In October 2005, sixteen-year-old John appeared in Luzerne County Juvenile Court to answer charges that he had shot out several windows in a Wilkes-Barre home with a BB gun. The boy had never been in trouble with police before, and even the homeowner asked the judge to be lenient. Nevertheless, Ciavarella, after repeatedly silencing the boy’s court-appointed defense attorney, ignored the homeowner’s request and in a matter of minutes banged his gavel, saying, “Adjudicated delinquent!” John was handcuffed, shackled, and taken in a van some fifty miles to Camp Adams, where he spent the next three months in the company of real delinquents serving time for stealing cars, drug dealing, and armed assault. The brief hearing in courtroom 4 was closed to the public, but it was witnessed by an assistant district attorney, the public defender, lawyers, probation officials, bailiffs, clerks, and other court staff. No one present spoke up against the inappropriateness of the sentence. Also silent outside the courtroom were the police, his teachers, and school administrators.
Silence is an extremely effective form of lying, but most silences are pauses, interludes, breaks in the action. The silence in Ciavarella’s courtroom was deep and abiding, six years long, and it was never broken from within by the people who were closest to it. It was a conspiracy of silence. A large group of people agreed to ignore an unpleasant truth of which they were all aware. It is not an unusual phenomenon. Conspiracies of silence have existed at all times and at all levels of society. They happened in the antebellum South, where sexual relations between masters and slaves were common. For many years the Roman Catholic hierarchy kept mum about sexual abuse of children by priests. Baseball officials celebrated the shattering of long-standing home run records in the face of clear evidence that it was accomplished with the aid of steroids. During the civil rights battles of the 1960s, Martin Luther King warned us, “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.” A generation earlier, Mahatma Gandhi said, “Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.”
In 2006 Eviatar Zerubavel, a Rutgers University sociologist, published The Elephant in the Room, a study of “silence and denial in everyday life.” He said one of the underpinnings of group censorship was “knowing what not to know.”
Thus, despite the fact that the Nazi deportations of German Jews to Eastern Europe were often carried out in public (not to mention the widespread rumors about what awaited them there), many Germans knew enough to know that it was better not to know more. By the same token, although people who lived near the death camps could clearly identify the unmistakable source of the smoke and the stench coming out of the crematoria, they nevertheless avoided asking “unnecessary” questions and, feigning ignorance, by and large tried to look innocent by not noticing. (Unlike tactful, “civil” inattention, however, this was clearly motivated by fear and designed to protect oneself rather than save someone else’s face.) In other words, they pretended to ignore what they otherwise could not help but notice. [They] learned that if awareness of what was happening in and around the camp was unavoidable, one might still look away. Although cognizant of the terror in the camp, they learned to walk a narrow line between unavoidable awareness and prudent disregard. In so doing, they thus came to embody the type of citizen who makes the authoritarian regime possible: not speaking, not looking, not even asking afterward, not once curious.
Although juvenile court proceedings are not open to the public or media, there were always a dozen or more adults in the courtroom when Ciavarella was violating the most basic constitutional rights of children. Stenographers, tipstaffs and other court officers, prosecutors, public defenders, probation officers, police, and attorneys with other cases all were witnesses. Many of the onlookers were lawyers who had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. Under the Rules of Professional Conduct adopted in 1988 by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, lawyers in Ciavarella’s courtroom were obligated to report the judge’s rights violations. Under rule 8.3, the lawyers aware of his actions should have reported him to the Judicial Conduct Board or the Supreme Court’s Disciplinary Board. In addition, the prosecutors were required under rule 3.8 to report the huge number of children appearing before Ciavarella without counsel.
Yet no one objected when the judge sent away eighty-two-pound Matthew the steak-thrower, fourteen-year-old Angelia the epileptic, and eleven-year-old Ryan, the boy who couldn’t pay a $488 fine. Something very unusual and sinister was going on in the courtroom, and the truth was dancing before the spectators’ eyes. A fifteen-year-old boy was sent away for three months for pushing a classmate into a locker. A fifteen-year-old girl was jailed for shoplifting a $4 jar of nutmeg. A thirteen-year-old girl was brought before Ciavarella for fighting on a school bus. The judge asked why she did it. Rather than answer, the girl started crying. Ciavarella sent her way for three months for not answering his questions.
