What was the name of this juvenile prison camp?
JAMIE QUINN: Well, first, I was told that I was only going to be at PA Child Care for up to three days. I was there for a week and then got sent to a military boot camp called VisionQuest in Quincy Township. It’s about an hour and a half away. And I spent most of my time there. And then I got FTA’ed from there and sent to—back to PA Child Care—
AMY GOODMAN: And “FTA’ed” means…?
JAMIE QUINN: Failure to adjust. And then I got sent back to PA Child Care, was there for about two weeks, because they said they couldn’t find a bed for me, and they didn’t know like where to place me. And then I went to a step-down program. They told me I needed to go there in order to be able to go back into the community. And I went to Wilkes-Barre, a place in Wilkes-Barre which is called Bridgeview.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, just step back for a second, Jamie.
JAMIE QUINN: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us why you were convicted.
JAMIE QUINN: Well, I was about fourteen years old, and 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 was no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word. My only charges were simple assault and harassment. And I didn’t even know that charges were pressed against me until I had to go down to the intake and probation and fill out a whole bunch of paperwork.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait. So that is what you went to jail for almost a year for?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How old were you?
JAMIE QUINN: I was fourteen, turning fifteen, and my court hearing was December 20th, three days before my birthday.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. Then we’re going to come back, and we’re going to hear Kurt’s story, Kurt Kruger, who was also imprisoned by one of these corrupt judges for more than four months. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the case of two judges who have pled guilty to receiving $2.6 million in return for placing youths in privately owned jails. Today, we’re speaking with two of those youths. Jamie Quinn just told us her story. We now turn to Kurt Kruger.
Kurt, tell us how you ended up in one of these privately run juvenile prison camps for more than four months. How did you get there?
KURT KRUGER: Well, first off, thank you for having us.
Basically, I was with a girl who was shoplifting DVDs from a Wal-Mart, local Wal-Mart, and we were caught, and I was considered the lookout. And it was basically just stupid kid stuff. The police came to the Wal-Mart and then called our parents. A week after this happened at Wal-Mart, they sent us letters that we were to appear in the probation office for interviews so they could decide court dates. And I then, after that interview, moved out of my father’s house because of personal problems. And at some point, a appearance in court did come to my house, a letter did come to my house, but I had no contact with my father, so I had no idea. The only idea I had of anything that was going on was that the girl who I was with, who was actually the one shoplifting, never received a letter of a court appearance or anything, never heard anything else about the case. So I thought that it was done and over with.
I was living with a friend for awhile, and I started going to school in the fall. I was eighteen at the time when I started going to school. I was seventeen when the incident occurred at Wal-Mart. I was in school one day, and I was called up to the probation officer’s office in the school, and there was a police officer there waiting for me, and he handcuffed me and led me out of the school and put me in the squad car and drove me up to PA Child Care in Pittston.
Since it was a Friday, I had to wait over the weekend to go in front of Judge Ciavarella, so I spent three days in PA Child Care, thinking the entire time that I screwed up but I was just going to get probation, at the worst. And I was then sentenced in a 90-second hearing. I was sentenced to Camp Adams for a minimum of ninety days. And I was never offered a lawyer, never explained my rights to a lawyer or what benefits it would have. I was just sent away to Camp Adams for at least ninety days, and I spent the better part of four-and-a-half months there.
AMY GOODMAN: And tell us about the judge, Mark Ciavarella, who sent you there and your reaction when you heard that he pled guilty.
KURT KRUGER: Shock, I guess. I mean, it was expected that he was going to plead guilty for this last week, but when all of this first started coming up, it was just absolute shock, because I had thought that I had just gotten a raw deal, that, you know, maybe possibly he was in a bad mood that day or something. I had never thought that the scope and the scale of this entire—of this entire investigation and what has come of it.
AMY GOODMAN: How old were you when you went to jail?
KURT KRUGER: I was eighteen at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamie, how did going to jail for almost a year, after your fight with your friend—how did that affect your life?
JAMIE QUINN: It affected me dramatically. I mean, you know, you think it wouldn’t, but it really has. I mean, I’ve lost friends over this. 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, and in my personal opinion, I think it’s because I was away and got locked up and was, I thought, getting, you know, punished for what I had did, which I don’t think I should have.
And I was just—I’m still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places are just horrible. Everybody gets put in the same level, and it’s just horrible. I’m still struggling. I’m graduating this year. And math is still not my favorite subject. I was like an A-B student before I went, and now I’m just struggling with Bs and Cs.
AMY GOODMAN: You began cutting yourself in jail?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think you started doing that?
JAMIE QUINN: Honestly, I never even—like I was never—I didn’t even know what it was until I was sent to VisionQuest. And 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. So, in my opinion, I think that it was the meds at the time. I mean, I was never medicated in my life nor diagnosed with depression. And that’s what I believe happened.
AMY GOODMAN: You were sent to the hospital three times—
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —during that almost year?
JAMIE QUINN: Yeah, Chambersburg Hospital.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob Schwartz, the plan now, and how much representation do young people have in Pennsylvania?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Well, in most Pennsylvania counties, almost all kids have a lawyer all the time. Pennsylvania law requires all youth to have a lawyer at the time of the first hearing before a detention officer to a judge at every subsequent hearing. Pennsylvania has granted kids, in many ways, more rights to lawyers than many states.
