‘Shackled,’ a book for kids, about ‘Kids for Cash’

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“Wait a minute, this is god-awfully unfair.”

That was author Candy J. Cooper’s reaction when she heard about the northeastern Pennsylvania scandal dubbed “Kids for Cash.”

Believing the story would resonate with young adults, who “have such an acute sense of fairness,” she wrote “Shackled,” her most recent non-fiction book for that audience.

Subtitled “A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges and a Town that Looked Away,” the book recounts the turn-of-the-millennium saga of thousands of young people sent away from their families, often for trivial offenses, to wilderness camps and to a juvenile detention facility in which Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan had a financial interest.

“Young adults need to know about this,” Cooper said, explaining during a phone interview that she hopes her book will help kids understand “the importance of the rule of law and the importance of speaking up.”

When she recently took part in a book event at the Bethlehem Public Library, Cooper said she was surprised when Carisa Tomkiel, one of the young people she had interviewed for the book, showed up.

In 2005 Judge Mark Ciavarella had sentenced Tomkiel, a clarinet-playing band student with good grades, to an indefinite stay at wilderness camp after she and a girlfriend scribbled graffiti on street signs. The experience “broke my brain,’ Tomkiel would later say.

Seeing her at the Bethlehem Public Library, Cooper invited Tomkiel to join her on stage.

“We sat together and I was reading a passage from the first chapter,” the author recounted. “I looked up and looked over and there was Carisa in tears. She was crying as I was reading her story. I wan’t sure whether to drop everything and give her a hug, but I kept on reading.”

“A young girl, 10 or 12, came up to both of us. She had made a sign that said ‘You are strong.’ She handed it over to Carisa, which further sent her into tears. It was such an emotional moment. It showed how this story resonated for a younger girl. She saw the harm that had been done to someone who was pretty innocent when it happened.”

Tomkiel and her friend had admitted to a few scribbles on street signs; they did not admit to the 86 counts of vandalism, “essentially every instance of graffiti defacing the town of West Pittston,” with which they had been charged. Tomkiel and her mother were astounded by the “lightning speed” with which Ciavarella sentenced the girl, not taking time to listen to her explanation or willingness to make restitution.

Other teens, meanwhile, were sent to detention “for preposterous violations like jaywalking, swearing or underage drinking,” Cooper wrote. “He (Ciavarella) detained young teens for yelling at a parent or hurling a sandal, a pillow, or as in one case, a piece of steak during shouting matches.”

“Wherever the children landed, so began their entry into the harrowing culture of youth incarceration,” Cooper wrote. “Luzerne kids, jailed most frequently for first-time and trivial offenses, were dropped into locked institutions alongside more sophisticated youths — usually older teens convicted of assaulting a police officer, or killing a parent, or committing armed robbery, or stealing a car. ‘And then there were people from Luzerne County,’ said one formerly detained youth, now an adult, in sworn testimony, ‘that were in there for stealing a pack of M&Ms or getting in a tiff with their high school teacher.’ “

The real criminals were adults, Cooper wrote, describing the strategy of tricking young people and their parents into signing away the right to be represented by an attorney, despite the fact that Pennsylvania law required young people to have legal representation.

Ciavarella described himself as a no-nonsense kind of judge, one who, during the era after the Columbine shootings, would scare kids straight. One who would have zero tolerance.

“One of the evils of this,” Cooper said, “is he took the idea of zero tolerance — and whether you agree with it or not you can debate it, you can apply evidence — he took that and he exploited it. He just used it to enrich himself.”

Cooper’s research included interviewing formerly detained young people, and their family members. She also relied heavily on news reports, including many from the Times Leader and other local newspapers.

The author, who lives in New Jersey, mentions her impression of northeastern Pennsylvania as an area still feeling the effects of its coal mining history. She believes that contributed to an atmosphere that set the scene for corrupt judges and for adults looking the other way.

“It’s horrifying, the number of people milling around that courtroom, the public defenders and the assistant DAs and so many courthouse workers who knew what was going on,” Cooper said. “And it went on for such a long time. Advocates, on the outside looking in, were shocked by it.”

Cooper also is the author of “Poisoned Water: How the Citizens of Flint, Michigan, Fought for Their Lives and Warned the Nation,” another non-fiction book for young adults.

“Flint also was about government wrongdoing,” she said, “but in that case a whole lot of people were protesting and lodging complaints and marching to the state capital and starting their own water giveaway programs. (What happened in Wilkes-Barre) was so shockingly different.”

“I think it’s partly cultural,” she said. “This corruption, the influence of the Mafia, the lawlessness, the idea that the rule of law is not something you needed to abide by. I thought that was very present in the history of coal mining,” she said. “In the coal mining history there was a lot of that sense of resignation. ‘We’re the underclass and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ “

Cooper, who worked as an investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press and San Francisco Examiner before devoting herself to writing books, learned about Kids for Cash because her editor on the Flint book is from Pennsylvania. “She was even in high school when all this was happening,” Cooper said. “She was aware of some of these kids.”

“Then the documentary (“Kids for Cash,” released in 2013) came out and she sent that along to me. This seemed like a story that hadn’t been told with (young adults) in mind. It was a natural.”

The author was a 1991 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting, nominated for her work investigating the Oakland Police Department’s failure to investigate charges of sexual assault. A few days after that story appeared, she said, “the police chief came out and said ‘we blew it.’ ” The police department then reopened about 200 cases, Cooper said.

Features writer Mary Therese Biebel may be reached at 570-991-6109 or on Twitter @BiebelMT