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Across the Country, Youth Prisons Are Closing. This State Is Building More.
Tennessee officials say they need more high-security facilities for kids who commit crimes. Experts say this approach flies in the face of crime data and research that shows youth prisons are not rehabilitative.
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Featured Stories
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Tennessee Lawmakers Demand Answers on Safety in State Youth Prisons
Lawmakers cited a recent WPLN and ProPublica investigation that found that juvenile justice facilities run by Tennessee businessman Jason Crews repeatedly failed to report abuse and other serious incidents to the state as required.
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Vouchers Promise Students With Disabilities a Path to Private School. Parents Say That’s Not the Reality.
To give voucher programs a toehold in state legislatures, politicians touted how students with disabilities would gain access to private education. But those students’ families often have the hardest time finding schools that will accept them.
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This State Is Spending More on Lethal Injections. A Law Tries to Keep the Details Secret.
As Georgia plans for its first execution in two years, a trove of records provides us with new information — and raises new questions — about the state’s lethal injection process.
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More Stories
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Hurricane Helene Killed His Wife and Destroyed His Mobile Home. New Tenants Are Now Renting the Same Flood-Prone Land.
Residents of a riverfront trailer park in the Appalachian Mountains have lost homes and loved ones in multiple storms. A policy gap puts mobile home residents in harm’s way again and again.
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He Spent 27 Years on Death Row as a Wrongfully Convicted Man. What Comes Next?
23-hour solitary confinement. 115-degree heat. Jimmie Duncan is haunted by the decades he spent in Louisiana’s Angola prison — and how, even after being released, he still isn’t truly free.
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These Local Jails Were Supposed to Detain Immigrants for Only 72 Hours. One Woman Was Held for a Total of 26 Days.
Rebookings of immigrants into local jails are an effort to circumvent federal rules and regulations, legal experts say. Our nationwide analysis shows that in the past year, two Florida jails had unusually high numbers of rebookings.
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His Research on Pregnant Opioid Users Was Widely Celebrated. Auditors and Experts Found Major Flaws.
Dr. Craig Towers was hailed as a hero for his research on detoxing pregnant opioid users. After he published a study that found naltrexone could help patients stay off drugs, addiction specialists started asking if his work was too good to be true.
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“They’re Putting Kids’ Lives at Risk”: How Abuse in a Tennessee Businessman’s Juvenile Prisons Remained Under Wraps
Tennessee’s highest-security youth prisons are operated by a single private company. Former staff say they felt pressure to hide abuse and other serious incidents from the state and to handle medical emergencies without calling 911.
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He’s Eligible for Up to $480,000 After Being Wrongly Imprisoned for 42 Years. The State Says No.
Elvis Brooks’ case was an egregious example of a wrongful conviction, civil rights attorneys said. But Louisiana’s attorney general maintains that Brooks and other exonerees are guilty — and therefore don’t qualify for any money from the state.
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Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed.
In 2020 as Kentucky faced a spike of deadly overdoses, Gov. Andy Beshear set out to help more people access drug treatment by loosening Medicaid spending controls. But as the costs piled up, so did the warnings that the system was being abused.
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How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School
Mary “Tracy” Morrison ordered students to scrub floors and urged them to attack a classmate. Few records exist of incidents at The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain, a private school with little transparency. I pieced together what happened.
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How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat
Farmers want the Trump administration to overhaul the H-2A visa program to make it more favorable to their businesses. But cutting red tape could cut labor protections, too.
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My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed
Max Blau spent a year reporting on abuses of farmworkers. It left him wondering: Is the produce he buys at the grocery store part of the problem?
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FBI Has Looked at Using Questionable AI Tech to Review Signatures on Seized Mail-In Ballots
As part of President Trump’s continued push to discredit the results of the 2020 election, his administration has considered using AI technology to scrutinize tens of thousands of ballots seized in Fulton County, Georgia, ProPublica has learned.
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This Private School Had Students Scrub Floors and Attack a Fellow Classmate. The State Still Funds It.
One of the few requirements for Arkansas private schools is that they have an American flag and a flagpole. But millions in state funds go to the largely unmonitored schools while complaints about safety and fraud have gone unanswered, parents say.
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Florida Is Executing Prisoners at a Record Pace, Even as Most of the U.S. Abandons the Death Penalty
Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at a faster rate than ever before. What followed was the most intense period of executions the state has carried out in more than eight decades.
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Louisiana Supreme Court Frees Death Row Prisoner, Calling Evidence Against Him “Scientifically Indefensible”
The decision affirms a lower court’s ruling nullifying Jimmie “Chris” Duncan’s 1998 first-degree murder conviction. Duncan was convicted based in part on forensic evidence that is now widely regarded as junk science.
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Trump Administration Killed Criminal Investigation of GOP Senator’s Coal Companies
EPA and Justice Department officials were looking into potential criminal violations by the vast coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice. Then the Office of the Deputy Attorney General told them “pencils down.”
