Summary Of Kids For Cash By Mark Ciavarella

Critical Reflection Paper In class we watched a video called “Kids for Cash.” It is a documentary on the juvenile system focusing particularly on one judge, his name is Mark Ciavarella. This documentary starts off in Luzerne, Pennsylvania in 1995. Mark Ciavarella was a Juvenile Court Judge. He incarcerated over 3,000 children while he was a judge. He was known as an icon for school tour groups and around the courthouse. The Juvenile Law Center in Philadelphia got wind of judge Ciavarella in 2008. They began to realize that there was a really high number of children signing to not have an attorney in his court room. That was a huge red flag that something was not going right in his court room. When they dug deeper they found that the children were going away for small offenses. They filed a request to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to help these children. They eventually helped get some of these kids. Ciavarella was then put on trial for what he had been doing in his court room. He at first denied the whole thing and had a partner who helped to commit these crimes, such as taking a finders fee of $2 million from a contractor working on the juvenile detention center. Ciavarella's partner in crime was Conahan.

One way it ties in with our class is delinquency which is introduced in chapter 1 of the book called “Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society.” Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society”. Delinquency is when someone who is under of the age of 18 violates the penal code. Judge Ciavarella found all these kids to be delinquent that he put behind bars. It may be true that they committed an act of delinquency, but not necessarily worth being behind bars for. A cas would be one of the kids was put behind bars for an act of terrorism when she created a myspace page of her assistant principal. It was disrespectful for her to do it, but no reason it should have been an act of terrorism or been put behind bars for