Most of all, I am grateful to the kids and parents who agreed to talk to me about their experiences in the Luzerne County Juvenile Court. Among this group, I am especially indebted to Laurene Transue, who showed Mark Ciavarella and his accomplices in injustice that one of the most dangerous places in the world is between a mother and her child.
This book could not not have been written without Juvenile Law Center and its two leaders, Bob Schwartz and Marsha Levick, who set out some four decades ago to change the world and did. They, along with their colleagues Marie Yeager and Laval Miller-Wilson, educated me in how a juvenile justice system ought to work. I thank them for their intelligent suggestions and patience.
As a journalist for a half century, I have covered many “blue ribbon” panels that were set up to study serious problems and then proceeded to ignore them. The Interbranch Commission on Juvenile Justice is a sterling exception. Chairman John Cleland is a judge who, unlike Conahan and Ciavarella, takes his oath of office seriously. He and several of his colleagues on the commission were steady, trusted presences in the process of writing this book.
Special thanks also to Thomas Baldino, Thomas Crofcheck, Richard Gold, William Kashatus, Bart Lubow, Chester Muroski, Robert Wolensky, and Clay Yeager.
Susan Stranahan, my onetime colleague at the Philadelphia Inquirer, read early drafts and made her usual perceptive criticisms.
I am also grateful to those individuals who agreed to talk to me on condition that I not use their names. You know who you are, and so do I.
My thanks to two esteemed institutions for their generous support toward the writing of and production of this book: the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation.
Anita Bartholomew, my agent, encouraged this project right from the beginning and connected me with The New Press and executive director Diane Wachtell, whose immediate enthusiasm for the project persuaded me to go with The New Press. Over the next year, she persevered through great personal tragedy to shape my manuscript into its final form. Marc Favreau, editorial director at The New Press, also made important suggestions that were heeded.
Finally, writing a book is a solitary, consuming experience and therefore hard on the people the writer lives with. No one knows this better than my wife Susan, who not only put up with me but served as my first-read editor, making constructive suggestions, aligning verb tenses, eliminating misspellings, blocking unwise metaphors, and knocking down pretentiousness.