The takeaway for me in the case of judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan taking kickbacks to send kids to particular detention centers is that we should require counsel for people under 18. That seems like something of an infringement on their liberties, if you have a right to counsel, you should have a right to waive it. But we don't let people under 18 vote, because 18 is, for some arbitrary and some cultural reasons, seen as the threshold to adulthood. If we've decided that people under 18 don't have the judgment to vote, it seems absurd to say that we believe people under 18 have the judgment to waive their right to counsel under the stress of facing criminal charges and possibly detention. Juveniles under these circumstances would be highly vulnerable to intimidation, manipulation, and ignorance of the law, things that could be mitigated by requiring a counsel to be present in their defense. If we're going to maintain that juvenile court proceedings must be kept closed for the child's benefit, this seems like the only course of action to ensure that kids don't get railroaded in court through their own bad decisions. Illinois, New Mexico and North Carolina already do.
That said, maybe opening the courts is the better option. You can lead a counsel to court but you can't make him care, and opening up juvenile proceedings would give access to child advocates who might be more invested in the child than an attorney provided by the state. But if you only opened up the courts and didn't require children to retain counsel, said advocates would have to convince the kid they have their best interests in mind. That seems complicated already without considering the privacy issues of opening up such proceedings to the public.
-- A. Serwer
