Two Pennsylvania judges were accused of taking bribes to send teenagers to private detention centers.
Pennsylvania judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan have pleaded guilty to collecting more than $2.6 million in kickbacks for sending an estimated 5,000 teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers.
The scheme was straightforward. First they shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, claiming that it was in “poor condition” and that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers. Then Conahan secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders.
Ciavarella, meanwhile, took advantage of the fact that juvenile proceedings are typically kept closed to the public to impose unusually harsh sentences for minor infractions--even on first-time offenders--so they could keep those detention centers filled. A couple of examples:
A “stellar student who had never been in trouble” built a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school. The page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke. Ciavarella “sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.”
Another boy who “had never been in trouble” got into a fight with another boy and gave him a black eye. Ciavarella “sentenced [him] to 90 days in a detention facility” on a charge of assault.
“He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.”
Despite pleading guilty to felony charges in federal court, Ciavarella still denies “sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.”
