Judge Mark Ciavarella and the Pennsylvania Kids for Cash scandal

¶ … high school student go to prison for making fun of the school's assistant principal on social media? This is what happened to 14-year-old Hillary Transue in January of 2007 (Pilkington 2009). Transue had made a hoax MySpace page for her high school's assistant principal, only to find herself brought into court in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on a criminal charge of harassment (Pilkington 2009). Less than a minute into Transue's court hearing, Judge Mark Ciavarella issued his verdict of "adjudicated delinquent" and Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months in a juvenile detention center (Pilkington 2009). What Transue did not know at the time was that she was one of hundreds of children being sentenced by two Pennsylvania judges in Luzerne County, Judge Mark Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan, who were accepting "kickback" money from a privately-run juvenile detention facility, run by a corporation called "PA Child Care" (Urbina 2009). In other words, for each child that Ciavarella and Conahan sentenced to juvenile detention, the judges received a fee from the corporate owner of the private prison to which these children were sent. Together, Ciavarella and Conahan admitted to taking over 2.6 million dollars in exchange for sentencing children, when they pleaded guilty to fraud charges in February 2009, in what is now referred to as the Pennsylvania "Kids for Cash" scandal (Urbina 2009).

Johnson (2012) highlights the primary question in evaluating such ethical lapses as whether it is due to "bad apples or bad barrels," which is to say whether "unethical individuals (the 'bad apples') spoil those around them, or do unethical organizations (the 'bad barrels') spoil their employees?" (Chapter 2). The ethical violation in this case is glaring and horrifying. Judges are expected to uphold the law, not to violate it routinely in exchange for cash. The very concept of justice was undermined by what happened in the "Kids for Cash" scandal. We could perhaps understand if Judge Ciavarella sentenced somebody like Hillary Transue for a moral or ethical purpose. Bullying on social media is a real problem for high schoolers, and it might be possible to justify the excessive sentence handed down for a fake MySpace page if Ciavarella was trying to set an example in response to a real moral problem. But Ciavarella did not even listen to Transue's case. He sentenced her in less than a minute in exchange for a bribe (Pilkington 2009).

How did this egregious breach of ethics occur? In the case of the "Kids for Cash" scandal, we must note that this was not a widespread phenomenon in Pennsylvania. It was limited to the two judges in Luzerne County, who are both currently in prison for the crimes. This would appear to focus the ethical lapse on the individual behavior of Ciavarella and Conahan. Johnson (2012) invokes the Jungian concept of the "shadow" self, the dark side of our everyday personality. When judges of the law become breakers of the law, or men with power become abusers of that power, the "shadow" is a persuasive way to explain their behavior (Chapter 2). In particular Jung's idea that the shadow self results in "projection" where a person will "react negatively when others reflect the very characteristics" that this person "dislikes" in himself sounds like what happened (Johnson 2012, Chapter 2). Ciavarella and Conahan used their power to declare hundreds of innocent children were criminals and violators of the law. In each of these cases, Ciavarella and Conahan were the only real criminals in the courtroom, and psychologically they would have been punishing the children so harshly because they knew they themselves deserved harsh punishment.