A bit of good news to report in follow-up to a previous post.  Thursday the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered the sentences of hundreds of juveniles who had appeared before Judge Ciavarella Jr thrown out.  Judge Ciavarella pled guilty to federal fraud and corruption charges involving over $2.6 million dollars in kickback payments made to the judge in exchange for sentencing juveniles to private detention facilities.  

Judge Ciavarella worked along side Judge Conahan to deliberately and systematically shut-down state-run juvenile detention facilities.  Judge Conahan oversaw the juvenile court system budget and literally starved the facilities of funds.  Once the system was too anemic to house and care for juvenile offenders, the judges argued that the state had no choice but to partner with private for-profit detention facilities, all the while taking kick-backs from the facilities to keep enrollment up.  Many of the children sentenced to these facilities were petty or first-time offenders.  Many appeared without attorneys and were taken from their families immediately after appearing before Judge Ciavarella, led away in shackles to begin serving detention sentences.

The expungement of these sentences is a small step in rectifying the damage done by these two judges.  A special magistrate is investigating the cases of every individual who appeared before these judges to try and ascertain how many kids were involved and the full scope of the conspiracy.  

In some ways it is easier to measure the damage done to the individual children and their families than it is to measure the damage inflicted to the entire juvenile justice system, but to be sure, damage has been done.  Judges stand at the precipice of either freedom or detention for kids.  They are the gatekeepers between the full force and effect of the law and children.  They have the absolute last say as to whether or not kids enter into a criminal justice system that will in some fashion follow them for the rest of their lives.  
The level of callous disregard for the rights of these children is well documented, but what is missing from the conversation is the level of callous disregard these judges displayed for their judiciary.  Juvenile justice systems were designed to be fundamentally different from adult criminal justice systems.  Above all judges, guardians, and attorneys were charged with keeping the best interest of the child in the forefront of proceedings, even for the most horrifically violent and troubled children.  

Yet we’ve collectively and purposefully moved away from a rehabilitative model of juvenile justice towards a punitive one.  Juveniles are increasingly treated, and tried, as adults.  Constitutional guarantees of counsel, due process, and confrontation simply do not exist for kids, yet when faced with criminal charges are the most important protections citizens have to protect themselves.  The rehabilitative goals have been largely abandoned and the results are devastating.  And that was before we added a profit motive to the equation.  Now these kids know that their freedom had a price–just over $2.6 million dollars.  I’m an optimist at heart, but there’s no way these kids will ever have any faith in our government, if they ever did.  That is a criminal justice nightmare, and an avoidable one.