Book Review: Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town That Looked Away,* by Candy J. Cooper, published April 2, 2024, recommended for grades 7-12, or ages 12 -16, Lexile 1140. Please note: this book is not yet in the Pageturner library and will require student requests for purchases to be made.
History teaches us so much. Believe it or not, this story started with COAL. Anthracite, to be more precise.** Anthracite is rare, coveted, and found only in northeastern Pennsylvania; it amounts to a mere 2% of all coal extracted in the USA. One of the six PA counties known for large deposits of anthracite is Luzerne, which includes Wilkes-Barre.***
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In the mid-to late 1800s, railroad titans found a way to move and transport anthracite into the center of American commerce. In addition to heating homes, anthracite began to feed steel mills and to power ships and trains, becoming the literal fuel for the American move toward mass production, the industrial revolution. Anthracite, historians later said, turned America into a world superpower…[C]oal’s great prosperity relied on terrible hardship for the workers who mined the sediment underground. Coal barons lived in splendor in Victorian estates, and then erected shabby housing for immigrant mine workers near the entrances to mines. These company towns, known as coal patches, looked like fragile clusters of rickety frame houses and included a school and a company store, which often charged outrageous prices and held a monopoly on all of the goods and groceries coal miners needed to survive.
In the mid-to late 1800s, railroad titans found a way to move and transport anthracite into the center of American commerce. In addition to heating homes, anthracite began to feed steel mills and to power ships and trains, becoming the literal fuel for the American move toward mass production, the industrial revolution. Anthracite, historians later said, turned America into a world superpower…[C]oal’s great prosperity relied on terrible hardship for the workers who mined the sediment underground. Coal barons lived in splendor in Victorian estates, and then erected shabby housing for immigrant mine workers near the entrances to mines. These company towns, known as coal patches, looked like fragile clusters of rickety frame houses and included a school and a company store, which often charged outrageous prices and held a monopoly on all of the goods and groceries coal miners needed to survive.
“Miners put in fourteen-hour days for starvation wages, often forcing their young sons into the mines. Preadolescent “breaker boys” sorted chunks of coal as it dropped down a conveyor, while “spraggers” were boys who slowed the speed of coal cars by thrusting sticks into the wheels. They wore bandannas and chewed tobacco in order to keep coal dust from their lungs…Breaker boys” … between the ages of 8 and 12 [were] employed in the anthracite coal mines in northeastern Pennsylvania during the latter half of the 19th century. They worked 10-hour days, 6 days a week.” All in all, some 35,000 men and boys lost their lives in Pennsylvania’s anthracite mines. This is, by the way, what billionaire tech bros are trying to recreate today, including child labor in dangerous jobs such as cleaning machinery used to butcher cattle.
When miners tried to unionize, 19 were killed, most of them shot in the back by Luzerne Co. sheriff deputies. After that, “Generations of Mafia bosses became active in anthracite over the decades…The mafia invaded coal, & as coal was replaced they moved elsewhere--& into the county courthouse.”
After the 1999 Columbine student murders, the U.S. public was goaded to retaliate viciously against certain teens: children of color, predominantly, and poor Whites. It was a campaign clearly promoting caste discrimination. Even before Columbine, however, Hilary Clinton perhaps pushed hardest for incarceration, in 1994 calling teens “super predators” during her relentless campaign to have 3-strikes laws, written by the private prison industry, passed in every state.**** These laws mandated 25 years in prison for any 3rd conviction after two allegedly violent felonies (including residential burglary when no one was home). In one infamous case, the third crime was a theft of a single slice of pizza.
So in 1996 when the subject of this non-fiction narrative begins at the Luzerne County Courthouse, all the circumstances to allow and even applaud its crimes, perpetrated by revered judges in cahoots with the mafia, were already solidly in place; criminality had, after all, been part and parcel of Luzerne County’s sordid story for generations. I’ve included the history at some length because a record of the above described travesties are included in the book. Then, too, crime never occurs in a vacuum, and indeed, this story has so much to teach us. “Everyone knew the coal titans on Wall Street used…smaller companies to accomplish crooked or illegal goals. ‘They knew that organized crime had become part of the cancer. Finally, they knew that the [union] had turned away from the mineworkers to become an accomplice to the scandal.’ The authors added: 'Many otherwise upstanding citizens participated in the crooked dealings. The culture of corruption that had engulfed the industry caused serious damage to the community’s social and moral fabric, leaving wounds that remain to the present.’ ” The Kids for Cash scandal, as termed in a book of that title published in 2012, could not have occurred without the active complicity of the entire community of justice professionals--and the reverberating silence of the community at large.
