February 14, 2009
wow
At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.
Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.
She was handcuffed and taken away as her stunned parents stood by.
“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”
The answers became a bit clearer on Thursday as the judge, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr., and a colleague, Michael T. Conahan, appeared in federal court in Scranton, Pa., to plead guilty to wire fraud and income tax fraud for taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers run by PA Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child Care.
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Wow. That is grim.
In 8th grade, I attained a modest amount of school yard notoriety with single page cartoon strip, satirizing our teachers in individual frames on a college-ruled sheet. During third period, however, it was confiscated from me by one of its featured characters. I spent the afternoon imagining how the rest of my life in detention would feel, until that same teacher pulled me out of my last class.
“Look, Mrs. C…” I stammered.
“I passed this around at our teacher meeting,” she interrupted.
Shit.
“Mrs. O isn’t that big, you know.”
“No. No! Of course, that’s not the joke, it’s about her homework demands, that’s just, uh, how I illustrated her…”
“Right. These are funny. Don’t do it again.”
When I was 15, I annoyed my R.E. teacher so profoundly one afternoon that he lost his rag completely and ran at me, eyes ablaze with fury. He ended up chasing me all around the school. It was a sports day, so everyone was outside, and our chase made it’s way across two games of cricket, around the netball & volleyball courts, across a road and through a few games of football [soccer], back across the road, through the school again, and finally, twice around the teacher’s building.
At that point, the Second Master [Deputy Headmaster], strolled out of the teacher’s building, and called my R.E. teacher off the chase. I spent the rest of the afternoon hiding under a stage, and went into school the next day dreading the impending fallout.
At registration, the Second Master summoned me to his office, and with exorbitant pleasure proceeded to tell me that he would do his utmost to ensure that The Great Chase [he was a man who could capitalise words with his eyebrows] would enter school legend, and that while he was compelled to give me two weeks of detention, I shouldn’t feel compelled to attend.