Kids for Cash Scandal

Overview

In Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, between 2003 and 2008, two elected judges ran a criminal enterprise that used children as currency. Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Judge Michael Conahan conspired to shut down the county’s publicly operated juvenile detention center and replace it with privately owned, for-profit facilities — facilities from which they personally received approximately $2.6 million in payments. In exchange for the money, Ciavarella used his position as the county’s sole juvenile court judge to sentence thousands of children to extended stays at the private facilities, ensuring a steady flow of young bodies to fill beds and generate revenue.

The children sentenced by Ciavarella were overwhelmingly first-time offenders charged with minor infractions. A 14-year-old girl was sentenced to a juvenile facility for creating a satirical MySpace page mocking her school’s assistant principal. A 15-year-old was locked up for shoplifting a $4 DVD from Walmart. Teenagers were incarcerated for school fights, for writing obscenities on a building, for possessing drug paraphernalia. Many appeared before Ciavarella without attorneys — the judge routinely encouraged juveniles and their parents to waive the right to counsel, assuring them that the proceedings would be informal and that lawyers were unnecessary. Hearings that should have lasted 30 minutes to an hour were conducted in 90 seconds. The sentences Ciavarella imposed bore no rational relationship to the offenses. They served a single purpose: keeping the private detention centers full.

The Kids for Cash scandal is not a conspiracy theory. It is a confirmed criminal conspiracy, proven in federal court, resulting in lengthy prison sentences for both judges and the vacating of over 4,000 juvenile convictions by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. It stands as one of the most egregious cases of judicial corruption in American history and one of the starkest illustrations of what happens when the profit motive is injected into the juvenile justice system.

What makes Kids for Cash significant beyond its specific facts is what it reveals about structural vulnerabilities in the American justice system — vulnerabilities that did not disappear when Ciavarella and Conahan went to prison.

The Players

Mark Ciavarella Jr.

Mark Arthur Ciavarella Jr. was born in 1950 in Wilkes-Barre, the seat of Luzerne County, in the coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania. He was a product of the region’s insular political culture — a world of ethnic Democratic machine politics, patronage networks, and the kind of localized power that comes from everyone knowing everyone. Ciavarella attended local schools, earned his law degree from Duquesne University in 1975, and practiced law in Luzerne County before winning election to the Court of Common Pleas in 1995.

Ciavarella was assigned to the juvenile division, where he cultivated a public image as a tough-but-fair judge who was hard on juvenile crime. He spoke at school assemblies about the consequences of breaking the law. He was quoted in local papers warning parents to keep their kids in line. He was, by all public appearances, exactly the kind of no-nonsense judge that a conservative, blue-collar community wanted overseeing its juvenile court.

Behind the public persona, Ciavarella was running what federal prosecutors would eventually describe as a racketeering enterprise. His sentencing patterns were so extreme that they attracted attention from defense attorneys and juvenile justice advocates years before the scheme was publicly exposed — but in the hierarchical world of small-county courts, challenging a sitting judge was professionally dangerous, and the complaints went nowhere.

Michael Conahan

Michael T. Conahan, born in 1952, was the senior partner in the conspiracy. Elected to the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas in 1993, Conahan served as president judge — the administrative head of the county court system — from 2002 to 2006. This position gave him control over the county court’s budget, contracts, and administrative operations, including oversight of juvenile detention facilities.

Conahan was the architect of the scheme’s critical first step: the closure of the county-owned juvenile detention center. In 2002, Conahan used his authority as president judge to withdraw county funding from the Pennsylvania Child Care facility, the publicly operated detention center that had served Luzerne County’s juvenile justice system. He then facilitated the county’s contract with PA Child Care, a new, privately built and operated facility, and its sister facility, Western PA Child Care. The closure of the public facility and the award of the private contract were administrative decisions that attracted little public scrutiny at the time — county government is not exciting, and decisions about detention facility contracts do not make the front page.

What no one outside the conspiracy knew was that Conahan had a direct financial interest in the private facilities he was steering the county toward. The payments he received — funneled through intermediaries and shell companies — constituted bribes for his role in creating the market that the private facilities would serve.