On the other hand, in Luzerne County, that was a right that was largely ignored. Lawyers doing their job would get in the way of this railroad from the bar or the court to Pennsylvania Child Care and other placements that was taking place in Luzerne County at the time. One of the things that we hope that will come out of this is that it will be much harder for any youth to appear before any judge without a lawyer in this state.
Meanwhile, there are several proceedings that are happening at the same time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear the case. They took the case after the US attorney acted at the end of January, and there will now be an examination of all 5,000 or so cases that took place in Luzerne County from 2003 forward. There are also going to be multiple civil rights actions in federal court in Scranton, going after not only the judges but others who conspired with them to hurt kids like Jamie and Kurt. What happened to them should never happen to a child in the United States of America.
AMY GOODMAN: And the role of the police in the schools, very briefly, in this, Bob Schwartz?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Well, the police were ordered to make an arrest. You know, it really varies in so many ways. They were obviously told in Kurt’s case to bring him to court, because there was a court warrant issued, because he had failed to appear for a hearing that he didn’t know about. They might have acted differently, but certainly the probation department and the court should have acted differently. The probation department was intimidated by the judges. They are court employees. And one of the things that the information of the US attorney claims is that Judge Ciavarella and Judge Conahan had probation officers change their recommendations, ordered them to change their recommendations, in order to make sure that they had enough kids to fill slots at these childcare facilities.
AMY GOODMAN: And the childcare facilities themselves? They paid the bribes.
BOB SCHWARTZ: They paid, and the federal proceedings will bring to light what their role actually was. Right now, they have not been charged criminally, but they are inevitably a defendant in every civil rights proceeding.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re talking about 5,000 kids like Jamie, like Kurt. How much jail time do these judges face?
BOB SCHWARTZ: They’ve pled and are expecting to get eighty-seven months in federal prison. That’s a little more than seven years, if the judge accepts the plea bargain.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamie, how do you feel about that?
JAMIE QUINN: It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we’re supposed to look up to and trust. I mean, Ciavarella has been a judge for a long time, from what I know, and a well-respected one, is what I thought. And obviously not. It just really makes me question and not trust other people. I mean, if someone like Judge Ciavarella could do this, then it makes me believe that anyone can betray the law and—I don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: And Kurt, your final comment?
KURT KRUGER: Well, basically, I just want to say that finally there’s some sort of closure, for me, at least, coming from the lawsuits from the Juvenile Law Center. There’s at least a little bit of closure for me, and I hope that’s the same case for everyone who’s involved.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kurt Kruger and Jamie Quinn, thanks so much for being with us, and Bob Schwartz, as well. I want to turn now to the commentary that alerted us to this story, of Mumia Abu-Jamal. He’s been on Pennsylvania’s death row for more than twenty-five years.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: “With Judges Like These.” In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, there are nine judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prisons’ builders and owners. According to published accounts, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan sent hundreds of boys and girls to the private facility and pocketed some $2.5 million in kickbacks. This was accomplished not merely because of the venal greed of the judges, but because virtually none of the children were provided with legal representation.
When the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center filed a petition in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, calling the county’s practice of adjudicating and sentencing some 250 kids to jail without legal representation unconstitutional, the state’s highest court denied the petition on January 8th. A month later, they changed their minds, vacating the denial. What transpired in the interim? Well, for one thing, the two judges pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire service fraud. Hundreds of children get sucked into jail after clearly unconstitutional proceedings with no legal representation, and the state supreme court doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. The media reports on this outrage, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expresses a little interest.
This is the nature of judging these days, when even kids are expendable fodder for the prison-industrial complex. Luzerne County is the state’s tenth largest county with just over 300,000 souls. At least 22 percent of their judges have admitted being corrupt in the sordid business of selling the freedom of poor children for profit.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
AMY GOODMAN: And we thank the Prison Radio Project in San Francisco and Noelle Hanrahan.
Copyright 2009 DemocracyNow.org
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/17/penn_judges_plead_guilty_to_taking
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Ruining young lives for profit
Michael Conahan (left) and Mark Ciavarella (right)
Nicole Colson reports on two Pennsylvania judges who took millions in kickbacks for keeping for-profit juvenile detention centers filled to overflowing.
February 19, 2009
"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 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.
Copyright 2009 SocialistWorker.org
http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/19/ruining-young-lives-for-profit [also at http://www.counterpunch.org/colson02272009.html ]
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Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months in juvenile detention for a spoof Web page mocking an assistant principal.
February 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?pagewanted=all ]
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U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money
Feb 12, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE51B7B320090212
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Lawyer sees case for ex-juvie workers
The 16 were laid off when the center closed in 2002, replaced by a private one
February 27, 2009
http://www.timesleader.com/news/20090227_27juvie_sm_ART.html
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The lowest of the low
Another blow against elected judges
Feb 26th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
EARLIER this month, two judges in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County admitted sentencing thousands of children to jail in return for kickbacks from a prison-management company. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received a commission for every day they sent a child to private juvenile detention centres run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company. The pay-offs came to $2.6m over seven years.
