This story is every conspiracy theorists wet dream.
Two Pennsylvania Judges have pleaded guilty to accepting more than $2.6 million from a private youth detention center in return for giving hundreds of kiddies longer sentences.
Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan of the Court of Common Pleas in Luzerne County admit that they took payoffs from PA Childcare and a sister company, Western PA Childcare, between 2003 and 2006.
The company running the youth detention center receives money from the government to cover the cost of incarceration, so the more kiddies in detention, and the longer they were locked up, the more money the company received.
According to Reuters , teenagers who came before Ciavarella in juvenile court were often sentenced to detention centers for minor offenses that would typically have been classified as misdemeanors. Examples include a 17-year-old boy was sentenced to three months’ detention for being in the company of another minor caught shoplifting, and similar sentences for “simple assault” resulting from a schoolyard scuffle that would normally draw a warning.
Conahan and Ciavarella face up to seven years in prison, a small price given the countless lives they may have destroyed.