Robert Mericle and Robert Powell

The money that corrupted the judges came from two sources, both connected to the private detention facilities.

Robert Mericle was the builder. His company, Mericle Construction, built the PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care facilities. Mericle paid over $2.1 million of the total $2.6 million in bribes, structuring the payments to avoid reporting requirements and routing them through intermediaries. Mericle’s motivation was straightforward: the construction contracts for the detention facilities were worth millions, and securing the county’s commitment to use the privately built facilities guaranteed the value of his investment.

Robert Powell was co-owner of PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care. Powell’s payments to the judges — approximately $770,000 — represented his share of the bribe scheme. For Powell, the calculus was equally simple: the private facilities generated revenue based on occupancy, and a judge who consistently sentenced juveniles to detention ensured that the beds stayed full. Every child Ciavarella sent to PA Child Care or Western PA Child Care represented per diem revenue for Powell’s facilities.

The financial arrangements were deliberately obscured. Payments were made through intermediary entities, structured in amounts designed to avoid currency reporting thresholds, and characterized as consulting fees, finder’s fees, or payments for services that were never rendered. The money trail was complex enough to evade casual scrutiny but not so complex as to withstand a serious federal investigation.

The Machine in Action

How the Scheme Worked

The mechanics of the Kids for Cash scheme were brutally simple once the structural pieces were in place.

Step one: Create the market. Conahan, using his authority as president judge, eliminated the county’s public juvenile detention option by defunding it. This forced the county to contract with the new private facilities for juvenile detention services. The contract, worth millions of dollars annually, guaranteed a revenue stream for the private operators — but only if the beds were filled.

Step two: Fill the beds. Ciavarella, as the county’s juvenile court judge, provided the supply. He imposed sentences of detention or placement on juvenile defendants at rates far exceeding state and national averages. He sentenced first-time offenders to months in residential facilities. He sentenced children for offenses that in any other jurisdiction would have resulted in probation, community service, or dismissal. He moved through cases at extraordinary speed, conducting hearings so brief that they precluded any meaningful legal process.

Step three: Eliminate obstacles. The most significant obstacle to the scheme was legal representation for juvenile defendants. An attorney — even a minimally competent one — would have recognized the sentences as grossly disproportionate and would have filed appeals. Ciavarella addressed this problem by systematically encouraging juveniles and their parents to waive the right to counsel. He assured families that the proceedings were informal, that lawyers were unnecessary, and that he would be fair. Many families, unfamiliar with the legal system and intimidated by the courtroom setting, took him at his word. Those who did retain attorneys found that their objections carried little weight — Ciavarella was the sole juvenile court judge in the county, and his sentencing decisions were rarely appealed.

Step four: Collect the money. The payments from Mericle and Powell to Ciavarella and Conahan flowed throughout the period of the scheme, totaling approximately $2.6 million. The judges concealed the income from tax authorities, financial disclosure requirements, and their colleagues on the bench.

The Children

The human cost of the scheme is measured in thousands of individual tragedies, each one representing a child whose life was derailed by a corrupt judge’s greed.

Hillary Transue was 14 years old in 2007 when she appeared before Ciavarella for creating a MySpace page that parodied her school’s assistant principal. The page was obviously satirical — juvenile humor of the kind that millions of teenagers engage in without consequence. Ciavarella sentenced her to three months at a residential placement facility. For a MySpace joke. Hillary, an honor student with no prior record, was handcuffed in the courtroom while her mother sobbed.

Charlie Balasavage was 13 when he was brought before Ciavarella after his mother called the police during an argument. The mother did not want Charlie arrested — she wanted help managing a family conflict. Ciavarella sentenced Charlie to a juvenile facility. He would spend months in detention, missing school and separated from his family, because his mother had called the cops during an argument.