“It just makes me think that anyone can betray the law,” says Jamie Quinn, one of the children exploited by the judges. Ms Quinn, from Scranton, was sent to juvenile prison for nine months at 14, after slapping a friend who, she claims, slapped her first.
Hillary Transue, who is 15 and faced Mr Ciavarella without a lawyer, was sentenced to three months because she constructed a fake MySpace page ridiculing the assistant principal at her high school. Her case led to the judges’ downfall; children have a constitutional right to a lawyer, and the case first alerted Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Centre. His organisation exposed the larger crime.
Adam Graycar, of the Rutgers Institute on Corruption Studies, explains that what is really unusual about this tale is the scale of the corruption. First the judges received monetary rewards for sanctioning the building of a new private-sector prison in their area. Second, they were paid for closing a county-funded prison nearby. And, then, of course, they offered up the “juvenile delinquents” for the benefit of the owners of the new jail. Both judges were elected, not appointed.
The judges are going to jail, but the prison companies have so far avoided prosecution. Mr Schwartz fears this is because Robert Powell, the former co-owner of Pennsylvania Child Care, has been co-operating with the authorities. If the prisons get off, though, that will be another disgrace.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185306 [comments at http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185306&mode=comment&intent=readBottom ]
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When prisons jail kids for cash
Clarence Page
March 1, 2009
While many Americans, including me, were caught up in the fury around the New York Post's weird dead chimpanzee cartoon, remarkably less attention was paid to a far more serious scandal in Pennsylvania's coal country: a multimillion-dollar scheme to jail kids for cash.
The tale of two Luzerne County judges shows what can go terribly wrong with for-profit prisons and detention centers.
Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to sentencing thousands of children to jail, often without the offenders having access to a lawyer, in a kickback scheme that brought the judges a reported $2.6 million.
The two received a commission for every day they sent a child to private detention centers run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister prison-management company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care.
As many as 2,000 kids are reported to have been incarcerated out of 5,000 who were sentenced while the scheme was in operation. They included Jamie Quinn, a 14-year-old Scranton girl who was sent to juvenile jail for nine months. Her offense? Slapping a friend who, she claims, slapped her first. Hardly a hardened criminal.
The case cracked open after Hillary Transue, 15, was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parody of an assistant principal at her school. As in many of the other cases, her mother had been persuaded to waive the girl's right to a lawyer. Her hearing before Ciavarella lasted less than two minutes.
After the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center took her case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the FBI began an investigation. The two judges entered guilty-plea agreements in February for tax evasion and wire fraud. Three class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.
But 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.
Kids are doubly vulnerable, an Associated Press nationwide survey found last year. Lax oversight and soft standards for tracking abuse make it hard to tell exactly how many youngsters have been assaulted or neglected.
The survey of state public and privately contracted juvenile correction agencies found more than 13,000 claims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse by staff members from Jan. 1, 2004, to the end of 2007, although only 1,343 of those claims of abuse—including 143 claims of sexual abuse—were confirmed by various authorities.
A big part of the problem in dealing with troubled youths is that some will make up stories. Some who suffer real abuse are pressured not to report it and when they do, too often they are not believed.
All of which makes it very important that we pay attention to the people we taxpayers pay to deal with kids who get into serious trouble. For a lot of kids who have substance abuse problems, severe educational needs and mental health traumas, our juvenile facilities offer hope of last resort.
At least, that's what they're supposed to do. For the Pennsylvania judges, juvenile correction facilities became a cash cow. Systems that pay contractors per diem rates according to how may kids they warehouse invite abuse.
That's why I was appalled that the confessions of Ciavarella and Conahan were overshadowed completely by other news, like the Post's chimpanzee cartoon. Civil rights activists, among other folks, thought the cartoon was a crude mockery of President Barack Obama as an ape. It sparked national protests and an apology from the Post and Rupert Murdoch, head of the newspaper's owner, News Corp., who insisted it was a lampoon of the economic stimulus bill.
But where, I wondered, is the outrage over a system that encouraged two Pennsylvania judges to jail kids for cash? Since the kids were a racial mix in a predominantly white area of the state, I wondered: When the issue is more about class than race, do civil rights leaders stop caring about kids?
Or maybe, like the rest of us, it's easier for them to get excited about race when it helps us to avoid dealing with the far more vexing issue of economic inequality.
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0301pagemar01,0,285354.column [comments at http://www.topix.net/forum/source/chicago-tribune/TGDBJTIT7RRUV2VBU ]
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Capitalism, criminal justice a bad combination
deron snyder • February 28, 2009
Maybe this is what it takes to finally wake us up, a pair of corrupt judges pleading guilty to taking $2.6 million in kickbacks over a seven-year period.
Maybe their despicable deal to stockpile private detention centers with harmless juvenile offenders will force us to confess the dangers of “capitalist punishment.”
In Pennsylvania, former Luzerne County judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan have been disbarred and have resigned their elected positions. They copped pleas this month on federal fraud charges, each man agreeing to serve 87 months in prison.
Prosecutors say the judges not only took kickbacks from two for-profit detention centers, but Conahan helped the facilities land contracts worth $58 million after he shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002.
The nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia said an estimated 5,000 juveniles appeared before Ciavarella since 2003 — hundreds without lawyers — and many were locked up for months, including first-time offenders accused of minor infractions. They were incarcerated even after probation officers recommended against it.
How ridiculous were some of the sentences?
One high school student received three months for mocking her assistant principal on MySpace, while another teen received five months for helping a friend swipe DVDs from Wal-Mart.
Though the Luzerne County case is disgusting, the problem with private prisons runs deeper than two greedy, amoral judges.
If any part of the criminal justice system is designed to make a profit, it’s not motivated to decrease the rate of incarceration and recidivism.
On the contrary, it has incentives to balance the budget and maximize the margins, while ensuring that cells are occupied, expenses are low and the stream remains steady.
So it’s no wonder that the prison industry works so hard to increase the number of people sent to jail, and extend their stays as long as possible.
Bonuses are at stake!
No wonder the industry’s campaign contributions and lobbying dollars focus on candidates and states in favor of “three-strike laws” and “mandatory minimum sentences.”
No wonder economically challenged and poverty-stricken states such as New Mexico — where nearly half of the state’s prisons and jails are run by corporations — are so open to the concept.
The industry which began making inroads by claiming it could save money for states, now presents itself as a job-bearing economic savior.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that business is booming for private prisons, partially due to a crackdown on illegal immigration and longer mandatory sentences for certain crimes.
Between Corrections Corp. and Geo Group, the USA’s biggest private-prison operators, we’ll see 28 new or expanded jails between 2008 and 2010.
Good luck to proponents of sentencing reform, or anyone who champions creative methods to prevent crime and reduce recidivism.
That would take a lot of money out of a lot of people’s pockets.
And it won’t come easy.
Instead of arguing whether we’re “tough on crime” or “soft on crime,” here’s a suggestion:
Let’s be “smart on crime.”
That means putting resources and incentives in place to steer people clear of prison.
Not the other way around.
Copyright ©2009 news-press.com
http://www.news-press.com/article/20090228/COLUMNISTS06/90228006/1015/OPINION [with comments]
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Wrongly jailed kids case is just tip of iceberg
Amy Goodman
February 26, 2009
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 this 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, often without any 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."
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 [is] 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."
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. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Ciavarella.
As Bob Schwartz of the JLC said: "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. 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 United States, and one relatively small private prison company. 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.
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.
Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio new hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. Send e-mail to kfswriters@hearst.com.
Copyright © 2009, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_agoodman_0226feb26,0,1958177.story
[video of segment embedded, view at source link first below (links to Real Video and Real Audio streams and MP3 download also included)]
Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
February 17, 2009
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.
Guests:
Bob Schwartz, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Juvenile Law Center, which helped expose the corrupt judges and is now involved in the class-action suit brought on behalf of the jailed youths’ families.
Jamie Quinn, spent more than eleven months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella.
Kurt Kruger, spent more than four months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, death row prisoner in Pennsylvania reading his commentary “With Judges Like These” (Prison Radio Project)
Rush Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: 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 that juvenile suspects were jailed in prisons operated by the companies Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care. Some of the young people 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.
In addition to the jailing of the youths, the judges also admitted to helping “facilitate” the construction of private jails. The US attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Martin Carlson, unveiled the charges last month.
MARTIN CARLSON: These payments were made to the judges, it is alleged, in return for discretionary acts by the judges favoring these businesses, acts relating to the construction, expansion, operation of these juvenile facilities and acts relating to the placement of juveniles in these facilities.
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Judges Ciavarella and Conahan entered guilty pleas on charges of wire fraud and income tax fraud. They’re currently free on a $1 million bail bond pending sentencing. Their plea agreements call for jail sentences of more than seven years. No charges have been filed against the private prisons that paid the bribes.
Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has appointed an outside judge to review all the cases tried by Ciavarella and Conahan. But the case has prompted calls for broader reforms of the juvenile justice system in Pennsylvania and nationwide.
We’re joined now by two of the thousands of youths jailed by the corrupt judges. On the line with us from Scranton, Pennsylvania, eighteen-year-old Jamie Quinn is with us. She spent more than eleven months in a privately run juvenile prison camp after being sentenced by Judge Mark Ciavarella as a first-time offender. Also on the line in the nearby town of Wilkes-Barre is twenty-two-year-old Kurt Kruger. Another first-time offender, he spent more than four months in a privately run prison—juvenile prison camp after also being sentenced by Judge Ciavarella.
And joining us in a studio in Philadelphia is Bob Schwartz. He is a co-founder and executive director of the Juvenile Law Center, which helped expose the corrupt judges and is now involved in the class-action suit brought on behalf of the jailed youths’ families.
We asked PA Child Care, the main private jail company linked to the bribes, to come on the broadcast. We were directed to an attorney who didn’t respond to our request.
Bob Schwartz, let’s start with you. When did all this begin to be revealed? How did it all happen?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Thanks, Amy, and thanks for having Kurt, Jamie and me on your show.
