Just when you think that life couldn’t get any crazier, you hear a story like the one I’m about to tell you and you know that it can get crazier than anything you can imagine. Two judges in Pennsylvania have been charged with taking MILLIONS of dollars in kickbacks to send teens that committed very minor offenses to two privately run youth detention centers.

I have never ever heard of such a thing! It’s absolutely incredible and the actions of these two judges is beyond reprehensible. According to prosecutors, Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in payoffs to put juvenile offenders in lockups run by PA Child Care LLC and a sister company, Western PA Child Care LLC. The judges were charged on Jan. 26 and removed from the bench by the Pennsylvania Supreme Courtshortly afterward. The judges are actually scheduled to plead GUILTY to fraud on Thursday in federal court. Can you believe that?

One of the judges, Mark Ciavarekka, issued the following statement.

“I have disgraced my judgeship. My actions have destroyed everything I worked to accomplish and I have only myself to blame.”

He issued that statement to his former colleagues. What I want to know is what kind of apology that fucker is going to give to the children he gave unnecessary sentences to! Where is the apology for those traumitized kids? I’m sure that those kids were subjected to some things they weren’t ready for in those centers. The lawsuit fallout from this should be substantial. Ciavarella is 58 years old. He is facing more than seven years behind bars. I hope the inmates give him the “presidential treatment”!! He and Conahan deserve whatever they get in prison. All of the cases they have tried are going to be called into question now.

People had been complaining about Ciavarella for years. They stated that his punishments were ridiculously harsh and ran over the constitutional rights of the children bought before him. One child, Hillary Transue was given a crazy sentence for something very minor. According to the report, Hillary Transue did not have an attorney, nor was she told of her right to one, when she appeared in Ciavarella’s courtroom in 2007 for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal.

Her mother, Laurene Transue, worked for 16 years in the child services department of another county and said she was certain Hillary would get a slap on the wrist. Instead, Ciavarella sentenced her to three months; she got out after a month, with help from a lawyer.

“I felt so disgraced for a while, like, what do people think of me now?” said Hillary, now 17 and a high school senior who plans to become an English teacher.

Another guy was even more traumatized by what he went through.

Kurt Kruger, now 22, had never been in trouble with the law until the day police accused him of acting as a lookout while his friend shoplifted less than $200 worth of DVDs from Wal-Mart. He said he didn’t know his friend was going to steal anything.

Kruger pleaded guilty before Ciavarella and spent three days in a company-run juvenile detention center, plus four months at a youth wilderness camp run by a different operator.

“Never in a million years did I think that I would actually get sent away. I was completely destroyed,” said Kruger, who later dropped out of school. He said he wants to get his record expunged, earn his high school equivalency diploma and go to college.

“I got a raw deal, and yeah, it’s not fair,” he said, “but now it’s 100 times bigger than me.”

Kurt is right. Unfortunately the situation is bigger than him. It’s so sad that Kurt had to go through what he went through just because of greed. I hope these two judges fry for what they did. It was uncalled for and callous. Sacrificing your career, your integrity, children’s lives and children’s safety is more than idiotic….it is completely stupid.