Word: louisiana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Generators like Calpine and Duke Energy (whose stock is up more than 20% this year) that sell their power to providers outside their home base are favorites. Peco and Louisiana-based Entergy, the nation's third largest power producer, have even embraced the once imploding field of nuclear energy, seizing on it as a lucrative way to produce power for the spot market. "Nuclear was viewed as an albatross--you just tried to survive it," says J. Wayne Leonard, CEO of Entergy. Leonard is spending $4.5 billion buying up nuclear plants at garage-sale prices. So far, his strategy seems...
...case of Jena helps explain why Foster has come to this conclusion. A month after the Justice Department sued Louisiana in 1998 for inadequate care of its jailed youth, a privately owned juvenile-detention facility opened there. Here was the state's chance to prove it could run a prison right, even if it meant contracting with an outside company--the Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corp. Instead a Justice Department investigation of Jena prompted the state to transfer all the inmates out of there last...
With hindsight, the head of Louisiana's prisons questions whether the state gave Wackenhut Corrections enough money to run a professional operation. Louisiana paid the company a per diem of $70 for each juvenile at the 276-bed facility. "We paid them approximately the same per diem that our own facilities cost," says corrections secretary Richard Stalder. "But they had to recover not only their operating but their capital cost. Seventy dollars a day is awfully close." Juveniles are twice as expensive as adults because they require more rehabilitative and educational programs...
...fill about 180 positions, a gross turnover rate of more than 300%. Staff shortages led to what the department characterized as excessive overtime and lapses in hiring. One security officer had a previous record of aggravated assault and cruelty to juveniles. But finding properly trained people to work in Louisiana's prisons is tough. The state's public corrections officers, who receive starting salaries just below $15,000, are the lowest paid in America. Recruiting is even harder in the private sector, where benefits tend to be less generous across the nation. Still, Wackenhut Corrections president Wayne Calabrese insists...
...Jena, a poor rural community, the corrections and prison populations were particularly mismatched. "You've got a Billy Bob high school-educated white guy trying to provide services and treatment to very tough, emotionally disturbed African-American kids," says David Utter, co-counsel for Louisiana's jailed youth in a class action against the state. Others argue that Wackenhut Corrections got a raw deal compared to the other four public juvenile facilities. "The reality is that [they] took their worst offenders and sent them to Jena," says John Cooksey, the Republican Congressman who represents Jena's district...