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. […]

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. […]

If the court agrees to the plea agreement, both judges will serve 87 months in federal prison and resign from the bench and bar.

What a ghastly injustice. Judges—freakin’ judges—have sold these kids into jail; the sentence for the judges should equal all the excessive sentences they imposed on these kids.

29 replies on “Only 87 Months?”

  1. I do believe this is the most depraved thing I have ever heard. Holy. Shit.

    If I were one of these kids parents, I would be putting my affairs in order in preparation for serving a murder sentence.

  2. Ah, capitalism at its best. What could go wrong with having jails run by for-profit companies? It’s a grand idea, I tell you. Totally foolproof.

  3. it is a form of slavery – a body bought and sold for profit – and the control of the operation being judges

    depraved and criminal to the max – and possibly common – local investigation is called for

    the sums of money involved could tempt more than one immoral judicial fraud

  4. I work in a drug treatment program for teens who are on parole for drug related offenses or running away from home, and let me tell you, it is hard enough to convince a 15 year old in lockup that justice has been served, and that they need to go with the program without this kind of horror.
    what happened to the A student is a travasty of justice, but the kid’s who are going to be most hurt by this are the ones who commited real crimes, and who now can uses this as another excuse not to get withe program and let the system work for them, instead they can blame that judge, and the next one, and the next one with more certenty, and avoid dealing with their own issues that much longer.
    we’ll be paying for that judge’s fuckup for a long time.

  6. Awesome. Too bad they didn’t sell the labor of the kids they dumped in the clink. I’m surprised that The Gap of Wal-Mart doesn’t have some deal with DOC. Of course the judge will get a small sentence and some fines and sued to the ends of the earth…but it won’t ever match what he deserves. Freaking bastard should rot the rest of his days away as some jail house psycho’s pin cushion.

  7. well clearly that means all Democrats are scum, because two of them are.

    sigh.

    actually the punishment seems pretty darned appropriate. The judges sold these kids into incarceration for financial gain, and as a result they face financial ruin. They’ll be disbarred, and are losing their pensions (which has to hurt as they are close to retirement age). Additionally, I don’t know exactly what the law is in a situation like this, but one would think that they might also be vulnerable to countless civil lawsuits on behalf of the kids who were wrongfully imprisoned. In any event, I think the punishment fits the crime pretty well. Just like the kids who were only imprisoned for a short time but will be dealing with the ramifications forever, these guys will get to reap what they sow for years after they serve their prison terms.

  8. Gee, thanks for this.

    As if there aren’t already enough reasons to be depressed in 2009.

    Now we have judges getting paid to put non-offending youth in centers.

    Where are the happy and uplifting stories we so sorely need right about now?

  10. Wow get over your party-fetish. It doesn’t matter what color hair these judges had either, or what shoes they wore or if they like boxers or briefs… You really think that if you or your kids are in a detention center, the first thing on your mind is what party the evil shit is from?!?!

    Can you try and not miss the point please?

    Pretty please?

  13. Listen monkey boy. If you really think there’s a radical difference when you only have a two party system which are BOTH backed by lobbyists from major corporations, then you are missing YET ANOTHER POINT.

    You really need to either get out more, or stay in and watch more South Park – there is no middle path for you.

  15. Yay for feeding the trolls!

    Or not.

    Anyway, I agree that 87 months is too lenient for this kind of abuse. At the same time, following existing sentencing guidelines is appropriate for this case in a kind of cosmic-irony way.

    But I would love to see harsher penalties for this kind of abuse of trust and authority. The thing is it’s not going to be pushed by those already in positions of trust and authoriy. It would have to be a populist movement.

  16. Let me second that: Only *87* months? What the fuck is the prosecutor thinking? If I were the Judge (hearing the case, not the ones who are alleged to have committed these crimes), I’d reject the plea and let the case go to trial. These fuckers, if convicted, deserve to rot in prison for the rest of their natural lives.

    I would also want to know why there have been no federal criminal trials brought against these fuckers?

  18. This is the worst thing I’ve ever heard of. I am quaking with rage. You read about this shit in classical French novels, and then everyone responsible for the horrible injustice dies.

  19. 7 1/2 years seems pretty stiff for a white collar crime. Glad to see it.

    Both parties are corrupt. The Dems are new dirty money and the Repubos are old dirty money. The Repubos know how to get their money in less straightforward ways that aren’t as obviously scummy.

