The New York Times, March 10, 2000
Teaching Johnny Values Where Money Is King
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Every day after school, 13-year-old Jeffrey Mendelman has a peanut butter
and jelly sandwich with milk, finishes his homework -- and checks his stocks.
"My dad's stock was going up," Jeffrey says of his decision to plunge into
the market, and he now follows stocks the way he collects autographs and
baseball cards. "Most kids here are interested in the market. Because a lot
of their dads have become pretty rich and that's why they get to live in a
gigantic house."
A new sort of American childhood is being forged in the land where each day
brings the dawn of an estimated 60 new millionaires. It is one in which
C.E.O.'s are the super heroes, family banter is often likely to include
talk of multiples and I.P.O.'s, and where a recent collision between two
students in a high school parking lot involved a Toyota S.U.V. Forerunner
and a Mercedes 500 SL.
But along with a new openness about money, and the good things it can
bring, have come concerns about the effect of Silicon Valley's bountiful
wealth on children, issues that are likely to escalate as the
post-adolescent entrepreneurs, barely old enough themselves to have
graduated from Ramen noodles on a hot plate, come of age.
The peculiar challenges of wealth, or what is now being referred to in the
Valley as "the sudden wealth syndrome," have themselves spawned a variety
of enterprises dedicated to helping the rich be rich, or what Judy G.
Barber, a marriage and family counselor, calls "the unique issues that
children of affluence face." Ms. Barber, with offices in Napa, San
Francisco and Palo Alto, also publishes the newsletter, "Family Money:
Commentary on the Unspoken Issues Related to Wealth."
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The New York Times, March 16, 2000
Privately Run Juvenile Prison in Louisiana Is Attacked for Abuse of 6 Inmates
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
A state judge in New Orleans has removed six teenage boys from a juvenile
prison after finding they had been brutalized by guards, kept in solitary
confinement for months and deprived of shoes, blankets, education and
medical care.
The descriptions of conditions at the prison in Jena, in central Louisiana,
are stark. But the criticism is particularly troubling, federal officials
and lawyers for the prisoners say, because the prison is run by the
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, the world's largest for-profit prison
operator. The judge said the company, which generally has a good reputation
in the industry, had treated the youths no better than animals.
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After reading the reports, Judge Doherty went to Jena himself and
interviewed inmates. He also conducted hearings of his own to determine the
facts of cases involving youths sentenced in his court.
Judge Doherty said one boy he released, a 17-year-old found guilty of
robbery, had been forced to lie on the floor on his stomach with a guard's
knee in his back, which caused excruciating pain since the boy had recently
had an operation for gunshot wounds in his abdomen and was wearing a
colostomy bag.
A Justice Department official said the government had given Wackenhut and
the state Department of Corrections a proposal for improvements at Jena.
"We are waiting to hear back from them, but the window is short," the
official said, indicating that the department was considering a lawsuit
against Wackenhut if changes are not made quickly.
As is often the case in Louisiana, the prison is also enmeshed in a
political corruption scandal.
A friend of former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, Cecil Brown, was indicted in New
Orleans in November on federal charges of funneling $845,000 from Fred
Hofheinz, a former mayor of Houston, to Mr. Edwards for the contract to
build the prison at Jena.
Louis Proyect
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