In Luzerne County, PA a respected judge named Mark A. Ciavarella was convicted on 12 counts of racketeering, bribery and extortion. Ciaverella sent 3,000 kids away to a for-profit juvenile detention center. Aside from ruining so many lives, he received $2.8 million dollars in kickbacks. The infamous scandal became known as, “Kids for Cash.”
The children, most in their early teens, were sent away for the “crimes” of fighting with a classmate, a fake MySpace page, talking back to a teacher or cursing. These kids were sent away for years. They lost their childhoods.
Judge Ciavarella worked with another crooked judge named Michael Conahan. When both were asked to explain what they had done, surprisingly, both agreed to being filmed. In the telling this horrific scandal that ruined so many people’s lives sounds like a farfetched thriller. But it’s real. The movie is told from the perspectives of the two villains, the victims, and all the heroes who got involved to fight for the kids. We get to witness the secrets behind what’s called one of the worst crimes in American history.
Filmmaker Robert May was working on a different movie project at the time. He literally stumbled upon this story. I’ll let him tell you the shocking details of what happened.
Dorri Olds: You were in Luzerne County when the story broke, correct?
Robert May: Yes, I was there working on another project. Coincidentally, also about greed and power. The day the story hit the papers, I began to read every day and followed the story closely. I had to decide to put aside the other project. My producing partner and I felt like the media was giving everybody a sensationalized one-dimensional story. We wanted to get access to the villain.
Word got around that we were looking into the scandal. It’s hard to say why those judges came forward. Both felt it was a one-sided story in the media. Judge Connahan never even spoke to the media. Ciaverella seemed to need to explain that there was more to the story. When we began speaking to them they confided that it made them feel better. I guess it was like therapy.
Or confession?
Yes. We were also careful not to judge. We were there to get all sides of the story. Maybe because we were not sitting in judgment they felt they could speak to us. It’s hard to know. It was very important that we didn’t let anybody know we were speaking to Ciaverella. His lawyers firmly told him not too.
Did you start to feel like this story was unfolding like a thriller?
Oh yes. It was like a Charles Dickens tale about twists and turns and betrayal.
I’m on the advisory board of Wilkes University’s creative writing masters program and the judge’s daughter happened to be part of the program. So, in the process of meeting the judge I also met his daughter and interviewed her as well. Then I’d see her on campus and have to pretend I didn’t know who she was.
Crazy things began to sort of pop up. One of the children’s mothers, Sandy Fonzo, was in an iconic photo used a lot in the media. Ciaverella was standing on the courthouse steps in the foreground and Sandy was behind him and had this explosion of rage on the courthouse steps. Our camera crew was standing right next to her when she attacked the judge.
Wow, sounds serendipitous.
That type of serendipity happened all through this project. There would be so many things. We’d be talking for the rest of the day if I went into each one.
Can you give me an example?
Okay. The attic village that you see in the opening credits of the movie and again at the end of the movie, that was designed to represent a lost childhood. After trauma children draw themselves isolated, when they’re lonely, bullied or pushed aside. So we thought it would be an interesting thing to do. We made a place where the kids could sneak up into an attic. We put boxes in the attic and created a little village with a good side of town and a bad part and there was the school. I had the image of that attic in my mind for the longest time and we hired a production designer to help. We built it and shot it. Then a month after we shot it we got video footage from of Sandy, a girl who killed herself.
While working, one of the editors ran to me and said, “You have to look at this footage.” I was like, “Why? We’re busy here.” But the editor said, “You have to look at this right now.” So we did and there was a child in her attic, in her house, taking video and the attic was the spitting image of the attic we had created and we’d shot two months earlier. It had the same pitch of the roof, same window, I mean the works. It was exactly the same. Incredible.
Did you find yourself moved to tears when you spoke to these kids and heard about their ruined lives?
I used to be an emergency medical technician and you cannot become emotionally involved. We had to be mechanical about this and just keep it together — but I felt the weight of the stories every day.
To learn more visit the website: kidsforcashthemovie.com
Watch the trailer:
Do you think he Judge Ciaverella believed in what he was doing or was he totally driven by greed?
I think that’s up for the audience to decide but the evidence points to him believing in what he was doing. He ran on a platform of zero tolerance before it was popular. He was reelected for a 10 year term. The police loved him. The school had him come speak to students every year. He had a long list of speaking engagements speaking at many schools and talked about his zero tolerance policy. The parents of any kid who was being arrested loved him. So I think he was boosted by his beliefs. And he was there before Columbine so I think he thought he was a man before his time. After Columbine he got even tougher. For him, he was thinking, ‘I’m doing the right thing. I think I am and everybody is telling me that I am.’ His own kids talk about how he was zero tolerant when they were growing up.
In Pennsylvania alone, after Columbine, school-based arrests increased by 300 percent, which is pretty incredible. After Columbine the school violence was going down and student arrests were going up all around the country.
Do you think that this type of thing happened in other states but judges weren’t caught?
We’ve screened the movie all around the country and asked moviegoers and we’re told that the kind of situations that have happened are depicted in the film. We screened the film in Washington and there was a judge who pulled me aside and he said, “I just want to let you know that I’ve done everything that has been depicted in this movie but of course I’ve never taken any money.” I think he felt that he needed to say that to somebody. I understood what he was saying because we screened it to a lot of judges around the country and you could tell that they were emotional, perhaps because they were tougher on kids than maybe they ought to have been but certainly taking money makes it completely different.
Click here to learn where to see the film
