Jennifer Gonnerman, Mother Jones
Gonnerman's revelatory "School of Shock" sheds light on the Judge Rotenberg Center, a Massachusetts-based behavior modification program that for 30 years has used an elaborate system of rewards and punishments’Äîincluding painful electric shocks administered through electrodes attached to the bodies of children as young as 9 years old - in an attempt to socialize troubled teens.
Gonnerman's reporting reveals the center's increasing use of such "discipline" not just on severely autistic and mentally retarded kids, but on kids with attention deficit disorder and other milder ailments.
In the wake of Gonnerman's story, Massachusetts legislators have opened a criminal investigation, and a D.C. school chancellor fired staffers for sending students to Rotenberg and discontinued the school's relationship with the center. Officials in New York, which accounts for nearly 60 percent of the center's students, have lifted a 12-year freeze on building residential schools for disabled children in Long Island so those youths will have alternatives to Rotenberg.
Jennifer Gonnerman is a contributing writer at Mother Jones and New York magazine. Her writing has received numerous prizes, including the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Meyer Berger Award from Columbia University's School of Journalism. Her first book, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award.
Ellen Schultz, The Wall Street Journal
This fine piece of investigative journalism details how debt collectors, in collusion with banks, are garnishing billions of dollars in Social Security payments to seniors and the disabled to satisfy outstanding debts, even though that money cannot legally be used for such purposes. Social Security is exempt from debt collection, but no one tells people that - not the debt collectors, the banks, or even the Social Security Administration. Even when people know their rights, a slow-moving legal system is often little help to debtors. Meanwhile, banks are making a small fortune on exorbitant fees from assessing penalties for overdrafts on the accounts of those who are just one missed check away from being destitute.
Reporter Schultz reveals how regulatory loopholes have allowed the practice to flourish and details exactly how it enriches debt collectors and banks while causing misery for many of the country's most vulnerable citizens. The publication of the story and its sidebar, "Banks Tap Social Security Funds Too," spurred congressional hearings, an Inspector General investigation of the Social Security Administration, and proposals from five federal agencies for regulations to prevent debt collectors from siphoning Social Security funds from bank accounts.
Ellen E. Schultz, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York, has spent the last decade focusing on the often hidden ways companies, executives and financial firms are profiting from aging workers and retirees. Her work has won dozens of awards for investigative and financial reporting, including three Polks, two Loebs, and a National Press Club award. She was also part of a team of Journal reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for explanatory reporting; recent awards include a sports-writing award for her story about the fight between the NFL and its disabled players. A San Francisco native and a graduate of U.C. Berkeley, Schultz taught non-fiction writing and journalism at New York University for a decade.