At the center of this web woven by silence were three individuals: David W. Lupas, the district attorney; Sandra Brulo, the chief probation officer, and Basil G. Russin, the chief public defender. The common denominator among them and their subordinates was an acceptance of zero tolerance. There is no indication that any public defender ever interrupted one of Ciavarella’s tirades against a cowering juvenile. No assistant district attorney ever appealed a case he had “won” because he knew Ciavarella’s decision was wrong. No probation officer ever stood up to the judge when Ciavarella dispatched a child away from home for the flimsiest offense.
Together, they embodied the proverbial three monkeys—“see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.” In Italy, the phrase refers to omerta, the Mafia code of silence, but in the rest of the Western world the three monkeys embody the acceptance of what is wrong by looking the other way, refusing to acknowledge, or feigning ignorance. They embody the official blink, moral laryngitis, systemic acquiescence.
During his tenure as district attorney between 2000 and 2007, Lupas never set foot in the juvenile court. Not even for a minute. He said he never received a complaint from his subordinates about the judge’s treatment of juveniles. It was Ciavarella’s courtroom, and no one dared to challenge him. The assistant district attorneys who practiced in juvenile court were young, naive, and unseasoned. Many of them were recent law school graduates seeking trial experience. They figured a judge like Ciavarella knew what he was doing, and they had no practical knowledge to counter that impression, and no guidance or supervision from Lupas.
There was a widespread feeling, common throughout the nation, that juvenile court was “kiddie court,” a place where newcomers—prosecutors, defenders, and probation officers—got some trial experience and labored until they were ready for “the big time.” In other counties and other states, the kiddie court mind-set even extended to judges, whose first assignment often was the juvenile court, with the understanding that they would “move up” if they did an acceptable job in this judicial apprenticeship.
Because of these newcomers’ lack of experience and curiosity, no one questioned the fact that an exceptionally large number of kids were showing up in court without lawyers. Pennsylvania’s 1972 Juvenile Act gives children the right to a lawyer from the time their cases begin until the end. Under the Supreme Court’s Rules of Professional Conduct for lawyers, prosecutors are obligated to be certain that juvenile offenders understand the implications of waiving their right to counsel. Yet in Luzerne County more than half of all children did not have a lawyer. How unusual is this? During the same period, George D. Mosee was head of the juvenile division of the Philadelphia district attorney’s office, overseeing the prosecutions of some 10,000 juveniles a year. He never prosecuted a single child who didn’t have an attorney. Most juvenile judges in Pennsylvania believe that children charged as delinquents should be provided with continuous legal representation throughout the delinquency process. Judge Dwayne Woodruff, who has been a juvenile court judge in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh) since 2006, said the question of a waiver is never raised in his court. “Every juvenile has an attorney. Period.” As a juvenile judge for twenty-one years in York County, John C. Uhler had some 20,000 young people charged with delinquency appear before him: “Every one of them had an attorney.”
The restrictions on waiving counsel in Pennsylvania got even tighter on October 1, 2005, when the Supreme Court’s new Rules of Juvenile Court Procedure took effect. The biggest change was Rule 152, which required that judges conduct a question-and-answer session—called a colloquy—with juveniles in open court to be sure that the young person is “knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily” waiving the assistance of an attorney. Even when a waiver is permitted, the colloquy procedure must be repeated in every succeeding court appearance. Another major change was that only the child, not his parent or guardian, could relinquish legal representation. In sixty-six of Pennsylvania’s sixty-seven counties, the change had a dramatic effect, cutting the number of waivers in half, from 8 percent to 4 percent of all juvenile cases. But in Luzerne County, little changed because Ciavarella—as well as the prosecutors and probation officers—ignored the rules. Over 50 percent of the children who came before Ciavarella had no legal representation.
Probation officers, who are employees of the court, advised juveniles either that they would not need an attorney or that they would fare better under Ciavarella without one. Ciavarella also manipulated the system by ordering the Juvenile Probation Department to set up tables outside the courtroom. Here youths or their parents arriving for hearings would routinely be asked to sign waiver forms. Often they were told they had to sign it, and many times they had no idea what they were signing. Ciavarella also pressured probation officers to recommend detention when the sentence was plainly incorrect. Ciavarella orchestrated a kind of festival of injustice, and everyone went along with it, murmuring Nuremberg-type rationalizations.