Ed Kenzakoski was a 17-year-old high school wrestler with no criminal record who was sentenced by Ciavarella to a juvenile facility after being found in the proximity of drug paraphernalia at a friend’s party. The sentence devastated Ed’s life trajectory. He struggled after his release, battled addiction, and in 2010, at the age of 23, took his own life. His father, Sandy Kenzakoski, became one of the most vocal advocates for justice in the Kids for Cash case, attending every day of Ciavarella’s trial and speaking publicly about how the corrupt judge had destroyed his son.

These were not isolated cases. Over the five years the scheme operated, Ciavarella sentenced approximately 50 percent of the juveniles who appeared before him to out-of-home placement — a rate dramatically higher than the state and national averages, which hovered around 10 percent. The pattern was so stark that it constituted statistical proof of corruption, though statistical proof is only useful if someone is looking at the statistics.

The Courtroom Assembly Line

Survivors and their families have described Ciavarella’s courtroom as an assembly line. Hearings lasted minutes or less. Ciavarella would address the juvenile defendant directly, bypassing attorneys when they were present and making it clear that their input was unwelcome. He would deliver a brief lecture about personal responsibility, then impose a sentence that bore no rational relationship to the offense.

Defense attorneys who practiced in Ciavarella’s court described a climate of fear. Lawyers who challenged Ciavarella’s sentences found themselves frozen out — assigned to unfavorable hearing times, subjected to verbal abuse from the bench, or simply ignored when they raised objections. Several attorneys later reported that they had suspected something was wrong but felt unable to act because the county’s legal culture provided no mechanism for challenging a sitting judge without ending one’s career.

The Luzerne County public defender’s office, which should have served as a check on judicial excess, was largely ineffective. The office was understaffed and underfunded, and the culture of deference to the bench that pervaded the county’s legal system extended to public defenders as well. Some public defenders later acknowledged that they had recognized the sentencing patterns as abnormal but had not connected the dots to corruption.

Exposure and Investigation

The Juvenile Law Center

The organization most responsible for exposing the Kids for Cash scheme was the Juvenile Law Center (JLC), a nonprofit legal advocacy organization based in Philadelphia. JLC had been working on juvenile justice issues for decades and had developed expertise in systemic challenges to juvenile court practices.

JLC first became involved in Luzerne County in 2004, when it received complaints from families about Ciavarella’s sentencing practices. Staff attorneys Marsha Levick and Lourdes Rosado began reviewing Ciavarella’s cases and quickly identified anomalies: the extraordinarily high rate of detention sentences, the pattern of children appearing without counsel, and the disproportionality between offenses and sentences.

JLC filed legal challenges on behalf of affected juveniles, arguing that the waiver of counsel was invalid because it was not knowing, voluntary, and intelligent as required by the Sixth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s decision in In re Gault (1967). The challenges met initial resistance from the Pennsylvania court system — challenging a judge’s practices through systemic litigation is difficult under the best of circumstances, and the deference that appellate courts typically afford to trial judges made the task harder.

But JLC’s persistence, combined with growing media interest in the Luzerne County anomalies, eventually created momentum. Investigative journalists, including reporters from the Wilkes-Barre Citizens’ Voice and the Times Leader, began examining the financial relationships between the judges and the private detention facility operators. The reporting drew the attention of federal investigators.

The Federal Investigation

The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania launched an investigation into the Luzerne County judges in 2007. Federal investigators traced the financial connections between Ciavarella, Conahan, Mericle, and Powell — following the money through shell companies, intermediary payments, and unreported income. The investigation was complex, requiring the reconstruction of financial transactions that the conspirators had deliberately obscured, but the evidence was ultimately overwhelming.

In January 2009, Ciavarella and Conahan were charged with honest services fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion. The initial charges were followed by a plea agreement in which both judges agreed to plead guilty in exchange for sentences of approximately seven years — an agreement that provoked outrage from victims’ families and advocacy organizations, who argued that seven years was grossly inadequate given the scope of the judges’ crimes and their impact on thousands of children.

Federal District Judge Edwin M. Kosik rejected the plea agreement, finding that it did not adequately reflect the seriousness of the offenses and that the defendants had not fully accepted responsibility. The rejection of the plea deal — an unusual step in federal court — forced the cases to trial.

