FYI

A news item in The New York Times: "Judges Plead Guilty in Payoffs for Jailing Youths" is more than just another example of corruption.

The Times reports: "prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled." An estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003.

The judges' moral turpitude aside, the story provides a glimpse into an unacknowledged relationship between law enforcement and psychiatry. Providers of psychiatric services rely on the juvenile detention system and child foster care system for a steady flow of "clients"--a government sanctioned referral system. The "care" provided to these involuntary "clients" is paid for by taxpayers.

This is a chilling reminder of the unholy alliance between Soviet psychiatry and the judiciary. In that regime, political dissidents were sentenced to the care of psychiatry. In the US, today, thousands upon thousands of children and adolescents are being condemned to equally painful, debilitating psychopharmacological treatments.

President Obama's administration needs to come up with a prescription for change: children should be protected from coercive, demonstrably harmful treatments--and hundreds of millions of dollars can be redirected for humane services.

Contact: Vera Hassner Sharav
212-595-8974
veracare@ahrp.org  

THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 13, 2009
Judges Plead Guilty in Payoffs for Jailing Youths
By IAN URBINA and SEAN D. HAMILL

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.

"I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare," said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. "All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing."

The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.

While prosecutors say that Judge Conahan, 56, secured contracts for the two centers to house juvenile offenders, Judge Ciavarella, 58, was the one who carried out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.

"In my entire career, I've never heard of anything remotely approaching this," said Senior Judge Arthur E. Grim, who was appointed by the State Supreme Court this week to determine what should be done with the estimated 5,000 juveniles who have been sentenced by Judge Ciavarella since the scheme started in 2003.

Many of them were first-time offenders and some remain in detention.

The case has shocked Luzerne County, an area in northeastern Pennsylvania that has been battered by a loss of industrial jobs and the closing of most of its anthracite coal mines.

And it raised concerns about whether juveniles should be required to have counsel either before or during their appearances in court and whether juvenile courts should be open to the public or child advocates.

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar. They are expected to be sentenced in the next several months. Lawyers for both men declined to comment.

Since state law forbids retirement benefits to judges convicted of a felony while in office, the judges would also lose their pensions.

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

Prosecutors say the judges tried to conceal the kickbacks as payments to a company they control in Florida.

Though he pleaded guilty to the charges Thursday, Judge Ciavarella has denied sentencing juveniles who did not deserve it or sending them to the detention centers in a quid pro quo with the centers.

But Assistant United States Attorney Gordon A. Zubrod said after the hearing that the government continues to allege a quid pro quo.

"We're not negotiating that, no," Mr. Zubrod said. "We're not backing off."

No charges have been filed against executives of the detention centers. Prosecutors said the investigation into the case was continuing.

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. 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.

"The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined," said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

"There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down."

Last year, the Juvenile Law Center, which had raised concerns about Judge Ciavarella in the past, filed a motion to the State Supreme Court about more than 500 juveniles who had appeared before the judge without representation. The court originally rejected the petition, but recently reversed that decision.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in 1967 that children have a constitutional right to counsel. But in Pennsylvania, as in 20 other states, children can waive counsel, and about half of all children that Judge Ciavarella sentenced had chosen to do so. Only Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina require juveniles to have representation when they appear before judges.

Clay Yeager, the former director of the Office of Juvenile Justice in Pennsylvania, said that typical juvenile proceedings are kept closed to the public to protect the privacy of children.

"But they are kept open to probation officers, district attorneys, and public defenders, all of whom are sworn to protect the interests of children," he said. "It's pretty clear those people didn't do their jobs."

On Thursday in Federal District Court in Scranton, both judges had their own lawyers with them as they sat at separate tables. They offered only the occasional "Yes, your honor" when Judge Edwin M. Kosik asked if they agreed with what was being said, or "No, your honor" when asked if they were on any medication.

More than 80 people packed every available seat in the courtroom, some of them angry Luzerne County employees, some parents of juveniles whom Judge Ciavarella had sentenced, and some people upset with the way someone they knew was treated by both judges over the years.

At one point, as Assistant United States Attorney William S. Houser explained to Judge Kosik that the government was willing to reach a plea agreement with the men because the case involved "complex charges that could have resulted in years of litigation," one man sitting in the audience said "bull" loud enough to be heard by most of the courtroom.

The antipathy continued as Judge Conahan and Judge Ciavarella, who are free on bond, left the courthouse, where a dozen or so people gathered to jeer at them as they rushed into waiting vehicles.

One of the parents at the hearing was Susan Mishanski of Hanover Township.

Her son, Kevin, now 18, was sentenced to 90 days in a juvenile detention facility last year for a simple assault case that everyone had told her would result in probation, since Kevin had never been in trouble before and the boy he hit merely had a black eye.

"It's horrible to have your child taken away in shackles right in front of you when you think you're going home with him," she said. "It was nice to see them sitting on the other side of the bench."

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

FAIR USE NOTICE: This may contain copyrighted (C ) material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. It is believed that this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. This material is distributed without
profit.