In affirming Ciavarella’s demands that they ask juveniles to waive their right to counsel, and in doing this outside the courtroom, the probation officers violated basic legal requirements and rules of procedure. The result was that an extraordinary number of children, perhaps 2,500, were forced to navigate through the legal system by themselves, often with drastic results. Social scientists say that most teenagers are not able to make intelligent decisions about legal matters. For many years the American Bar Association has recommended a flat prohibition on allowing young people to waive their right to a lawyer. The MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice concluded that adolescents are far less likely to make a decision that takes into account its risks and long-range consequences. It is clear that in most cases, neither the juveniles nor their parents knew what they were signing when they stepped off the elevator before entering Ciavarella’s courtroom.
When a child came before Ciavarella, the judge usually had in front of him a folder containing not only the detailed recommendations of the Probation Department, but information on the juvenile’s school record, parents, siblings, and other personal information, including any problems with drugs or alcohol. This information usually came from a so-called “intake report” based on an initial interview conducted by a juvenile probation officer early in the case. Typically, the file was given to Ciavarella by Brulo, even though it was against the law and a violation of court procedure for Ciavarella to have it, because information from the file could prejudice his final ruling. A juvenile judge is expected to hear a case with a clean slate and decide on the basis of the facts of the case whether the child committed the offense he or she is accused of. But by the time a child came before Ciavarella, the judge had already read his or her file and made up his mind about what to do. That’s one reason most of the hearings were so brief.
Public defenders witnessed hundreds of instances of children’s constitutional rights being violated, but they failed to speak up either on behalf of their clients or under their ethical responsibilities as lawyers. They failed to contact the state Judicial Conduct Board, they failed to contact the Luzerne County Bar Association and, with one exception, they failed to contact Russin, the chief public defender, who was in charge of twenty-two assistant public defenders—six full-time and sixteen part-time. Russin was the county’s chief public defender for the entire time Ciavarella was the juvenile judge. In fact, Russin had held that post since 1980 and had served as an assistant public defender for four years before that. He worked at his public job about twenty hours a week, reserving the rest of his time for his private practice. As a part-time official, Russin did no in-the-courtroom supervision of his assistants, even though he knew they were inexperienced. There were no performance reviews or training in juvenile procedures.
During the Ciavarella years (1996–2008), Russin assigned only one of his twenty-two defenders to juvenile court, and that was on a part-time basis averaging four hours a week. As a result, public defenders handled extraordinarily few juvenile cases in Luzerne County. Russin estimated this number to be somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of all cases in which the offender had an attorney, meaning that between 2003 and 2008 no more than 250 juveniles had representation from Russin’s office. Russin claimed he did not know the extent of Ciavarella’s denial of legal representation to children, but said that the low number of defenders assigned to juveniles was due to his meager budget. Pennsylvania is one of only two states that do not provide funds for public defenders to represent juveniles. The entire burden falls on the counties, and therefore there are significant differences within the state in the quality of legal representation for child offenders. This disparity is sometimes known pejoratively as “justice by geography.”
Russin felt so constrained by a lack of funds that even when one of his assistants came to him with a serious complaint, he did not address it. Jonathan Ursiak told Russin that huge numbers of juveniles were going before Ciavarella without lawyers, often after signing improper waivers. But rather than look into the possibility of constitutional violations, he told his young subordinate, “First of all, we’re not going to seek clients. I’m not going to put up a sign and say, ‘Please come in here, and we’ll represent you.’ We have to assume there’s a proper waiver going on. We have to assume the judge has a waiver. We have to assume the district attorney knows the rules and the waiver and the juvenile probation office is doing the waiver. And we don’t have the time or the manpower to intervene.”
But, of course, all those assumptions were wrong.
One of the most egregious abuses Ursiak brought to Russin was Ciavarella’s practice of placing children in PA Child Care to await evaluation by Dr. Vita, the court-appointed psychiatrist who was married to Conahan’s sister. Matthew, the thirteen-year-old accused of tossing a piece of steak at his mother’s boyfriend, was detained for sixteen days before getting to see Dr. Vita. Edward, the wrestler who eventually committed suicide, languished at the Pittston center for a month before getting his evaluation. Russin was troubled by the injustice of depriving children of their liberty in order to be evaluated under a court order, but he did not protest because he said he respected Ciavarella’s judgment. Moreover, Russin was well aware that Ciavarella’s zero-tolerance philosophy had strong support from the probation officers, who were taking their cues from the judge; the assistant district attorneys, who were getting convictions; and the police, who knew that when they charged a kid it would stick and youths would be sent away. But Ciavarella’s adherents went well beyond the courtroom—and nowhere was zero tolerance embraced more warmly than in Luzerne County’s eleven public school districts, where 50,000 children showed up for class every day.
