Biden Shouldn’t Have Commuted the Sentence of a Judge in the ‘Kids for Cash’ Kickback Scandal
Among the 1,500 federal offenders whose home confinement sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden yesterday was a former judge who took millions of dollars in kickbacks to send teenagers to private juvenile detention centers.
The Citizens’ Voice first reported that Biden had commuted the sentence of Michael Conahan, a former Pennsylvania judge who pleaded guilty to racketeering in 2011 for participating in an infamous “kids for cash” scheme. Conahan and another judge received nearly $3 million in kickbacks to increase the head counts at two juvenile detention centers, often sending teens upriver for minor disciplinary issues. Conahan was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison.
However, in 2020, the elderly Conahan became one of roughly 13,000 federal prisoners who were released to home confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic under the CARES Act, a large pandemic relief bill. To qualify, an inmate had to be medically vulnerable, not be convicted of violent or sexual crimes, and have completed the majority of their sentence, among other requirements.
The Justice Department under Donald Trump’s first term planned on returning those offenders back to prison when the pandemic emergency declaration ended. But criminal justice groups successfully pressured the Biden administration to release a new rule allowing those offenders to remain at home, arguing it was cruel and wasteful to reincarcerate them after they’d been successfully rebuilding their lives for several years. A potent data point for their argument was the extraordinarily low recidivism rate among those released: The Bureau of Prisons reported in 2023 that, among the 13,204 individuals serving their sentence on home confinement since March 2020, only 2
Article from Reason.com
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