ShackledA Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town that Looked Away
Calkins Creek, 2024. 192 pages.
Review written November 18, 2024, from a library book.
Starred Review
Shackled is a book that's painful to read, but is tremendously important. It tells the story of a group of men, including judges, who made millions of dollars by locking kids up.
The book opens telling the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who, with her friend, wrote with Sharpie on a few street signs in 2005. She was brought before judge Mark Ciavarella in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.
Carisa and Agelia listened as Ciavarella judged the two girls "delinquent," or guilty, of eighty-six counts of vandalism. In the next breath he imposed their sentence: an indefinite stay at a wilderness camp that relied on extreme discipline and boot camp-like drills. With those words the girls heard a rattling sound from a corner of the courtroom. Soon a court worker appeared holding two medieval-looking sets of shackles. The worker enchained Carisa and Angelia like cartoon criminals - wrapping heavy leather belts around their narrow waists; snapping iron handcuffs to their child-size wrists; and clamping leg irons around their slender ankles. The girls looked to their stunned parents. The court worker turned the girls away. Ciavarella called the next case. The girls clomped in their high-heeled dress shoes past the judge's bench and toward the door.
The book goes on to explain the full scope of the judge's scheme. He was getting kickbacks from a man who'd gotten a contract to build a new detention center for youth, as well as various other money-making opportunities to go with every child he managed to sentence. The judge and his friends made millions of dollars in a few years and found ways to hide the money. Eventually local news reporters began to uncover suspicious details - like the much higher than normal incarceration rate of teens in Luzerne county - and eventually the FBI got involved. One of the men turned informant, and they were caught in a scandalous trial.
The sad part, though, is the many young lives devastated by the judge's arbitrary rulings - designed to line his own pockets.
The author doesn't leave us entirely discouraged, telling about the Restorative Justice movement now gaining ground across America, and about the judge's victims who were able to tell their stories and win justice in a civil case. Though they admit that the now-grown victims will probably never see the money - but they gained something important by getting to tell their stories.
It's all sobering and sad, but I'm so glad this book exists to shine light on a horrible injustice carried out on thousands of kids - in the worst possible way, the name of justice itself.