This has been going on, we believe, in Luzerne County since 2003. It came to Juvenile Law Center’s attention a couple of years ago, when we heard from the mother of one of the girls whom we ended up representing, a young woman named Hillary Transue, who was brought into court, found guilty, sent away for an internet parody of an assistant principal at her high school. Her mother found us, and when we were able to bring a habeas corpus petition on Hillary’s behalf, she told our attorneys that she wasn’t the only one who had been locked up by Judge Ciavarella, that there were lots of other kids in the same situation. That was a couple of years ago.
And we began investigating and found that Luzerne County had half of the waivers of counsel in Pennsylvania of all the cases in which lawyers were waived by young people in juvenile court. 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. So, she was sent away. We investigated and last year, about a year ago, brought a petition before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court asking them to take a look at all of the cases in which kids were tried and adjudicated delinquent and many sent away without a lawyer. We thought that was the problem. That turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. When we filed, it turned out that the FBI began its investigation and found the corruption that you spoke about at the top of this segment.
AMY GOODMAN: And just very briefly, Hillary—explain what she did. A cartoon?
BOB SCHWARTZ: She had done a—I think a MySpace parody of her—of an assistant principal, a paragraph or two, with internet humor of an adolescent variety, finishing by saying, “I hope that Mrs. Smith”—or Jones—“has a sense of humor.” It turned out that the assistant principal didn’t, we gather, at least, complained to the police, who filed a harassment petition against Hillary. This is the kind of case, like Kurt’s and like Jamie’s, that never should have been in court in the first place, let alone get to a trial. Juvenile court is not designed for this kind of adolescent misbehavior. The cases should have been diverted entirely. Instead, Hillary and Kurt and Jamie and thousands of others were used by the court for profit, while many people over many years stood by watching.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to Jamie Quinn right now. Jamie, welcome to Democracy Now!
JAMIE QUINN: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Are you speaking to us from your house?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: So, you were in jail for almost a year. Where were you imprisoned? What was the name of this juvenile prison camp?
JAMIE QUINN: Well, first, I was told that I was only going to be at PA Child Care for up to three days. I was there for a week and then got sent to a military boot camp called VisionQuest in Quincy Township. It’s about an hour and a half away. And I spent most of my time there. And then I got FTA’ed from there and sent to—back to PA Child Care—
AMY GOODMAN: And “FTA’ed” means…?
JAMIE QUINN: Failure to adjust. And then I got sent back to PA Child Care, was there for about two weeks, because they said they couldn’t find a bed for me, and they didn’t know like where to place me. And then I went to a step-down program. They told me I needed to go there in order to be able to go back into the community. And I went to Wilkes-Barre, a place in Wilkes-Barre which is called Bridgeview.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, just step back for a second, Jamie.
JAMIE QUINN: OK.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us why you were convicted.
JAMIE QUINN: Well, I was about fourteen years old, and 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 was no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word. My only charges were simple assault and harassment. And I didn’t even know that charges were pressed against me until I had to go down to the intake and probation and fill out a whole bunch of paperwork.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait. So that is what you went to jail for almost a year for?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: How old were you?
JAMIE QUINN: I was fourteen, turning fifteen, and my court hearing was December 20th, three days before my birthday.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. Then we’re going to come back, and we’re going to hear Kurt’s story, Kurt Kruger, who was also imprisoned by one of these corrupt judges for more than four months. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about the case of two judges who have pled guilty to receiving $2.6 million in return for placing youths in privately owned jails. Today, we’re speaking with two of those youths. Jamie Quinn just told us her story. We now turn to Kurt Kruger.
Kurt, tell us how you ended up in one of these privately run juvenile prison camps for more than four months. How did you get there?
KURT KRUGER: Well, first off, thank you for having us.
Basically, I was with a girl who was shoplifting DVDs from a Wal-Mart, local Wal-Mart, and we were caught, and I was considered the lookout. And it was basically just stupid kid stuff. The police came to the Wal-Mart and then called our parents. A week after this happened at Wal-Mart, they sent us letters that we were to appear in the probation office for interviews so they could decide court dates. And I then, after that interview, moved out of my father’s house because of personal problems. And at some point, a appearance in court did come to my house, a letter did come to my house, but I had no contact with my father, so I had no idea. The only idea I had of anything that was going on was that the girl who I was with, who was actually the one shoplifting, never received a letter of a court appearance or anything, never heard anything else about the case. So I thought that it was done and over with.
I was living with a friend for awhile, and I started going to school in the fall. I was eighteen at the time when I started going to school. I was seventeen when the incident occurred at Wal-Mart. I was in school one day, and I was called up to the probation officer’s office in the school, and there was a police officer there waiting for me, and he handcuffed me and led me out of the school and put me in the squad car and drove me up to PA Child Care in Pittston.
Since it was a Friday, I had to wait over the weekend to go in front of Judge Ciavarella, so I spent three days in PA Child Care, thinking the entire time that I screwed up but I was just going to get probation, at the worst. And I was then sentenced in a 90-second hearing. I was sentenced to Camp Adams for a minimum of ninety days. And I was never offered a lawyer, never explained my rights to a lawyer or what benefits it would have. I was just sent away to Camp Adams for at least ninety days, and I spent the better part of four-and-a-half months there.
AMY GOODMAN: And tell us about the judge, Mark Ciavarella, who sent you there and your reaction when you heard that he pled guilty.