By almost any standard, the public schools of Luzerne County were remarkably corrupt. Dr. Thomas Baldino, the Wilkes University political science professor and longtime critic of local public education, likens some districts to “job-selling cesspools:” He adds: “For most respectable school boards, the biggest political issue is taxes, but in northeastern Pennsylvania, it’s jobs. If you want a job teaching, you have to know somebody or pay somebody.” Undeniably, the fourth R in Luzerne County schools was Relatives. Nepotism has been a way of life in northeastern Pennsylvania for so long that it is accepted and expected. School districts are loaded with the families and friends of school directors and top administrators. Not only do school directors see virtue in “hiring locally,” the argument has even been advanced that it is a way to counter “brain drain,” the migration of talented young people away from home. In 2009, Jeffrey T. Namey, superintendent of the Wilkes-Barre Area School District, claimed that a school board member’s wife, a principal’s son, and a teacher’s son were all the best possible selections for elementary teaching positions among all the applicants. In 2002 a Wilkes-Barre Area school director had her son, daughter-in-law, and four cousins on the payroll earning a combined $270,000 in salary and benefits. The director defended her actions by saying everyone was doing it: “I have nothing against anybody else, as long as they’re qualified. Every board member is pushing somebody for a job—friends’ kids, neighbors’ kids. I have helped many, many teachers in the district get jobs.” Just before the 2002 election, the Times-Leader did a survey and found that fully one-third of the incumbent school directors who were seeking re-election in Luzerne County had relatives working in the school districts they oversaw.
By 2005, school officials were well aware that the one certain way to rid themselves of a troublemaker was to call the police, because this would get the child before Ciavarella. These kids were not only disciplinary headaches, they often were low achievers academically and dragged down test scores, making it doubly desirable to get rid of them. Behaviors that once were matters for in-school discipline—shoving matches, foul language, disrespect to teachers—were elevated to law enforcement issues. They were no longer handled by a visit to the principal’s office or an after-school detention. In short, Luzerne County educators used Ciavarella as their chief disciplinarian. This despite the fact that under Pennsylvania law the only offense schools were required to report to police was the discovery of firearms and other prohibited weapons on school grounds. Around administrative offices and teachers’ lounges, Ciavarella was praised to the point of eulogy. “The schools just loved him,” said former Judge Chester B. Muroski, who served as juvenile judge in Luzerne County from 1982 to 1996. “It was so easy for them. When a kid got sent to the principal’s office, even for something relatively minor, just call the cops.” Muroski was removed as juvenile judge in 1996 partly because of complaints from school officials that he was too lenient in sentencing young people. Under Ciavarella, they pressed for disruptive students to be “placed”—and therefore out of their hair.
In feeding their problems to Ciavarella, Luzerne County educators ignored alternative steps that would be fairer to the children and less expensive to society. These include community service, after-school detention, loss of privileges such as extracurricular activities, and in-school suspensions that allow students to receive extra academic help.
Every autumn, early in the school year, principals, teachers’ organizations, and parents’ groups invited Ciavarella to speak at high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools. One parent remembers an elementary school principal introducing the judge to some 250 pupils this way: “And if all of that didn’t scare you enough, here’s Judge Ciavarella.” Parents bathed him in a warm blanket of applause. Punctuating his sentences with his eyes and brows, he promised institutional placement for any school-related rules infractions or behavioral lapses. “I’m your friend,” he said, “but there’s one thing you must remember. If you don’t behave, you’re going to end up in my courtroom. You don’t want that to happen.” Then he mixed in with his audience, patting children on the head. Parents thanked him for taking time out from his busy schedule. The judge received similarly warm receptions all over the county, though in high schools there would be a scattering of catcalls and boos from students sitting in darkened auditoriums. “Ciavarella played on fear,” Baldino said. “Parents were afraid their kids would be bullied in school. Old people were afraid they would be attacked by violent juveniles.”
“Ciavarella took something good to a whole new level that was wrong,” said James A. Gibbons, a district magistrate judge in nearby Scranton. “I go into schools and give talks, but mine are thematic and educational. I’ll go in and talk about how the courts work and why to be wary of Internet predators. This guy went overboard and was threatening kids.”
