Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town That Looked Away

Gr 7 Up–Cooper relates the story of two corrupt judges who received massive financial kickbacks for putting hundreds of juvenile offenders in jail for relatively minor offenses in Luzerne County, PA, from the late 1990s to 2008. She starts off with an informative chapter on the history of coal mining in the region and the corruption that grew out of that industry. Then, at a speedy pace, she outlines how the judges carried out their scheme. In addition to receiving payments for each youth jailed, the judges also fast-tracked the building of a new for-profit juvenile detention center with misleading paperwork and carried out significant nepotism in courthouse hiring. Ultimately, local and federal investigations led to their arrests and convictions in 2009. Defendants, as young as 11, were given lengthy sentences for benign offenses, such as smoking, marking up street signs, and minor fights, and were then subject to further incarceration for violating overly stringent parole requirements. Cooper concludes with an interesting discussion of the long-term harm done by the punitive juvenile detention system, including follow up on the adult lives of some of the victims, paralleled with a brief introduction to the benefits of the newer practice of restorative justice.