Kids-for-cash judges, who sent children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks...

.. ordered to pay more than $200M to the victims.

I'm sure a lot of what the kids did deserved some sort of punishment, but these guys took a zero-tolerance policy, even jailing 8 year olds.

quote:

---

In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups. Ciavarella, who presided over juvenile court, pushed a zero-tolerance policy that guaranteed large numbers of kids would be sent to PA Child Care and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care.

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. The judge often ordered youths he had found delinquent to be immediately shackled, handcuffed and taken away without giving them a chance to put up a defense or even say goodbye to their families.

---

Judges in jail. What could (hopefully) go wrong?

Daily Press