Shackled by Candy J. Cooper

Shackled by Candy J. Cooper. Calkins Creek, 2024. 9781662620133






Rating: 1-5 (5 is an excellent or a Starred review) 4.5



Format : Hardcover



Genre: Narrative Nonfiction



What did you like about the book: Candy Cooper, who leveled her investigative lens at the Flint water crisis with Poisoned Water (2020), is something of a YA Barbara Ehrenreich. She writes clear accounts of terrible events, with a selective eye to sorting through the details.. Here she looks at the Kids for Cash scandal. This was a Bush-II era event that centered on the Luzerne County Courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, PA, in which two judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, weaponized a zero-tolerance punishment philosophy for profit. From 2001 to 2008, they handed down overly harsh convictions for first-time and low-level offenders while the two judges siphoned money from kickbacks into their pockets, some of which they invested in a lucrative real-estate business in Florida run by their wives. In Wilkes-Barre, too, it was essentially all a real estate transaction. The judges reconnected with old friends to get the prison built and then got paid to fill it. 



Cooper is keen to point out that newspapers covered these shady dealings the whole time. She also includes a quick genealogy of the region, which can essentially be boiled down to trauma. Pennsylvania Coal Country is corrupt and deadly in a way that ripples through generations. Coal mining “shredded” the landscape, says the Times Leader , it “killed our fathers and children, and fashioned a new breed of often self-serving business barons. It left a legacy of culm banks and orange acid mine water we continue to combat, and the tragedy of black lung and other life-altering aliments lingering long after the cause vanished”. The entrenchment of corrupt political power evolved from the corrupt coal power that had exhausted itself. 



She returns to the same theme in the book’s third act, when Ciaravella cites comorbidities for a compassionate release from FCI Ashland in Kentucky during the COVID-19 outbreak. He has kidney disease and wants to go home. The deciding judge in that decision was also dealing with the US attorney’s civil hearings about the long term effects of victims from the scandal that sent Ciaravella to prison. Here, Cooper opens the floodgates to a litany of horrors from the 2021 hearings: abuse, infections, “profound psychological trauma,” “forced to eat bugs,” and a father of a victim who testified with an urn beside him. It’s truly eerie and a well done explanation that problematizes authority figures and details a wake of destruction that decimated the mental health of young people, the finances of their families, and the trust in the integrity of the justice system. 



Cooper’s gift of selection and organization also allows her to tell this whole story in under 200 pages (Don Brown, the graphic novelist, exercises similar brevity). The book concludes on a few individual stories and an aside about the Newark Youth Court, where New Jersey kids try other kids in a courtroom, an example of a justice reform effort supported by US Department of Justice administrator Liz Ryan. She explains “Most young people will engage in delinquent behavior during their teenage years. And the good news is that most young people will age out of that delinquent behavior as they mature.”



Anything you didn’t like about it? There’s a few spots where Cooper’s descriptions feel overwritten: (“Amid the classic columns, polished marble, and detailed woodworking of courtrooms in Harrisburg and Wilkes-Barre, the restrained, patrician-looking Conner reacted with frank horror…”). And, trigger warnings. This subject matter can be intense.



To whom would you recommend this book? Activists, budding legal experts, social studies fans, and students curious about incarceration. Upper middle school and high school teachers looking for a case study.



Who should buy this book? School and public libraries. Shedding light on issues like this protects people– a true example of ‘knowledge is power.’



Where would you shelve it? Non-fiction section and on the social justice display.



Should we (librarians/readers) put this on the top of our “to read” piles? True white-collar crime? Examples of why we need restorative justice? I would put it on the pile. As advocates for our patrons, Shackled is a story all about finally listening– there’s an “educational” bent to the ways zero-tolerance policies and juvenile centers were sold to the public. It’s a story too of how institutions that serve the public can turn away from those people.



Reviewer’s Name, Library (or school), City and State: Luke Steere, Wilson Middle School, Natick, MA



Date of review: March 4, 2024