The Man Really is After You (Especially Your Kids)

 Folks thought that once Obama was in office people of color would have no more excuses about the man or the system being against them. There would be no more conspiracy theory left to keep us down. If Obama can make it, there is no reason why we can’t.   Ask the children of Luzerne County, Pennsylviana if they could do and be who what they wanted to be. The answer up until a month ago would have been, “No!”   Last month two juvenile court judges, Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., 58 and Judge Michael T. Conahan, 56 plead guilty “to a scheme that involved sending thousands of juveniles to two private detention centers in exchange for $2.6 million in kickbacks,” reports the New York Times.   The children of Luzerne County, Pennsylviana would come before Judge Ciaverella who wouldn’t inform them of their rights to an attorney and would find them guilty in under ten minutes. He once told reporters, “It’s not my job to spoon feed people,” when asked about the lack of attorneys for children as young as 14 years old. When families approached attorneys to represent them, they would decline stating there was no point. Innocence played no factor, it was about the money.   Day after day parents would bring their child to court and be forced to leave without them, unsure of what just transpired.   “Kurt Kruger, for example, was 17 when he was sent to a boot camp for five months in 2004 for being a lookout for a friend who was stealing DVDs from a Wal-Mart. DayQuawn Johnson was 13 when he was sent to a detention center for several days in 2006 for failing to appear at a hearing as a witness to a fight, even though his family had never been notified about the hearing and he had already told school officials that he had not seen anything. Both juveniles were first-time offenders.”   Before the judges even began their caseloads each day, court officers and the detention centers were already aware of how many new prisoners to expect. They would be funneled to private detention centers build by a friend of the two judges and was on contract with the juvenile court system of Luzerne County.   For each child sentenced, the dentition center received money and the judges got their cut.   The scheme, which had been running since June 2000, unraveled—the judges bought yachts, Florida condos, and expensive homes with the funds. If it had not been stopped the racket would have produced thousands of Herman Adkins. In February, 70 children and their families filed a class action suit against the courts. The judges will be sentenced next month and will serve a minimum of seven years because of their plea deal.     How do you protect your children from this? It’s no longer enough to be good, go to school, stay out of trouble when in these courts you would have been sentenced for being present at a fight or not paying a fine.   The real outrage is for the thousands of children, guilty or not, who will be scared by the industrial prison complex. Of the thousands of children sentenced, an estimated 2,500 will have their records cleared. Still, that doesn’t erase the experience of being treated like cattle—bought, sold and traded—from their impressionable minds.   As a parent, how do you protect your child from “The System”?   We worry about gangs, pedophiles, drugs, bullies. All these pale in comparison to the man in the black robe entrusted to provide fair and balanced justice.   Let’s just hope these two will receive the same treatment their victims did while they were locked up.    For the last seven years, Chloé A. Hilliard has been a culture/entertainment journalist, writing for the Village Voice, Essence, Vibe, King, and The Source. In addition to writing The X Fact(her), a hip hoppers humorous look at politics, she co-hosts I’m Sayin’ Radio, a weekly talk show, and aspires to be a vegan. Learn more about her on chloehilliard.com.