In many cases, the children’s parents were advised by the police to waive legal counsel, although as one public defender wryly notes, even F. Some were as young as 12, and the crimes could be as trivial as mouthing off or, in one case, creating a bogus MySpace page to mock an assistant principal. The kids interviewed for the documentary tell similar stories. Where a fistfight might have once led to detention or a suspension, now children were getting arrested and, because of judge Mark Ciavarella’s strict zero-tolerance policy, ending up in shackles. That 1999 massacre at a Colorado high school stoked an irrational fear that led school administrators to hand off misbehaving kids to the county.
In May’s telling, it all started with Columbine. Most impressively, May managed to interview both judges, offering the men chances to give their sides of the story. He spoke to the investigative journalist who broke the story, he followed the children and families affected by the convictions and he interviewed those at the Juvenile Law Center who helped overturn thousands of convictions. In his directorial debut, Robert May examines in granular detail the causes and effects of the scandal, and interviewed dozens of people over a number of years. Yet the documentary “ Kids for Cash” proves that the abuse was both more nuanced and more tragic than the public understood.
It was a stunning abuse of power, and both men were eventually tried and sentenced to long prison terms. If the details of the 2008 “kids for cash” scandal are but a distant memory, here’s a quick refresher: Two Pennsylvania judges pocketed millions from the developer of juvenile detention facilities, where they were sending thousands of kids for minor infractions.