The Trials

Ciavarella chose to go to trial, maintaining that the payments he received were legitimate business transactions unrelated to his judicial duties. His defense was undercut by the overwhelming financial evidence and by the testimony of victims and their families, who described in devastating detail the impact of his sentences on their lives.

On February 18, 2011, a federal jury convicted Ciavarella of 12 of 39 counts, including racketeering, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion. The jury’s verdict, reached after a trial that lasted several weeks, effectively destroyed Ciavarella’s claim that the payments were legitimate. He was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison — a sentence that reflected both the severity of his crimes and his refusal to accept responsibility.

Conahan, who had cooperated more extensively with investigators after the plea deal collapsed, eventually pleaded guilty to one count of racketeering conspiracy. He was sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison. Both judges were also ordered to pay restitution.

Robert Mericle pleaded guilty to failure to report a felony and was sentenced to one year in federal prison. Robert Powell pleaded guilty to failing to report a felony and being an accessory to honest services fraud and was sentenced to 18 months.

The disparity between the judges’ sentences and the sentences imposed on Mericle and Powell drew criticism from victims’ advocates, who argued that the businessmen who paid the bribes received dramatically lighter treatment than the judges who accepted them. Prosecutors countered that the judges, as public officials who had violated their oaths of office, bore a greater degree of culpability.

The Aftermath

Vacating the Convictions

In October 2009, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took the extraordinary step of vacating all juvenile adjudications issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008 — a sweeping action that affected over 4,000 cases. The court found that the systemic corruption of Ciavarella’s courtroom had rendered every adjudication suspect, because it was impossible to determine which sentences had been influenced by the bribery scheme and which, if any, had been imposed on their merits.

The vacating of convictions was legally unprecedented in its scope and practically complicated in its execution. Many of the affected juveniles had completed their sentences, aged out of the juvenile system, or moved into the adult criminal justice system. The expungement of their records — a process that should have been automatic following the Supreme Court’s order — proved slow and inconsistent, leaving some young people with juvenile records that continued to affect their lives years after the scandal was exposed.

For some victims, the vacating of convictions came too late. Ed Kenzakoski was already dead. Other former defendants had dropped out of school, lost scholarships, developed substance abuse problems, or experienced psychological trauma that no court order could remedy. The Kids for Cash scandal demonstrated that while convictions can be vacated, the damage inflicted by wrongful incarceration cannot be undone.

Civil Litigation

In 2011, a federal jury awarded $2.5 million in damages to two of Ciavarella’s victims in a civil lawsuit. The verdict was significant not only for the amount but for the legal principle it established: that children harmed by judicial corruption could seek civil damages.

Subsequent civil litigation expanded the universe of plaintiffs. In 2015, a class action settlement provided compensation to approximately 2,500 former defendants who had appeared before Ciavarella. The settlement, while meaningful, was widely regarded as inadequate relative to the harm inflicted. The per-person amounts — typically in the low thousands of dollars — could not compensate for lost years, disrupted education, destroyed family relationships, or psychological trauma.

Additional lawsuits targeted Mericle, Powell, and the detention facility operators. Mericle alone paid approximately $17.75 million in civil settlements. But the total financial accountability imposed on the conspirators and their associated entities remained, in the view of many victims and their families, disproportionately small relative to the scale of the conspiracy and its human impact.

Broader Impact on Juvenile Justice

The Kids for Cash scandal became a national reference point in debates about juvenile justice, private prisons, and judicial accountability. The case provided concrete, documented evidence for concerns that critics of the prison-industrial complex had been raising for years — that the profit motive in criminal justice creates incentives for incarceration that have nothing to do with public safety or rehabilitation.

The scandal accelerated several policy developments:

Judicial oversight: The case exposed the weakness of existing mechanisms for monitoring judicial conduct. Ciavarella’s sentencing patterns were statistically anomalous for years before anyone in the court system acted on the anomalies. The scandal prompted calls for more systematic monitoring of judicial sentencing patterns, particularly in juvenile courts, where proceedings are typically closed to the public and receive less media scrutiny than adult criminal cases.

Right to counsel: The case reinforced the importance of legal representation for juvenile defendants and highlighted the consequences of allowing children to waive their right to counsel. In the wake of the scandal, juvenile justice advocates pushed for reforms requiring the appointment of counsel for all juvenile defendants, regardless of the seriousness of the offense, and prohibiting the waiver of counsel without a meaningful colloquy and judicial finding that the waiver is knowing and voluntary.

Private prison scrutiny: The case provided ammunition for opponents of for-profit incarceration. If two judges in one Pennsylvania county could be corrupted by private prison money, critics argued, the same dynamics could be operating — perhaps more subtly — wherever private operators profit from incarceration. The scandal contributed to a broader movement questioning the role of private companies in the criminal justice system, a movement that has produced some policy changes (including the Biden administration’s 2021 executive order limiting the federal government’s use of private prisons, later rescinded) but has not fundamentally altered the landscape of private incarceration in the United States.

Juvenile record sealing: The difficulty of expunging the records of Ciavarella’s victims highlighted the broader problem of juvenile records following young people into adulthood. The scandal added urgency to campaigns for automatic sealing or expungement of juvenile records, particularly for minor offenses.

The Documentary

Kids for Cash (2013)

Director Robert May’s documentary Kids for Cash, released in 2013, brought the scandal to a national audience beyond the reach of newspaper coverage and legal proceedings. The film was notable for its access to the principal figures in the case, including extensive on-camera interviews with both Ciavarella and Conahan.

Ciavarella’s on-camera presence is remarkable in the documentary. He presents himself as a victim of overzealous prosecution, insisting that the payments he received were legitimate business transactions and that his sentencing practices, while perhaps strict, were motivated by genuine concern for the children who appeared before him. The dissonance between Ciavarella’s self-presentation and the testimony of his victims — intercut throughout the film — creates a portrait of denial that is both infuriating and instructive.

The documentary also captures the impact on families. Sandy Kenzakoski’s account of his son Ed’s descent and death is among the most powerful sequences in any documentary about judicial corruption. Other families describe the confusion, shame, and helplessness they felt as their children were sentenced to detention for offenses that seemed trivial and as their attempts to advocate within the system were rebuffed by a judge who brooked no opposition.

Kids for Cash won the Documentary Audience Award at the 2014 South by Southwest Film Festival and aired on MSNBC. It remains the most comprehensive visual account of the scandal and serves as a primary-source document for understanding not just the mechanics of the corruption but its human cost.

Structural Lessons

When the System Is the Crime

The Kids for Cash scandal is often discussed as a case of individual corruption — two bad judges who exploited their positions for personal enrichment. This framing, while accurate as far as it goes, understates the systemic dimensions of the case.

Ciavarella and Conahan did not operate in a vacuum. Their scheme was possible because of structural features of the American juvenile justice system that existed before they corrupted it and that continue to exist after their conviction:

Judicial independence without accountability. The same institutional independence that protects judges from political pressure also insulates them from oversight. Ciavarella’s sentencing patterns were anomalous for years, but no mechanism existed to flag those anomalies or to trigger investigation. The county’s legal community recognized that something was wrong, but the professional and institutional barriers to challenging a sitting judge proved insurmountable until federal investigators intervened.

Closed proceedings. Juvenile court proceedings are closed to the public and the press, a practice justified by the need to protect minors’ privacy. But closed proceedings also reduce the transparency that serves as a check on judicial conduct. Ciavarella’s courtroom practices — the 90-second hearings, the coerced waivers of counsel, the wildly disproportionate sentences — would have been immediately apparent to anyone observing from the gallery. But no one was in the gallery, because no one was allowed to be.

The profit motive in confinement. Private detention facilities are paid based on occupancy. This creates a financial incentive to maximize the number of people confined and the duration of their confinement — an incentive that is fundamentally at odds with the goals of a justice system that is supposed to impose confinement only when necessary and for the shortest appropriate period. Ciavarella and Conahan exploited this incentive structure, but they did not create it. It exists wherever private operators are paid per head per day to confine human beings.