In 2005 Ciavarella went to faculty meetings and warned the teachers of the growing danger of gang members disrupting classes. “There are problems down there that don’t get resolved,” he said after meeting with the Hazleton Area School District faculty. “There is an element now beginning to participate in gangs. People don’t want to say gangs are there and want to have a ‘kids-will-be-kids’ attitude. You can’t do that and maintain a safe environment for our kids to go to school.” To be sure, there was gang activity in northeastern Pennsylvania, partly because of easy access to drugs from New York City. In addition, two major national drug trafficking routes—Interstates 80 and 81—intersected in Luzerne County.
But no sinister gang inspired fifteen-year-old Paige to throw her sandal at her mother during an argument in the summer of 2005. Her mother filed charges to teach her a lesson. At a brief hearing, Ciavarella told the young girl, “Kiss your parents goodbye.” Then he sent her to PA Child Care for six months. It was a difficult experience for her. She yearned to be home, and she didn’t understand why she was interned with burglars, drug traffickers, and prostitutes. Nor was thirteen-year-old Sheree a threat to public safety when she took a joyride on a bicycle her mother said had been abandoned on the street. Ciavarella sent her away for a month, and thus began a long series of out-of-home confinements in several areas of Pennsylvania. The child became lonely, unstable, and began cutting herself. Fifteen-year-old Alyson was not a gang member when she got in a dispute over a candy bar with her mother and, at the height of the argument, hit her three times on the backside with a pillow. To teach her a lesson, her mother called the police, and suddenly she was before Ciavarella on assault charges. When the judge asked her how she was pleading, she said guilty. She got fifty-six days at Wind Gap, the wilderness camp in Carbon County operated by the Youth Services Agency.
The familiar scenario of parents bringing their children before Ciavarella to “teach them a lesson” has a long history. The very first juvenile courts of more than a century ago were used by working-class Americans to discipline their own unruly children. Sometimes parents were annoyed that their children refused to take factory jobs. “Working-class and immigrant parents used the courts as a club over rebellious children,” writes Lawrence M. Friedman in his 1993 book Crime and Punishment in American History. “It was a weapon in a culture clash—a clash of generations, especially between old world parents, at sea in America, confused about values, horrified at the mobility, the laxity, the narcissism, the ‘fatal liberty’ that swallowed up their children and destroyed a nexus between parent and child that they had thought to be as sacred as a worshiped sun.”
Fourteen-year-old Jamie came before Ciavarella on assault charges. She had gotten into a fight with another girl. They slapped each other once in a dispute over a boy at a bowling alley. Police and probation officers told her she did not need a lawyer. Ciavarella adjudicated her delinquent and sent her first to PA Child Care. She also spent time in two other detention facilities for a total time away from home of eleven months. During her confinement, other girls taught her about self-mutilation. She still bears the scars. Four years later, she told an interviewer, “It affected me dramatically. I’ve lost friends over this. People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. I’m still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places is just horrible. Everybody gets put in the same level, and it’s just horrible. I’m still struggling. I’m graduating this year. I was like an A-B student before I went, and now I’m just struggling with Bs and Cs.”
Meanwhile, Conahan was a glowering, unsmiling presence in the century-old courthouse and dominated the courthouse staff by populating it with his political cronies and relatives. Even to Ciavarella, Conahan was the Boss. The courthouse teemed with ambition for raises and promotion, and fear of demotion and firing. When it came to questioning the violation of children’s rights and the loss of their freedom, the courthouse became a hotbed of cold feet. Conahan and Ciavarella packed the courthouse with their friends and relatives. Dr. Vita, the court-appointed psychologist and Conahan’s brother-in-law, was far from the only one of the judge’s relatives to benefit. Indeed, it was joked that one probation office contained so many Conahan kin that “you didn’t have to go far for a kidney if you needed a transplant.” Conahan’s cousin was the court administrator and another brother-in-law was jury management supervisor. Conahan’s sister and nephew had jobs. Ciavarella’s daughter was an assistant district attorney. Also holding county jobs were a former Ciavarella neighbor, Ciavarella’s daughter’s boyfriend and former boyfriend, Ciavarella’s wife’s nephew, his wife’s nephew’s wife, the daughter of Ciavarella family friends, and Ciavarella’s cousin.