KURT KRUGER: Shock, I guess. I mean, it was expected that he was going to plead guilty for this last week, but when all of this first started coming up, it was just absolute shock, because I had thought that I had just gotten a raw deal, that, you know, maybe possibly he was in a bad mood that day or something. I had never thought that the scope and the scale of this entire—of this entire investigation and what has come of it.
AMY GOODMAN: How old were you when you went to jail?
KURT KRUGER: I was eighteen at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamie, how did going to jail for almost a year, after your fight with your friend—how did that affect your life?
JAMIE QUINN: It affected me dramatically. I mean, you know, you think it wouldn’t, but it really has. I mean, I’ve lost friends over this. 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, and in my personal opinion, I think it’s because I was away and got locked up and was, I thought, getting, you know, punished for what I had did, which I don’t think I should have.
And I was just—I’m still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places are just horrible. Everybody gets put in the same level, and it’s just horrible. I’m still struggling. I’m graduating this year. And math is still not my favorite subject. I was like an A-B student before I went, and now I’m just struggling with Bs and Cs.
AMY GOODMAN: You began cutting yourself in jail?
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Why do you think you started doing that?
JAMIE QUINN: Honestly, I never even—like I was never—I didn’t even know what it was until I was sent to VisionQuest. And 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. So, in my opinion, I think that it was the meds at the time. I mean, I was never medicated in my life nor diagnosed with depression. And that’s what I believe happened.
AMY GOODMAN: You were sent to the hospital three times—
JAMIE QUINN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —during that almost year?
JAMIE QUINN: Yeah, Chambersburg Hospital.
AMY GOODMAN: Bob Schwartz, the plan now, and how much representation do young people have in Pennsylvania?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Well, in most Pennsylvania counties, almost all kids have a lawyer all the time. Pennsylvania law requires all youth to have a lawyer at the time of the first hearing before a detention officer to a judge at every subsequent hearing. Pennsylvania has granted kids, in many ways, more rights to lawyers than many states.
On the other hand, in Luzerne County, that was a right that was largely ignored. Lawyers doing their job would get in the way of this railroad from the bar or the court to Pennsylvania Child Care and other placements that was taking place in Luzerne County at the time. One of the things that we hope that will come out of this is that it will be much harder for any youth to appear before any judge without a lawyer in this state.
Meanwhile, there are several proceedings that are happening at the same time. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear the case. They took the case after the US attorney acted at the end of January, and there will now be an examination of all 5,000 or so cases that took place in Luzerne County from 2003 forward. There are also going to be multiple civil rights actions in federal court in Scranton, going after not only the judges but others who conspired with them to hurt kids like Jamie and Kurt. What happened to them should never happen to a child in the United States of America.
AMY GOODMAN: And the role of the police in the schools, very briefly, in this, Bob Schwartz?
BOB SCHWARTZ: Well, the police were ordered to make an arrest. You know, it really varies in so many ways. They were obviously told in Kurt’s case to bring him to court, because there was a court warrant issued, because he had failed to appear for a hearing that he didn’t know about. They might have acted differently, but certainly the probation department and the court should have acted differently. The probation department was intimidated by the judges. They are court employees. And one of the things that the information of the US attorney claims is that Judge Ciavarella and Judge Conahan had probation officers change their recommendations, ordered them to change their recommendations, in order to make sure that they had enough kids to fill slots at these childcare facilities.
AMY GOODMAN: And the childcare facilities themselves? They paid the bribes.
BOB SCHWARTZ: They paid, and the federal proceedings will bring to light what their role actually was. Right now, they have not been charged criminally, but they are inevitably a defendant in every civil rights proceeding.
AMY GOODMAN: So, we’re talking about 5,000 kids like Jamie, like Kurt. How much jail time do these judges face?
BOB SCHWARTZ: They’ve pled and are expecting to get eighty-seven months in federal prison. That’s a little more than seven years, if the judge accepts the plea bargain.
AMY GOODMAN: Jamie, how do you feel about that?
JAMIE QUINN: It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we’re supposed to look up to and trust. I mean, Ciavarella has been a judge for a long time, from what I know, and a well-respected one, is what I thought. And obviously not. It just really makes me question and not trust other people. I mean, if someone like Judge Ciavarella could do this, then it makes me believe that anyone can betray the law and—I don’t know.
AMY GOODMAN: And Kurt, your final comment?
KURT KRUGER: Well, basically, I just want to say that finally there’s some sort of closure, for me, at least, coming from the lawsuits from the Juvenile Law Center. There’s at least a little bit of closure for me, and I hope that’s the same case for everyone who’s involved.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Kurt Kruger and Jamie Quinn, thanks so much for being with us, and Bob Schwartz, as well. I want to turn now to the commentary that alerted us to this story, of Mumia Abu-Jamal. He’s been on Pennsylvania’s death row for more than twenty-five years.
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: “With Judges Like These.” In Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County, there are nine judges of the Court of Common Pleas. Two of them just pleaded guilty to a conspiracy to convict and sentence juveniles to a private prison, so that they could get kickbacks from the prisons’ builders and owners. According to published accounts, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael T. Conahan sent hundreds of boys and girls to the private facility and pocketed some $2.5 million in kickbacks. This was accomplished not merely because of the venal greed of the judges, but because virtually none of the children were provided with legal representation.
