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Two former Pennsylvania judges who orchestrated a scheme to send children to for-profit jails in exchange for kickbacks have been ordered to pay more than $200 million to hundreds of people they victimized in one of the worst judicial scandals in U.S. history. A federal judge awarded $106 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages to plaintiffs in a long-running civil suit against the judges. In what came to be known as the kids-for-cash scandal, Mark Ciavarella and another judge, Michael Conahan, shut down a county-run juvenile detention center and accepted $2.8 million in illegal payments from the builder and co-owner of two for-profit lockups.
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