This are two of the several victims of Mark Ciavarella Jr. and his colleague Michael Conahan, two Pennsylvania judges who later admitted to receive more than $2.6 million dollars in kickbacks to send minors into two private juvenile detention centers.
The documentary “Kids for Cash” premieres this week, covering the scandal of two Pennsylvania judges who jailed minors after receiving bribes from private prisons owners.
By Hugo Espinoza Caut.
Hillary Transue was a 14 years old teenager that mocked her Assistant Principal through a MySpace profile she created. Charles Balasavage, another student of the same age, was not aware that his parents bought him a stolen scooter.
Both kids were taken to the Luzerne county courts, in Pennsylvania. They thought they were only getting some grim lecture from the adults, but instead they were sent to juvenile detentions centers for a indefinite period. “I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Transue.
This are two of the several victims of Mark Ciavarella Jr. and his colleague Michael Conahan, two Pennsylvania judges who later admitted to receive more than $2.6 million dollars in kickbacks to send minors into two private juvenile detention centers.
The reports indicate that the judges were bribed by Robert Powell and Robert Mericle, the owner and builder of those youth prisons, respectively. During years, Ciavarella was sending teenagers to jail for little misconducts, as trespassing empty properties or stealing a DVD from Walmart, even when the minors did not have any previous criminal record.
The worst case comes from the Kenzakoski family, whose son Ed was in his last year of high school. In an attempt to “scare him”, his parents called a police officer friend to raid a party, where they found the young Ed and his peers smoking marijuana. The student was imprisoned for years, until he submerged in a very deep depression and ended up commiting suicide. Ciavarella was sentenced to 28 years in prison.
This scandal is revived and analized through the harsh testimonies of victims and witnesses, in the documentary “Kids for Cash”, that premieres this week. Watch the trailer in the next video:
The increasing interest in building and running private prisons does not only relate to juvenile detention centers, but it is spread all over the punitive prison system of the US.
Ten years ago, there were only five private detention facilities, with an estimate population of 2,000 inmates. Today we have more than a hundred of those private prisons with almost 62,000 inmates. And the worst is to come –projected privately run jails will have 360,000 prisoners by ten years.
Many of these inmates work for 25 cents the hour, mostly in assembly jobs, making this prison population a very convenient and cheap labor force. Recently, a Mexican factory moved its operations into San Quentin jail, in California, while inmates of Lockhart prison, Texas, work in assembly positions for pieces that well-known corporations as IBM and Compaq used in their products, as GlobalResearch.ca reports.
