Sending Children to Prison for Profit

There is a documentary film showing today at a New York film festival called “Kids for Cash” which will be generally available on February 5th next year. It is about two judges and assorted collaborators in Luzerne County (which includes Pittston, Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton), Pennsylvania, who profited by cruel and arbitrary sending of children to for-profit prisons.

William Ecenbarger wrote a detailed, readable, excellent book on the crime, entitled Kids for Cash:Two Judges, Thousands of Children and a $2.8 Million Kickback Scheme. The book came in the mail at about 5:00 PM last night and I couldn't put the damned thing down until I finished it at 5:00 AM this morning. I didn't want to read the book but I felt I had to read it, because this particular crime exemplified for me the whole Reagan era turn to selfishness, opportunism, the belief that social order derives ultimately from The Fist rather than love, that there is no such thing as society, and that money is a good measure of success and value.

Judge Mark A. Ciavarella

The Juvenile Court judge, Mark Ciavarella, had a friend build a juvenile prison, “PA Child Care,” in Pittston and another one in western PA, and then sent a steady stream of kids to keep those prisons full and immensely profitable for six years. The kids were arrested on ridiculous charges and given an average of four minutes hearing, during which most kids, who did not have lawyer representation, said only a couple words and often just cried, then were handcuffed, shackled, and taken off to prison. We are talking here about several thousand girls and boys under the age of sixteen over a period of six years.

It would be just monstrous for me to choose some quote from Ecenbarger's book to try to convey what it was like for, say, a ten-year-old to be taken away from his home for three to twelve months or more on some transparently dishonest charge and incarcerated in a harsh situation.

Rather, here is just one quote from the book (p. 240) which gets at another aspect. Basil G. Russin, who had been chief Public Defender for Luzerne County for twenty-six years, said the following to a commission of inquiry in justification of his own, and his staff's, silence, passivity, compliance and irresponsibility (p.240):

“Because everybody loved it. Everybody loved it. The schools absolutely loved it. They got rid of every bad kid in their school. When I was in school if you threw a spitball, maybe you went to the principal's office and sat for a couple periods. Last couple years if you threw a spitball, they got the police, and you ended up in juvenile court and got sent away. Schools got rid of all their problems. Parents, parents who had problems with the kid at home. They called the police. Police said, you want us to take him away? Sure. I can't control the kid anymore. Away the kid would go. Parents loved it. Police loved it. They knew every arrest they made the kid would get sent away. And despite what you heard this morning, the DA loved it because they were getting convictions. They were never losing cases.”