Kids for Cash is a new documentary about the notorious juvenile court judges in Western Pennsylvania who were accused of accepting bribes from a private prison contractor in exchange for sending delinquents to the facility.
It’s well worth seeing.
What sets Kids for Cash apart from other documentaries is its unparalleled access to the bad guys: Judges Mark Ciaveralla and Michael Conahan. Most documentaries about court cases and corruption are lucky to offer a rare glimpse of the subjects, perhaps raising a middle finger or storming past the camera in a huff. In this movie, the villains sit down and give full participation and lengthy interviews. Which gives the movie its greatest strength: presenting a fair and balanced look at an extremely emotional, archetypal national incident.
By the end of the first act of the movie, the audience—like pretty much everyone else reading the newspaper reports across the country when the news broke—was convinced of the evil of these two men, ready to form a mob and administer some justice right there. There was a gaggle of elderly ladies around me in the screening room out on some kind of Finer Things Club field trip, and they were clucking and gasping and tut-tutting up a storm.
However, after showing the emotionally triggering opening interviews with the victims (the kids) and their parents, we have the first interview with Mark Ciavarella—where he admits to basically being a financial dodger—but points out that he was doing all of the draconian sentencing well before he participated in building the private detention facility.
By the end of the film, you are truly torn. Between the iconic image of distraught mother Sandy Fonzo confronting Ciaveralla on the steps of the courthouse (a confrontation that Director Robert May built up to with razor sharp timing), and the thought of the elderly judges going to prison for the rest of their lives because of their perceived crimes rather than any actual wrongdoing, the audience is left at a loss.
Rather than leaving with righteous indignation, you leave with just an overwhelming sense of sadness. That this is the world we live in, that there are times when we cannot know guilt with absolute certainty, and that so many families have been torn apart by this case.
I don’t normally seek out documentaries. But I know this is a good one.
