Introduction

2025 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist CCBC Choices 2025
2025 NCSS-CBC Notable Social Studies Book Winner
YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Young Adult Readers
The New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2024

From award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist Candy J. Cooper comes the explosive story of the Kids for Cash scandal in Pennsylvania, a judicial justice miscarriage that sent more than 2,500 children and teens to a for-profit detention center while two judges lined their pockets with cash.

In the early 2000s, Judge Mark Ciavarella and Judge Michael Conahan of Luzerne County, PA were known as no-nonsense judges. Juveniles who showed up in their courtrooms faced harsh words and even harsher sentencing. In the post-Columbine era, many people believed that was just what the county needed to ensure its children and teens stayed on the straight and narrow path. But as more and more children faced shocking sentences for seemingly benign crimes, and a newly built for-profit detention center filled up further and further, a sinister pattern of abuses and bribery emerged.

Through extensive research and original reporting leading into contemporary times, award-winning journalist Candy J. Cooper tells the story of a scandal that the Juvenile Law Center calls “one of the largest and most serious violations of children’s rights in the history of the American legal system.”

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Excerpt

Sneering insults uttered by a judge, the rattle of leg irons across a floor, the stricken cries of a mother whose child is led away: here was a juvenile courtroom turned into a chamber of cruelty. Carisa Tomkiel, unformed and childlike at fourteen, would later remember the hard, wooden courthouse bench and her building sense of dread on that winter morning in 2005 in downtown Wilkes-Barre. She had looked around the hallway to see her accusers staring at her. She had heard the judge was hard-nosed and sent every person away. She tried to recall her parents’ advice: yes, it was wrong to scribble in Magic Marker on a couple of street signs. But it had been a minor childish stunt, and Carisa was a good kid. It was a first offense. If she took responsibility, if she was straightforward and honest and spoke to the judge with a respectful “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” justice would prevail. She would likely be placed on probation, required to clean up the signs or abide by a curfew. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

From the author:

1. “I've been guided by two main questions in my writing: What is fair? And what is true? I get upset when something seems unfair or untrue.” Cooper clearly returns to this motivation by writing SHACKLED. How do you feel when you learn about something that’s unfair? What personal strategies do you possess to deal with these situations? Are there structural strategies for you to deal with this?

2. Do for-profit prisons do what they set out to do? What controls are there on the ways the prison system can be susceptible to financial scandals? Who makes money on private prisons?

3. Consider the amount of press the Cash for Kids story received. Does it remain an important story in our cultural consciousness or imaginations? Why or why not? How did SHACKLED surprise you?

4. Can fairness ever be sacrificed for something? Such as safety? Should truth be sacrificed for any reason? What freedoms or rights do we sacrifice for our safety? What sorts of ways has this been interpreted in the past? How do you feel it is interpreted in your own life? What would you change about these views?

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