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By Challen Stephens & Ivana Hrynkiw, AL.com It’s not easy to make a dent when reporting on Alabama prisons. The system is jam-packed, cruel and deadly. Reform tends to happen only when the state is forced by the courts. But in 2024, something surprising happened.  After we began reporting on the bottleneck at the state…

By Katey Rusch, UC Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program Since we exposed the widespread use of secret deals to bury police officers’ misconduct in California, we’ve been asked the same question repeatedly: How did you know these agreements existed when they were designed to evade detection? The honest answer is that it happened by accident. In…

By Alejandra Cancino & Maya Dukmasova, Injustice Watch On paper, Chicago is a “tenant-friendly” town. This project began more than a decade ago when Maya Dukmasova started requesting data on eviction lawsuits from the Cook County Circuit Court. Court records are public, but in order to analyze the data, Maya needed bulk, case-level information in…

By Melissa del Bosque & Jack Sapoch, Lighthouse Reports. In March 2023, a fire tore through a locked cell inside a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, killing 40 men and injuring 27 others. It was the deadliest fire in a government immigration facility in Mexico’s history. Officials claimed that the fire was a…

By Brendan Keefe, WANF How do you find government agents in the world’s busiest airport when they’re disguised just like the passengers they target? That was the challenge I faced when trying to track Drug Enforcement Agency task force officers who were searching innocent travelers for cash at boarding gates. The story would end with…

By IRE Staff Finalized in 2015, the NFL concussion settlement resolved the most serious threat America’s most popular and lucrative sports league has faced, promising to pay every former player who developed dementia or several brain diseases linked to concussions. The league even agreed to fund a nationwide network of doctors to evaluate players and…

By Camille Phillips, Texas Public Radio After the death of an instructional assistant in San Antonio in February 2024, special education teachers in the city’s largest school district filed a formal complaint alleging his death was part of a widespread pattern of student-caused injuries. But that 77-page report was just the tip of the iceberg. …

By IRE Staff There are two kinds of investigative stories: those that would have come out eventually through a lawsuit or law enforcement investigation.  And those that only emerge because a reporter dug them up, tested their plausibility, asked hard questions and ultimately exposed wrongdoing so outrageous that it forced law enforcement to take action.…

By Sukey Lewis & Julie Small, KQED This investigation began with a striking data finding. In analyzing newly accessible records obtained through California’s landmark police transparency law, our reporting team discovered that correctional officers at California State Prison, Sacramento — also known as New Folsom — were using serious force at three times the rate…

By Lori Jane Gliha and Brittany Freeman, Scripps News When a gunman killed 18 people during a shooting spree in Lewiston, Maine in October 2023, our team did what many reporters might do in a breaking news situation: we asked a ton of questions, and we filed open records requests for anything that might give…