In 1996 Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan began discussing how to shut down the county’s juvenile detention facility and in 2002, finagled the building of a new, privately owned juvenile detention center with developer Mark Mericle. Conohan had taken over the county court system as President Judge in that year, while Ciavarella was in charge of the juvenile court for the next 12 years. Each received a kickback Mericle called a “finder’s fee” of a million dollars when the new facility, a cinderblock of 40,000 sq. ft. in an industrial park, opened in 2003. The public was surprised to learn that it had been in the works for two years without any public announcements whatsoever; it was a fait accompli. But the judges kept demanding more cash; Mericle gave them $2.5 millions. The facility was then purchased by Robert Powell, who received $25 millions in kickbacks himself, and who continued to cave and give another $.3 million to the two corrupt judges. Much later, Powell would wear a wire when discussing a planned defense with Conohan and Ciavarella that would assist in their convictions. Eventually Powell would be sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.5 millions in restitution. Mericle was released from prison in 2015.
In 1996 Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan began discussing how to shut down the county’s juvenile detention facility and in 2002, finagled the building of a new, privately owned juvenile detention center with developer Mark Mericle. Conohan had taken over the county court system as President Judge in that year, while Ciavarella was in charge of the juvenile court for the next 12 years. Each received a kickback Mericle called a “finder’s fee” of a million dollars when the new facility, a cinderblock of 40,000 sq. ft. in an industrial park, opened in 2003. The public was surprised to learn that it had been in the works for two years without any public announcements whatsoever; it was a fait accompli. But the judges kept demanding more cash; Mericle gave them $2.5 millions. The facility was then purchased by Robert Powell, who received $25 millions in kickbacks himself, and who continued to cave and give another $.3 million to the two corrupt judges. Much later, Powell would wear a wire when discussing a planned defense with Conohan and Ciavarella that would assist in their convictions. Eventually Powell would be sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.5 millions in restitution. Mericle was released from prison in 2015.
To guarantee profits for the new center, Ciavarella began routing thousands of children to the new build. Ultimately, he locked up ten times the numbers of children as did the entire rest of the state. First offenders as young as 10 were tricked into signing illegal waivers of counsel and sent away for months--or years. Each was shackled in a thick leather belt at the waist chained to wrist cuffs, with iron manacles around their ankles, and taken away as shocked parents expressed disbelief and some mothers fainted, their children asking,“Is she ok? Did she die?” as they were hustled out of the courtroom. It was still not enough cash for these two judges; they had Mericle build two additional juvenile facilities and took kickbacks from those, too. Required by county commissioners to explain the necessity for this new construction, Conohan brazenly clamped down the investigation as “trade secrets.” Conohan then signed off on these additional facilities himself, despite having no authority to do so.
Both Conohan and Ciaravella built luxe new homes in Florida, and Conohan bought a yacht he named “Reel Justice.” Their wives ran an operation called Pinnacle, which laundered the money. No matter their newly acquired millions, it was never enough for them. Although their judicial salaries were never more than $150K/year, the two began development of 86 condos in the Florida neighborhood where they now lived when not supervising the PA county court system.
During these years, too, Conohan was having weekly breakfasts with a mob boss named William D’Elia. They always at the same public restaurant. Conohan would openly display files and other papers which they perused together. Conohan’s hubris knew no bounds; he thought himself utterly invincible. He was fixing cases for D’Elia, who in 2020 was ordered to testify to one such case in which his man had been gifted $3.5 millions by a rigged outcome. “Mr. D'Elia, 62, of Hughestown, is the reputed head of the crime family once headed by the late Russell Bufalino. He has been in federal custody since October 2006 and has been cooperating with federal investigators, prosecutors say.” From https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/news/delia-ordered-to-testify-at-defamation-hearing/article_b7b348a6-ea75-5d9c-b4b2-1f011fc3f6e7.html
Robert Powell was later joined by a co-owner who just happened to be the son of the former PA Supreme Court Justice. Two suits filed by the Juvenile Justice Center were subsequently shut down by the state’s high court without comment because of nepotism. Conohan had also cleverly insinuated his own extended family into many prime county positions, and they, too, got into the con and received private prison monies. As an example, one distant nephew or other should have received about $70K for evaluating minors’ mental states--from time to time he even got the names wrong, and his evaluations were mostly boilerplate--but he garnered more than $145K in a year. The flip side was, of course, retribution, which Conohan delivered swiftly and mercilessly. When the judge of the dependency court wrote a letter asking why there were no funds to aid needy children when so much money was being diverted to Ciaravella's juvenile court, Conohan sent a letter to his home within 3 days, demoting him from 23 years in his court to the criminal court, which was considered a backwater. You may well recognize the mafia system of nepotism and revenge in the national arena, today.
The con was ongoing from 1996 through 2009, but it’s still reverberating through the court system. Sentenced to 17 years in fed prison in 2011, Conohan himself wrote a note for comprecognizes this.assionate release in 2020 when COVID hit, claiming various, unverified illnesses. He was released within a week. Ciaravella was sentenced to 28 years and resides in the cushiest fed prison in the USA, with all sorts of resort-type facilities for inmates who share two-man suites. He continues to file appeals and defies all claims against him, despite his conviction after a jury trial. In August 2022, both men were ordered to pay $200 millions in restitution--such sums seem high but are rarely ever paid. You may recognize that in today's news, too.
What’s truly agonizing, however, is what happened to the children. First, it must be noted that eventual “justice” came about because these were White kids. For Black kids behind bars there’s been no such relief. Shackled recognizes this and comments on it. Even so, had these children been middle class or rich, they would’ve escaped completely. The author notes that one rich kid who actually did commit a violent crime was given probation without any detention at all. Ciaravella equated poverty with criminality, and for years, the citizens of Luzerne County not only agreed, they honored him for it. No one bothered to notice that rich kids weren’t ever shackled or sent away. The caste system in Wilkes-Barre continued to function as it had in the days of miner barons and their Victorian castles.
One girl taken into custody was stripped searched ‘and given delousing treatment in her ‘lady parts.’” She was ten years old. Moreover, that little girl’s parents ended up having to pay $5,000 in court fees! Ciaravella asked one child to choose which team would win a game, and when the guess proved wrong, he had her locked up. He asked another girl, age 16, to count the buttons on her blouse. She counted 11--and he sent her away for 11 months; at first she laughed, thinking it was a joke. Her only crime? She’d accidentally driven the wrong way on a one way street. A boy who had vandalized a school bathroom was 12 when Ciaravella informed him he’d graduate from the detention school; it took a few minutes for him to realize he’d been condemned to imprisonment for five years! As an adult, he was still tormented and struggling to survive, as so many of these kids were, as well. Parents had known from the start that something was terribly wrong, but all the court staff and the lawyers looked the other way, praising the judge either because they feared for their careers, or because they truly believed Ciaravella’s mantra, “The greatest rehabilitative tool we have is punishment.” On the contrary, many studies had been done--and continue to be done--that detail the lifelong harm done to minors who’d been subjected to juvenile jails.
Not only did Ciaravella imprison children illegally, he ran a debtors’ prison in which it was the children themselves, not their parents, who were obliged to pay the state’s costs of their own imprisonment. The monies went into a fund ostensibly for the probation department, but they knew nothing about any such monies--it was actually a slush fund for Ciaravella’s personal use. “Ciaravella presided over the fines court as early as 1999, operating at best as a collections agent, at worst a kidnapper.” He asked an 11 year old boy, 4’2” tall and weighing 63 pounds, whether he had the $488.50 to pay? No? “Very good,” Ciaravella said…he can stay [imprisoned] until he pays the fines.” A girl who’d been playing a rock tossing game to see who could throw the highest over a phone line accidentally hit a playmate. Before she was sentenced, she was raped, at 14. When her mother tried to tell the judge about the rape to explain why she’d been acting out since, Ciaravella told her to shut up and not mention it in his court, that she had to be punished for what she’d done--he simply preferred not to be bothered with what had been done TO her. This girl was at first sent to the general population of the juvenile jail, but one of Conohan’s family members subsequently held her longer and subjected her to a sort of anger management ‘treatment’ in which she was heavily drugged and spent two years in custody. She was never treatment or any therapy for the rape she’d suffered. Another girl was in agony after learning she’d been given a toothbrush previously used by another who had Hep-B; it was three months before she could be tested and ruled free of the disease. Children in custody were beaten, sexually assaulted, and otherwise routinely abused.
These children were ostracized upon release, often by their own families, and certainly by their peers and the rest of the community. Sometimes they turned to drugs and other crimes and were sent to adult prisons. Children who’d been innocent going in came out hardened, having lived with real criminals who’d pedaled drugs and/or committed real, even violent crimes. One woman, now a mom, explained years later in a reparations court that she’d been sent away for a pillow fight, only to emerge later as someone who could make a shiv from a toothbrush in a matter of minutes.
This book is listed by the Library of Congress under the heading Juvenile Justice. It’s a critically important read for today’s teens, who already know the many ways the system is stacked against them. For the rest of us, this is truly a shocking account.
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*A School Library Journal recommendation*
**There are two types of coal: bituminous coal and anthracite. Bituminous coal is a dull-looking dark gray and contains up to 85% carbon. You can see an example here: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/DSC_0039_0.JPG Anthracite coal, on the other hand, has a metallic black sheen and contains up to 98% carbon, which makes it burn hotter and cleaner. The U.S> Geological Survey provides this image of anthracite: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/DSC_0023.JPG “According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2015, Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Pennsylvania produced about 639 million short tons (580 million metric tons) of bituminous coal, representing 71% of total coal production in the United States. --Excerpted from Wikipedia, “Coal Mining in the United States.”
***In 2000, the U.S. Census showed Wilkes-Barre’s population as 43,038. At its peak in the 1930s and ‘40s, Wilkes-Barre’s population had exceeded 86,000. In those days, the Knox mine in Luzerne County included 100,000+ workers; by 1965, that number had shrunk to 35K because of a 1959 disaster caused by sheer recklessness. (You can read about that in the book, which includes photos.)
****During her presidential campaign, no one accepted more private prison industry donations than Clinton--and Marco Rubio. “Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio have benefited from prison lobbyist money. In fact, they've taken almost the same amount of contributions from major prison lobbyists. Clinton's campaign has received $133,246 while Rubio's campaign accepted $133,450 from the prison lobby.” See: http://: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marco-rubio-and-hillary-clinton-accepted_b_9191868 After several news agencies publicized this, she later decided not to accept any further such funding but only donated $8,600 of the monies she’d accepted, ironically, to a woman’s prison. https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/02/clinton-campaign-gives-private-prison-lobbyist-cash-to-charity-218524 She followed up with a promise to end the private prison system. Today, a company called CoreCivic owns 56% of private prisons, or about 75,000 beds, and uses the forced labor allowed in the 13th Amendment’s exception to slavery. https://investigate.afsc.org/company/corecivic
*A School Library Journal recommendation*
**There are two types of coal: bituminous coal and anthracite. Bituminous coal is a dull-looking dark gray and contains up to 85% carbon. You can see an example here: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/DSC_0039_0.JPG Anthracite coal, on the other hand, has a metallic black sheen and contains up to 98% carbon, which makes it burn hotter and cleaner. The U.S> Geological Survey provides this image of anthracite: https://d9-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/DSC_0023.JPG “According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), in 2015, Wyoming, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Pennsylvania produced about 639 million short tons (580 million metric tons) of bituminous coal, representing 71% of total coal production in the United States. --Excerpted from Wikipedia, “Coal Mining in the United States.”
***In 2000, the U.S. Census showed Wilkes-Barre’s population as 43,038. At its peak in the 1930s and ‘40s, Wilkes-Barre’s population had exceeded 86,000. In those days, the Knox mine in Luzerne County included 100,000+ workers; by 1965, that number had shrunk to 35K because of a 1959 disaster caused by sheer recklessness. (You can read about that in the book, which includes photos.)
****During her presidential campaign, no one accepted more private prison industry donations than Clinton--and Marco Rubio. “Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio have benefited from prison lobbyist money. In fact, they've taken almost the same amount of contributions from major prison lobbyists. Clinton's campaign has received $133,246 while Rubio's campaign accepted $133,450 from the prison lobby.” See: http://: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marco-rubio-and-hillary-clinton-accepted_b_9191868 After several news agencies publicized this, she later decided not to accept any further such funding but only donated $8,600 of the monies she’d accepted, ironically, to a woman’s prison. https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2016/02/clinton-campaign-gives-private-prison-lobbyist-cash-to-charity-218524 She followed up with a promise to end the private prison system. Today, a company called CoreCivic owns 56% of private prisons, or about 75,000 beds, and uses the forced labor allowed in the 13th Amendment’s exception to slavery. https://investigate.afsc.org/company/corecivic