The vulnerability of juvenile defendants. Children are the most vulnerable participants in the justice system. They do not understand their rights. They cannot effectively advocate for themselves. They are dependent on adults — parents, attorneys, judges — to protect their interests. When those adults fail, as they did comprehensively in Luzerne County, children have no recourse.

The Ongoing Problem

As of 2026, every structural vulnerability that made the Kids for Cash scheme possible remains in place somewhere in America. Private juvenile detention facilities continue to operate in multiple states. Juvenile court proceedings remain closed. Judicial oversight mechanisms remain weak. And the profit motive continues to permeate a justice system that confines more people — adults and children — than any other country on earth.

No other case as extreme as Kids for Cash has been publicly documented since Ciavarella and Conahan’s convictions. But the absence of detected cases is not evidence of absence. The conditions that produced Kids for Cash — the intersection of private profit, judicial power, minimal oversight, and the vulnerability of children — exist wherever the troubled teen industry and the private prison industry overlap with the juvenile justice system.

The Kids for Cash scandal proved that the nightmare scenario critics had warned about was not hypothetical. Two judges really did sell children for money. The question that remains unanswered is how many other, less dramatic versions of the same dynamic continue to operate undetected — not necessarily involving direct bribes, but involving the subtler corruptions that arise whenever the people who decide whether to confine children have financial relationships with the people who profit from that confinement.

Timeline

• 2002 — Judge Conahan, as president judge, defunds the county-owned juvenile detention center
• 2003 — Luzerne County contracts with PA Child Care, a privately built and operated juvenile detention facility; bribes begin flowing to Ciavarella and Conahan
• 2003–2008 — Ciavarella sentences approximately 50% of juvenile defendants to out-of-home placement, far exceeding state averages
• 2004 — Juvenile Law Center begins receiving complaints about Ciavarella’s sentencing patterns
• 2005 — Western PA Child Care opens as a second private facility; additional contracts and payments follow
• 2007 — FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office launch investigation into Luzerne County judges’ financial relationships with private facility operators
• January 2009 — Ciavarella and Conahan charged with honest services fraud, wire fraud, and tax evasion
• July 2009 — Federal judge rejects plea agreement as inadequate
• October 2009 — Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacates over 4,000 juvenile adjudications issued by Ciavarella
• 2010 — Ed Kenzakoski, a former Ciavarella defendant, dies by suicide at age 23
• February 2011 — Federal jury convicts Ciavarella on 12 of 39 counts including racketeering and fraud
• August 2011 — Ciavarella sentenced to 28 years in federal prison
• September 2011 — Conahan sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison
• 2013 — Documentary Kids for Cash directed by Robert May released
• 2015 — Class action settlement provides compensation to approximately 2,500 former Ciavarella defendants
• 2022 — Conahan released to home confinement during COVID-19 pandemic, drawing protests from victims’ families

Sources & Further Reading

• Robert May (director), Kids for Cash (documentary film), 2013
• William Ecenbarger, Kids for Cash: Two Judges, Thousands of Children, and a $2.6 Million Kickback Scheme (The New Press, 2012)
• Terrie Morgan-Besecker, investigative reporting for the Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, 2009–2015
• Juvenile Law Center, case materials and reports on Luzerne County juvenile court
• Government Accountability Office, “Residential Treatment Programs: Concerns Regarding Abuse and Death in Certain Programs for Troubled Youth” (GAO-08-146T), 2007
• In re Luzerne County Juvenile Court Proceedings, Pennsylvania Supreme Court (2009)
• United States v. Ciavarella, No. 3:09-CR-0272 (M.D. Pa.)
• United States v. Conahan, No. 3:09-CR-0272 (M.D. Pa.)
• Marsha Levick and Neha Desai, “Still Waiting: The Elusive Quest to Ensure Juveniles a Right to Counsel at All Stages of the Juvenile Court Process,” Rutgers Law Review, Vol. 60, No. 1 (2007)