When the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center filed a petition in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, calling the county’s practice of adjudicating and sentencing some 250 kids to jail without legal representation unconstitutional, the state’s highest court denied the petition on January 8th. A month later, they changed their minds, vacating the denial. What transpired in the interim? Well, for one thing, the two judges pleaded guilty to federal charges of wire service fraud. Hundreds of children get sucked into jail after clearly unconstitutional proceedings with no legal representation, and the state supreme court doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. The media reports on this outrage, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court expresses a little interest.
This is the nature of judging these days, when even kids are expendable fodder for the prison-industrial complex. Luzerne County is the state’s tenth largest county with just over 300,000 souls. At least 22 percent of their judges have admitted being corrupt in the sordid business of selling the freedom of poor children for profit.
From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
AMY GOODMAN: And we thank the Prison Radio Project in San Francisco and Noelle Hanrahan.
Copyright 2009 DemocracyNow.org
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/17/penn_judges_plead_guilty_to_taking
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Ruining young lives for profit
Michael Conahan (left) and Mark Ciavarella (right)
Nicole Colson reports on two Pennsylvania judges who took millions in kickbacks for keeping for-profit juvenile detention centers filled to overflowing.
February 19, 2009
"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 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.
Copyright 2009 SocialistWorker.org
http://socialistworker.org/2009/02/19/ruining-young-lives-for-profit [also at http://www.counterpunch.org/colson02272009.html ]
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Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit
Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months in juvenile detention for a spoof Web page mocking an assistant principal.
February 12, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?pagewanted=all ]
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U.S. judges admit to jailing children for money
Feb 12, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE51B7B320090212
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Lawyer sees case for ex-juvie workers
The 16 were laid off when the center closed in 2002, replaced by a private one
February 27, 2009
http://www.timesleader.com/news/20090227_27juvie_sm_ART.html
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The lowest of the low
Another blow against elected judges
Feb 26th 2009 | NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
EARLIER this month, two judges in Pennsylvania’s Luzerne County admitted sentencing thousands of children to jail in return for kickbacks from a prison-management company. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received a commission for every day they sent a child to private juvenile detention centres run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company. The pay-offs came to $2.6m over seven years.
“It just makes me think that anyone can betray the law,” says Jamie Quinn, one of the children exploited by the judges. Ms Quinn, from Scranton, was sent to juvenile prison for nine months at 14, after slapping a friend who, she claims, slapped her first.
Hillary Transue, who is 15 and faced Mr Ciavarella without a lawyer, was sentenced to three months because she constructed a fake MySpace page ridiculing the assistant principal at her high school. Her case led to the judges’ downfall; children have a constitutional right to a lawyer, and the case first alerted Robert Schwartz, executive director of the Juvenile Law Centre. His organisation exposed the larger crime.
Adam Graycar, of the Rutgers Institute on Corruption Studies, explains that what is really unusual about this tale is the scale of the corruption. First the judges received monetary rewards for sanctioning the building of a new private-sector prison in their area. Second, they were paid for closing a county-funded prison nearby. And, then, of course, they offered up the “juvenile delinquents” for the benefit of the owners of the new jail. Both judges were elected, not appointed.
The judges are going to jail, but the prison companies have so far avoided prosecution. Mr Schwartz fears this is because Robert Powell, the former co-owner of Pennsylvania Child Care, has been co-operating with the authorities. If the prisons get off, though, that will be another disgrace.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185306 [comments at http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13185306&mode=comment&intent=readBottom ]
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When prisons jail kids for cash
Clarence Page
March 1, 2009
While many Americans, including me, were caught up in the fury around the New York Post's weird dead chimpanzee cartoon, remarkably less attention was paid to a far more serious scandal in Pennsylvania's coal country: a multimillion-dollar scheme to jail kids for cash.
The tale of two Luzerne County judges shows what can go terribly wrong with for-profit prisons and detention centers.
Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan pleaded guilty to sentencing thousands of children to jail, often without the offenders having access to a lawyer, in a kickback scheme that brought the judges a reported $2.6 million.
The two received a commission for every day they sent a child to private detention centers run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister prison-management company, Western Pennsylvania Child Care.
As many as 2,000 kids are reported to have been incarcerated out of 5,000 who were sentenced while the scheme was in operation. They included Jamie Quinn, a 14-year-old Scranton girl who was sent to juvenile jail for nine months. Her offense? Slapping a friend who, she claims, slapped her first. Hardly a hardened criminal.
The case cracked open after Hillary Transue, 15, was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parody of an assistant principal at her school. As in many of the other cases, her mother had been persuaded to waive the girl's right to a lawyer. Her hearing before Ciavarella lasted less than two minutes.
After the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center took her case to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, the FBI began an investigation. The two judges entered guilty-plea agreements in February for tax evasion and wire fraud. Three class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.
But 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.
Kids are doubly vulnerable, an Associated Press nationwide survey found last year. Lax oversight and soft standards for tracking abuse make it hard to tell exactly how many youngsters have been assaulted or neglected.
