The High Price of Zero Tolerance
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| Courtesy SenArt Films/Kids for Cash Movie |
Kids for Cash details the 2008-2009 scandal involving two Pennsylvania judges that were accused of taking kickbacks to send kids to juvenile detention. As it turns out, whether the judges actually took kickbacks specifically to send particular kids to jail is unknown and disputed. What we do know is that these judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, took money from a for-profit prison corporation and greased the wheels to ensure that the corporation would be able to build a juvenile detention center in their county and that it would be fully stocked with inmates. They then worked hard to hide the kickback they did receive and committed the classic criminal mistake of not paying their taxes on the money.
May interweaves the stories of several families of kids that were sent to jail by Ciavarella, who was the area's juvenile judge and bragged in his campaign commercials about how he was going to be tough on juveniles that came before him. We find out Ciavarella was sentencing kids to juvenile detention for any minor infraction, and was apparently uninterested in hearing their cases.
Ciavarella's tough-on-crime attitude is part of a zero tolerance movement that fully flowered in the 1990s and that, according to the film, really took off after the Columbine Massacre. It persists to this day. May properly shows the disastrous effect that these policies have on kids. One of the kids was sent to jail for writing a parody Myspace page about her vice-principal. It is, in fact, the Myspace case that is widely credited with helping to attract the attention that ultimately led to Ciavarella's downfall.
In Ciavarella's courtroom, kids and their parents were coerced into waiving their right to counsel, although as the public defender notes, it wouldn't have mattered anyway. Apparently, Ciavarella lived up to his promises to the people of Luzerne County Pennsylvania to get tough on kids. And because voters love themselves some vindictive judges (as long as those voters don't have to partake of the criminal justice system), they happily signed him up - twice.
May also managed to get interviews with both Ciavarella and Conahan. Here Ciavarella becomes the star of the show with his self-pitying, feigned naivete act. Ciavarella's excuses are laughable when not just pathetic. This JUDGE claims he didn't realize it was a problem not paying taxes on a million dollar payday from the prison corporation or that it was unethical not to disclose to defendants he had received money from the jail to which he was sending these kids. If I believed those excuses - and I don't - the only thing they would prove is that Ciavarella apparently was not even fit to be a lawyer, let alone a judge. For this former judge to try ignorance of the law as an excuse was jaw-dropping.
May also incorporates the work of local journalists and the Juvenile Law Center, who helped expose this scheme. The inclusion of the Juvenile Law Center not only helps demonstrate that there are hero lawyers out there, but it allows May to address the broader problem of zero tolerance for juvenile infractions.
May looks into how we arrived at the present situation of zero tolerance in schools, but here May draws the circle too narrowly and relies too heavily on the Columbine Massacre. Yes, Columbine set off a national panic, but as Ciavarella's own campaign commercials from 1995 demonstrate, the tough-on-juvenile-crime fetish and zero tolerance policies began well before Columbine.
In fact, these policies have been at least 50+ years in the making, part of a broader reaction to supposedly liberal Supreme Court rulings and the resulting fear that, if we really give criminal defendants rights, we're all doomed. Dirty Harry, a right-wing fantasy of crime-fighting was released in 1971. Mandatory minimums came long before Columbine. And let's not forget the tough guy acts of Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 (who gave us both the Willie Horton ad and the bizarre suggestion that being a member of the American Civil Liberties Union is somehow immoral), and their terrified Democratic counterparts that soon realized they had to rush into the race to show they were tough on crime, too. Schools adopted zero tolerance policies en masse in the 1990s. All pre-dating Columbine. This is not just a single-event driven panic. And now for-profit prison corporations have entered the fray. The introduction of profit motive to imprisoning people can only make things better, right?
The focus on Columbine is not just a minor trip-up because I think it lets society generally off the hook a little too easily. We have a much bigger problem to fix than just tamping down a panic. Our justice system is broken, the way we think about crime and punishment needs to be overhauled, and we need big systemic fixes, not just a national calming down.
Of course, May has a lot of material to deal with here and he smartly realizes that he can't fall too far down the rabbit hole with a complete history of American juvenile justice. It mostly suffices to explain the problem, to show us the human toll these policies take, and the slimeballs that perpetuate these policies to win elections or make their own lives a little easier. When May cuts to a school administrator that brags about his district's zero tolerance approach, we realize that fixing the problem isn't going to be easy. The very people that we have charged to educate and care for our children seem to enjoy zero tolerance a little too much. (Why wouldn't they? It's harder to fix a child than it is to throw the child into the basement and lock the door. And with funding for public education being slashed, educators have to feel increasingly alone and desperate for policies that can make their lives easier, even if we all pay a price in the long-term.)
If you're worried that this is merely a dry, procedural documentary, or nothing but a political polemic, then don't. The movie is certainly not apolitical - it openly lets the audience know that there is a society-wide problem that needs to be fixed. Nevertheless, the story of these kids is not just poltical, but personal and emotional. You will ache for these kids and their families. Any human being with a sense of decency will be enraged at these judges, particularly Ciavarella, whose ego and self-pity are off the charts. When a smirking Ciavarella and his lawyer brag to the press about beating some of the criminal charges and then are confronted by the mother of one of the affected kids there's a moment of thankfulness that someone is finally giving this guy what-for. Only when you realize the depth of this mother's loss and sorrow, the vindictiveness slips away and your heart just breaks. It's an object lesson in how empathy can ultimately triumph over anger if only we let it.
The most depressing aspect of May's documentary is seeing that Ciavarella was elected democratically based on an explicit campaign of being tough on kids. We the people asked for it, and he delivered it. It highlights that the toughest part of fixing this broken system will be fixing ourselves.
Screened in the theater.
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