    The Repubos having the cash are more interested in power. They had pleasure in Gitmo without making money off it directly.

    Was the prison owned by union pension funds or some repubo like the ones in texas.

  21. Am I the only one who thinks 3 months in Juvie is a small price to pay for cyber-fraud? They of course don’t go into detail about what the girl’s web spoof consisted of, but if she was humiliating and/or impersonating someone online I think it is a fair sentence and sends a strong message. Have we forgot about the Megan Meier case already? That was just a “joke” too.
    I do agree though that their motivation behind the sentencing is reprehensible.

  22. #21 “7 1/2 years seems pretty stiff for a white collar crime. Glad to see it.”

    This was NOT a white collar crime, at least not morally. Morally, this was clearly conspiracy to kidnapping and slavery, not to mention an horrific abuse of power. These judges should be thrown into federal prison for the rest of their lives.

    #23, you’re an idiot. “Cyber-fraud”? Seriously? What happened to the right to ridicule public figures covered under the first amendment? You’re a moron.

  23. @24 Fuck off, don’t call me a moron. You and I don’t know what exactly she did because they conveniently didn’t give any details about it. For all you know, she could have been impersonating the man, creating a profile using his name, which is borderline identity theft. Who’s to say she wouldn’t go on to work her way up to the real thing had she not been deterred by a short stay at Juvie to impress upon her that pretending to be someone else is wrong.

    Now if she posted something like “Assistant Principal Smith likes to pick his nose” on her own profile in her own name, I would agree with your “ridicule of public figures” notion.

    All speculative of course, but since we weren’t given all of the information we don’t know.

    Happy Friday!!

  25. Lots of questions here. Clearly, the judges were making money (and not reporting it) from these detention centers.

    That does not mean, however, that this girl did not deserve the three month sentence. We simply have no facts to determine if her crime (harassment) regularly receives this penalty.

    For instance, if these judges were paid a kick-back to send criminals to a private detention instead of public jail, that would be wrong; but not depraved. It certainly wouldn’t be kiddnapping or involuntary servitude or slavery.

    If the student was innocent and simply railroaded by the judges for money, then we should hang ’em.

    Bottom line is that this blog is having a knee-jerk reaction (which journalist/newspapers love as it sells copy). Wait for the facts to emerge before becoming hysterical.

  26. The AP said the judges weren’t telling the kids they had a right to legal representation, and then over-sentenced the kids.

    Wilkes-Barre/Scranton is the big city compared to where I grew up in PA, in a tiny town whose only industry was two maximum security prisons, a county jail and a “youth forestry camp.” My high school friends who wanted to be musicians used to sing at weddings, the VFW, the nursing home, the prison and the youth forestry camp. Where, by the way, Bret what’s-his-name of “Poison” spent some time. (PA music censorship: when covering the Violent Femmes, they had to sing “Body and beach/I go to Sheetz/I don’t even know why.”)

    Everyone’s fathers and uncles had been in Vietnam and come back untreated, and the best job they could hope for was as a prison guard. Domestic violence was through the roof. The school system reflected the fascist babysitter mentality on the one end and “doing your time” on the other.

    I also looked in on a few PA county commissioner conventions in the 1980’s. The “hospitality suites” in the convention hotels seemed dominated by prison building firms. My friend’s brother has become a prison consultant, looks pretty sleek now. I also met an Italian guy from New Jersey recently who specializes in cleaning up PA toxic waste sites so prisons can be built on them. Said they clean them up to Dutch standards, the highest in the world.

  27. Stephen King and Peter Straub wrote that subplot into The Talisman…Reverend Gardiner’s Sunlight House. I always thought that was one of the creepiest parts of the story, the horrid Bible-thumper house and the bent judges who took money to send kids there.

    Sometimes you can’t MAKE this shit up.

  28. I saw this article and I agree they should serve longer terms. At least they’ll be ruined financially… I hope they have to live in a cardboard box and eat dog food for the rest of their lives.

    Meanwhile, we have GOT to do something about all those for-profit prisons. They create a huge conflict of interest and basically enslave their inmates. Of course this is an unusual case in that the excessively sentenced prisoners were kids… but adults deserve our sympathy too.

  29. #23, the article above says that the myspace “…page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.” So how can you compare this with the Megan Meier case, which was an intended deception?

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