The “Kids for Cash” Scandal
Inside the Luzerne County judicial scandal that inspired MINORS
Onstage at Lantern Theater Company May 23 through June 30, 2019, Minors is a world premiere musical by Kittson O’Neill and Robert Kaplowitz and inspired by the “kids for cash” scandal. The story — both the real story and the fictionalized version onstage — is one of corruption, greed, and a community looking the other way.
Both the play and the scandal have their roots in another time, one that reverberates today: the mining heyday of the late 19th century. In the mining company towns of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, the coal bosses ruled the day, and profit was their main driver. Safety regulations were ignored, workers were seen as disposable, and wages were low. Children as young as eight went to work in the coal breaker buildings, and if they survived the dangerous work would graduate to becoming a miner before eventually finding themselves back in the breaker as an old man. The company ran its employees lives, and extracted everything it could before casting them off.
Despite the great pride the workers took and still take in being miners, the corruption of the industry is symptomatic of and contributing to a larger culture. A community built around a company that prioritizes its own interests over those of its people might come to expect greed and hypocrisy as facts of public life. This expectation both fuels further corruption and pushes honest people to look the other way.
Nowhere was this more clear than with the “kids for cash” scandal. In 2009, judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan were convicted of accepting an illegal “finder’s fee” and kickbacks from a private juvenile detention facility ultimately amounting to $2.8 million. The scheme began in 2002 when the judges conspired with a private developer to open a for-profit detention center, close the government-run facility, and keep the center’s beds full of children who had been adjudicated delinquent.
Over the next seven years, the rates of juveniles appearing before Judge Ciavarella without a lawyer skyrocketed, as did the rate at which these kids were incarcerated and sent to the private facilities. Before the scheme, Ciavarella was remanding about 4% of juveniles who appeared before him to detention; during the scheme, it was nearly 25%. Some of the offenses were those you see in Minors, including parody social media accounts and vandalism. Other infractions that resulted in juvenile detention included stealing a $4 jar of nutmeg and throwing a sandal at a parent. Ciavarella told one juvenile to count the number of birds on the windowsill outside the courtroom, and then gave him one month detention for each bird.
Kids were being remanded for the smallest infraction — and doing so without their constitutionally protected right to a lawyer. The scheme hinged on families not understanding their child’s fundamental rights as American minors. While the Constitution does not apply as broadly to minors as it does to adults, the right to counsel in court proceedings is absolute. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that juvenile are entitled to due process, and per a Pennsylvania rule minors cannot waive this right without a colloquy — an on-the-record discussion with the judge where the minor is made to understand the charges and the risks of waiving counsel.
In “kids for cash,” this law was being purposefully flouted. Families signed counsel waivers without knowing their rights, making it easier for Ciavarella’s 60-second hearings with no testimony before ruling a juvenile delinquent and sentencing them to a detention facility. By the time the scandal was exposed, 50% of those appearing before Ciavarella were doing so without counsel, and he was remanding an average of 300 kids a year to detention, netting the judges further kickbacks.
Children, not coal, were the commodity in this scheme, but the culture of greed and profit as the primary goal echoes in the mines and in the courtroom. And the judges were allowed — even encouraged — to continue, due largely to the popularity of zero tolerance punishment policies and an unwillingness among the county’s citizens and courthouse employees to speak out.
It took a separate accusation of corruption to bring the scandal to light. In Philadelphia, the Juvenile Law Center received a call from the mother of a juvenile who was remanded for making a parody Myspace page for her vice principal. The JLC investigated; in their own words, the Center “advocates for rights, dignity, equity and opportunity for youth in the child welfare and justice systems.” When they uncovered the scandal — alongside Terrie Morgan-Besecke’s reporting in the Times Leader — the Center petitioned the Pennsylvania Supreme Court for relief. They were denied.
When both Conahan and Ciavarella were caught up in a separate corruption scandal involving organized crime, the Juvenile Law Center petitioned again, and ultimately won some measure of justice for the juveniles who were worth more to the judges incarcerated than free. But some of these juveniles were never able to recover from what they faced. Like the miners buried in cave-ins or floods caused by the voracious financial appetite of the company, these kids were lost to the greed of the judges and the apathy of those in the system who looked the other way.
Minors is onstage at the Lantern May 23 through June 30, 2019. Visit our website for tickets and information.