The survey of state public and privately contracted juvenile correction agencies found more than 13,000 claims of physical, sexual and emotional abuse by staff members from Jan. 1, 2004, to the end of 2007, although only 1,343 of those claims of abuse—including 143 claims of sexual abuse—were confirmed by various authorities.
A big part of the problem in dealing with troubled youths is that some will make up stories. Some who suffer real abuse are pressured not to report it and when they do, too often they are not believed.
All of which makes it very important that we pay attention to the people we taxpayers pay to deal with kids who get into serious trouble. For a lot of kids who have substance abuse problems, severe educational needs and mental health traumas, our juvenile facilities offer hope of last resort.
At least, that's what they're supposed to do. For the Pennsylvania judges, juvenile correction facilities became a cash cow. Systems that pay contractors per diem rates according to how may kids they warehouse invite abuse.
That's why I was appalled that the confessions of Ciavarella and Conahan were overshadowed completely by other news, like the Post's chimpanzee cartoon. Civil rights activists, among other folks, thought the cartoon was a crude mockery of President Barack Obama as an ape. It sparked national protests and an apology from the Post and Rupert Murdoch, head of the newspaper's owner, News Corp., who insisted it was a lampoon of the economic stimulus bill.
But where, I wondered, is the outrage over a system that encouraged two Pennsylvania judges to jail kids for cash? Since the kids were a racial mix in a predominantly white area of the state, I wondered: When the issue is more about class than race, do civil rights leaders stop caring about kids?
Or maybe, like the rest of us, it's easier for them to get excited about race when it helps us to avoid dealing with the far more vexing issue of economic inequality.
Copyright © 2009, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped0301pagemar01,0,285354.column [comments at http://www.topix.net/forum/source/chicago-tribune/TGDBJTIT7RRUV2VBU ]
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Capitalism, criminal justice a bad combination
deron snyder • February 28, 2009
Maybe this is what it takes to finally wake us up, a pair of corrupt judges pleading guilty to taking $2.6 million in kickbacks over a seven-year period.
Maybe their despicable deal to stockpile private detention centers with harmless juvenile offenders will force us to confess the dangers of “capitalist punishment.”
In Pennsylvania, former Luzerne County judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan have been disbarred and have resigned their elected positions. They copped pleas this month on federal fraud charges, each man agreeing to serve 87 months in prison.
Prosecutors say the judges not only took kickbacks from two for-profit detention centers, but Conahan helped the facilities land contracts worth $58 million after he shut down the county-run juvenile prison in 2002.
The nonprofit Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia said an estimated 5,000 juveniles appeared before Ciavarella since 2003 — hundreds without lawyers — and many were locked up for months, including first-time offenders accused of minor infractions. They were incarcerated even after probation officers recommended against it.
How ridiculous were some of the sentences?
One high school student received three months for mocking her assistant principal on MySpace, while another teen received five months for helping a friend swipe DVDs from Wal-Mart.
Though the Luzerne County case is disgusting, the problem with private prisons runs deeper than two greedy, amoral judges.
If any part of the criminal justice system is designed to make a profit, it’s not motivated to decrease the rate of incarceration and recidivism.
On the contrary, it has incentives to balance the budget and maximize the margins, while ensuring that cells are occupied, expenses are low and the stream remains steady.
So it’s no wonder that the prison industry works so hard to increase the number of people sent to jail, and extend their stays as long as possible.
Bonuses are at stake!
No wonder the industry’s campaign contributions and lobbying dollars focus on candidates and states in favor of “three-strike laws” and “mandatory minimum sentences.”
No wonder economically challenged and poverty-stricken states such as New Mexico — where nearly half of the state’s prisons and jails are run by corporations — are so open to the concept.
The industry which began making inroads by claiming it could save money for states, now presents itself as a job-bearing economic savior.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that business is booming for private prisons, partially due to a crackdown on illegal immigration and longer mandatory sentences for certain crimes.
Between Corrections Corp. and Geo Group, the USA’s biggest private-prison operators, we’ll see 28 new or expanded jails between 2008 and 2010.
Good luck to proponents of sentencing reform, or anyone who champions creative methods to prevent crime and reduce recidivism.
That would take a lot of money out of a lot of people’s pockets.
And it won’t come easy.
Instead of arguing whether we’re “tough on crime” or “soft on crime,” here’s a suggestion:
Let’s be “smart on crime.”
That means putting resources and incentives in place to steer people clear of prison.
Not the other way around.
Copyright ©2009 news-press.com
http://www.news-press.com/article/20090228/COLUMNISTS06/90228006/1015/OPINION [with comments]
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Wrongly jailed kids case is just tip of iceberg
Amy Goodman
February 26, 2009
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 this 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, often without any 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."
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 [is] 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."
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. The assistant principal didn't find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Ciavarella.
As Bob Schwartz of the JLC said: "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. 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 United States, and one relatively small private prison company. 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.
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.
Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio new hour airing on more than 700 stations in North America. Send e-mail to kfswriters@hearst.com.
Copyright © 2009, Newport News, Va., Daily Press
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_agoodman_0226feb26,0,1958177.story
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
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upon the Right of Election, 1790
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