The judges’ intimidation powers extended well beyond the courthouse. In the American political system, there are few figures more powerful than judges, who are empowered to rule on the most basic aspects of everyday life and deprive any citizen of freedom and property. William Kashatus, the local historian, said this influence was magnified in Luzerne County: “The longtime residents are products of a regional culture that emphasizes deference to public officials and retribution for those who challenge authority. Much of the area’s population is descended from poorly educated immigrants from eastern and southern Europe who worked in a once-prosperous anthracite coal industry. Congressmen, state representatives, and judges were among the most important authority figures in the lives of those immigrants, wielding significant influence and helping them navigate the challenges and uncertainties of their new home. At the same time, the immigrants feared retribution if they challenged authority of any kind, whether legal or illegal. Aspects of this mentality still prevail in Luzerne County. Ciavarella and Conahan realized that and preyed on it.”
According to Robert Wolensky, the Wisconsin sociologist who grew up in Luzerne County: “There’s always been a mentality here that if you don’t do as you’re told, you’re going to lose your livelihood. But if you do as you’re told, and don’t make trouble, you’ll be taken care of and you’ll have a job. The pillars of this pattern were the coal companies, the aristocratic families, the church, and organized crime. Now it’s the elected officials. Who’s more powerful than a judge in his courtroom?”
Former Judge Muroski, who handled juvenile matters in Luzerne County for twenty-three years, believes there is a strong “anti-kid” current that lent Ciavarella’s stern policies popular support. Luzerne County has one of the oldest populations in the nation—about 18.1 percent of its people are over sixty-five, which is higher than even the state of Florida at 17.2 percent. “The city of Wilkes-Barre owns two golf courses, but there is no municipal swimming pool,” says Muroski. “I rest my case.” The judge remembers that when he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a notorious juvenile facility called Kis-Lyn: “The kids were treated unbelievably brutally. They were beaten with razor straps. Parents, teachers, and principals told kids, ‘If you screw up, you’ll go to Kis-Lyn.’ It was the worst thing that could happen to you. A teacher threatened me with it once. It scared the crap out of me.” Kis-Lyn was closed in 1965 and the site is now a federal job training center. “Ciavarella became the new Kis-Lyn,” Muroski said. “Parents and teachers tried to scare kids by threatening to send them to Ciavarella.” Indeed, right after he became juvenile judge in 1997, Ciavarella tried to persuade the county to reopen Kis-Lyn for first-time offenders, whom he said would benefit from a boot camp atmosphere that featured strenuous physical activity, schooling, and counseling. “It would be a place where we could reinforce the fact that they don’t ever want to break the law again,” he said. The plan was dropped because the county did not provide funding. Anthony T. P. Brooks, executive director of the Luzerne County Historical Society, said the relative inattention to the welfare of children goes back to the mining days when preadolescent boys and girls were employed as breakers, sorting chunks of coal as they rolled down chutes, or as “spraggers,” jabbing long pieces of wood under the wheels of mine cars to slow them down.
For many of the kids who were run through Luzerne County Juvenile Court and sent away, the worst part of the experience happened immediately—the shackling of their hands and feet. Many of them report feeling degraded and humiliated by the restraints. At the beginning of the day, a dozen or more sets of shackles would be brought in by court bailiffs. If the youths were placed by Ciavarella, sometimes they would be shackled by probation officers and escorted from the courtroom. On other occasions, they would be taken to a separate room to have the restraints attached. Several individuals recalled days when there were a dozen or more children standing in the courtroom shackled and wearing orange prison jumpsuits.
The hand and foot restraints were attached to a belt, forcing the juvenile to shuffle. Some of the handcuffs and leg cuffs used in Luzerne County were manufactured by the Hiatt-Thompson Corp. of Oak Park, Illinois, which has roots going back to a British firm, Hiatt & Company. This company started making handcuffs, manacles, leg irons, and other devices to shackle humans in 1780. Among their earliest customers were slave traders.
George D. Mosee said that in Philadelphia, juvenile offenders are not restrained unless they are a serious safety risk, and that in nearly all cases only handcuffs are used. And he said that the sheriff, not the judge, determined the issue of restraints on a case-by-case basis.
After sentencing seventeen-year-old Kevin to three months at Camp Adams for getting into a fight after a concert, he ordered the boy shackled. His mother said later, “Kevin has since told me that the most traumatic thing for him was the experience of being handcuffed and shackled in the courtroom, escorted out a side door, and shoved in a van. He was so ashamed to be treated like a serious criminal in front of people he knew in the courtroom. He was also worried about the emotional distress his grandfather experienced watching it all happen.”