More than fifteen years after the “kids for cash” scandal shocked the nation, it’s back, stirring not just public incredulity but, for some, soul-slicing memories of hell on Earth.
This is thanks to Joe Biden’s decision to grant clemency to Michel Conahan, one of two juvenile-court judges in Luzerne County. Pennsylvania, convicted of accepting cash from private detention centers – as much as $2.8 million over a period of about six years – in exchange for sending them children (my God, as young as 8-years-old) convicted of petty offenses, such as fighting, shoplifting, underage drinking, to serve prolonged sentences in prison.
Conahan, along with Mark Ciavarella, had collected cash for sending more than 2,300 children to prison. Many of them were scarred for life by this experience. Some committed suicide.
“My son did nothing more than anything that most of us as kids did, you know, experimenting and living his life and making mistakes, that we usually all get to just learn and evolve and grow from. He did nothing more than be at an underaged drinking party with tons of other kids, but he was caught.”
This is Sandy Fonzo, speaking recently with Amy Goodman in a highly emotional interview on Democracy Now, in the wake of the news of Conahan’s clemency. Her son, a senior in high school, a star wrestler, spent a month in the juvenile detention center just as his senior year was beginning. He came out lost, emotionally shattered, wound up getting into a fight and had to stand before Judge Ciavarella again. This time he was walloped with an eight-month sentence.
“He lost his senior year.” Sandy said. “He never had the chance to wrestle again, any chance that he had for a scholarship. He came out of there very bitter, very angry, pent up with anger. He couldn’t look you in the eye. I don’t know what happened in that facility. My son was a very big, strong, proud boy, and he came out broken.
“. . . It changed him. It broke him. It stole his youth, his childhood. He would never, ever recover. And it just became too much, and he shot himself in the heart.”
Kids for cash! Her son wound up killing himself – and that’s just one story out of, presumably, thousands. A kid does a “bad” thing and, whoops, off to prison with you! At the time, I wrote in a column:
“Many of these kids had never been in trouble before and many of the offenses that netted jail time were trivial in the extreme. Sixteen-year-old Hillary T., for instance, who lampooned her assistant principal on MySpace, was given a three-month sentence. (With a lawyer’s help, she got out after one.) Kurt K. was in the company of someone who was caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart; accused of being a ‘lookout,’ he wound up doing almost a year of jail time. Jamie Q. exchanged slaps with a friend during an argument; she also was sent away for almost a year. She was 14.”
While the judicial corruption of “kids for cash” is glaring, that’s hardly the entirety of the issue. As I read and remember the details, I see something far larger quietly looming in the background, behind the judges’ criminality – behind what I called at the time “the blurring of the line between profit and state.” It’s the system itself: structured on the value and, indeed, the necessity, of punishment . . . of “war” . . . on all that is evil, from a kid stealing a candy bar to terrorists attacking America.
Here's how Bernie Sanders put it the other day, addressing his congressional colleagues as they were considering the passage of 2025’s National Defense Authorization, which allots $895 billion – two-thirds of the federal budget, for defense spending.
“When we talk about increasing Social Security benefits,” Sanders said, “well, ‘we just can’t afford to do that. We just can’t afford to expand Medicare to cover dental, hearing, or vision. We just cannot afford to make higher education in America affordable.’ That’s what I hear every single day. When there’s an effort to improve life for the working class of this country, I hear, ‘No, no, no, we can’t afford it.’ But when it comes to the military-industrial complex and their needs, what we hear is ‘yes, yes, yes’ with almost no debate.”
Understanding and transcending our troubles, our conflicts, is complex – way too complex, apparently, for so many of those in power to have the patience to try to comprehend, especially when they also have the far simpler option available of simply eliminating those troubles (no matter that it never works).
In a justice system immersed in such complexity – focused on understanding a lawbreaker rather than simply, and coldly, enforcing rules – corruption of various sorts would no doubt still be possible, but not at the simplistic, easily justified level of “kids for cash.”
This is the us-vs.-them mentality, a quick-grab governing concept that has given us both the military-industrial complex and the prison-industrial complex: two looming cash cows that define far too much of who we are as a nation. As the National Priorities Project noted in a 2023 report:
“In (fiscal year) 2023, out of a $1.8 trillion federal discretionary budget, $1.1 trillion — or 62 percent — was for militarized programs. That includes war and weapons, law enforcement and mass incarceration, and detention and deportation.”
I can only hope that the reawakened “kids for cash” outrage shines a light on more than just two convicted judges, one of whom received clemency after a dozen years of imprisonment. I certainly can understand the anguish and anger this could cause for anyone – parent or child – wounded by their corrupt actions. But maybe it’s also time for a collective reassessment of our criminal-“justice” system as a whole and, indeed, our moral certainty that punishment and war keep us safe.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His newly released album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments, is available here: https://linktr.ee/bobkoehler
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