Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town That Looked Away by Candy J. Cooper (review)

Reviewed by: Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town That Looked Away by Candy J. Cooper Amanda Toledo Cooper, Candy J. Shackled: A Tale of Wronged Kids, Rogue Judges, and a Town That Looked Away. Calkins Creek, 2024 192p Trade ed. ISBN 9781662620133 19. 99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781662620140 11. 99 Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 10-12 "Count the number of buttons on your blouse, " a judge tells a sixteen-year-old girl, "and that's the number of months. . . that you're going away for. " Though it reads like a line from a villain, it is unfortunately a quote pulled from real-life court transcripts. This nonfiction deep dive focuses on corrupt Pennsylvania judges who used their positions of power to create a for-profit juvenile prison and conspired to send youths there for minor offenses. The book opens by examining how the region's history of mining corruption and organized crime paved a path for a group of men to pull off the elaborate, years-long criminal enterprise in the early 2000s, enriching themselves at great cost to those lesser off. The account is compelling in its horrific details—the outcome of a football game could impact the sentence teens received for crimes as small as spray painting a sign or incorrectly driving down a one-way street—yet the outrageousness of the judges' actions is centered more than the real-world damage done to the children incarcerated by them. Cooper acknowledges that the carceral system is overwhelmingly harmful to youth of color, and that the teens sent into the system by the corrupt judges often went on to commit other crimes because of the damage inflicted upon them by the prison system. Those issues, however, garner almost passing commentary, and when discussing the harm done to white teens committing mistakes, she emphasizes the harm they experienced at the hands of the "bad kids" in these for-profit prisons, with no consideration of how the "bad kids" may also be a result of a system working as normal. This book has enough history and crime to be intriguing for class assignments and could point readers toward nuanced books like Alexander's The New Jim Crow or Slater's The 57 Bus (BCCB 11/17). End Page 248 Copyright © 2024 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois