One kid was locked up by these evil people for a minor drug paraphernalia charge. He spiraled after that and ended up committing suicide. The video is the mom confronting the corrupt judge and the river of BS from his lawyer.
Just want to comment that according to the documentary about the Kids for Cash scandal the media made it seem worse then it was.
Their side of the story was that Pennsylvanian's children correction facilities were crap and he did not feel comfortable sending kids there. He organized a group of investors to pay for a new facility. The real estate developer who got the contract to build it paid the judge a "finders fee" for the referral. The Judges didn't report the money. As far as the harsh sentences the judge was doing that for years as an over reaction to the Columbine thing. It's an interesting doc suggest checking it out.
The article above is from 2/29/09. A 2014 article[0] shows their guilty pleas were later rejected due to their behavior, and both given larger sentences.
> Both originally agreed to spend seven years in prison, but then Ciavarella talked exclusively with Newswatch 16.
> "I loved the juvenile court, I loved helping those kids. I would never do anything to hurt a child, that's just not what I do. That's not me. I was always there for those kids. I resent the fact that people think I did something improper. I didn't do anything improper when it came to the care of those kids," said Ciavarella in July of 2009.
> Days after that interview, a federal judge rejected the guilty pleas of Ciavarella and Conahan, saying their behavior didn't really accept guilt.
The "crimes" mentioned in the article are as minor as it gets:
> Ciavarella ordered children as young as 8 to detention, many of them first-time offenders deemed delinquent for petty theft, jaywalking, truancy, smoking on school grounds and other minor infractions.
I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what really takes the cake is:
"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."
"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!
It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.
2 months later when something happens to the kid this entire thing will get replayed in the media and everyone that didn't do anything will be made out to be a villain.
This is insane! Using the "law" to get to this unprecedented levels of harassment against KIDS! I mean, for fuck's sake: THINK OF THE KIDS!
I honestly want to see more and more of this, there's an already growing wave of anti-MAFIAA and this kind of abuses will only make it bigger and meaner. The bubble will burst at some point and it won't be pleasant.
In this metaphor, its more like they injured several children by driving into a playground while drunk, then woke up the next day and did it again. And again. And again. And carried on doing so for years. While somehow profiting off their playground rampages.
And then got one 50k fine a few years down the line.
Another reference showed "peak juvenile incarceration" at ~100k kids, and 2000 cases were identified in this scandal alone, so 2% of the peak population were touched directly - and this was the most publicized incidence.
I can't tell who's worse in this story. Shame all around.
More on topic, you'd expect false reports of threats to children to be evenly distributed across the population. If so, that's a mass media issue. If the reports come repeatedly from just a few people, it's those people whose behavior needs correction.
Not just "people," that corrupt POS judge sent 4000 juevniles as young as eleven to be abused at a "for profit" detention center while he accepted cash for every child he sent there.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/17/pennsylvania...
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