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Escape dilemma at Avalon
A Tulsa World investigation found that officials at Avalon Correction Center marked serious offenses such as escape attempts and substance-related offenses as minor misconducts, instead of X-level offenses. Avalon is a halfway house, which are among the lowest-security facilities for Department of Corrections inmates, where some inmates who committed nonviolence crimes finish the end of…
Read MoreUnchecked irrigation threatens to sap Minnesota groundwater
Crop irrigation has boomed in Minnesota in the past few years, increasing land values and raising yields for corn, soybeans and other crops. But hundreds of Minnesota farmers appear to be irrigating cropland without the state permits required to use large volumes of public water, according to Minnesota Public Radio News. Of roughly 1,200 crop…
Read MoreKentucky company making money off Georgia motorists
A private company that sells vehicle accident reports for $11 each to Georgians is making roughly $1 million a year off information that can by law be made available to drivers for less than a dollar. Each day, police officers statewide direct hundreds of drivers involved in wrecks to a website, Buycrash.com, that belongs to…
Read MoreObama administration deporting illegal immigrants for serious crimes, and minor infractions
With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.” But a New York Times…
Read MoreJail Crunch: A visualization of crime in Eastern Europe
OCCRP reporters filed freedom of information requests to prison authorities across Eastern Europe. The interactive visualization is a compilation of the data received from each prison authority, organized to demonstrate similarities and differences between prison demographics and crime categories across the region. OCCRP journalists conducted dozens of interviews with convicted criminals throughout Eastern Europe. The…
Read MorePortsmouth schools stash away year-end surplus dollars
In a highly unusual move a little more than a year ago, a special grand jury declared that Portsmouth school officials had violated state law by holding on to tens of millions in year-end surplus dollars that should have been returned to the city. Yet six times since the financial maneuvers were first challenged by…
Read MoreExperts raise numerous concerns about Lakeland Behavioral Health System
The News-Leader raised questions then about Lakeland Behavioral Health System and posed more questions when more runaways were reported. The paper found a report that says Lakeland failed to follow Medicaid rules by repeatedly using antipsychotic drugs to restrain children.
Read MoreConcerns over Google’s scans of student emails
Every day, thousands of Orange County students log in to their school-assigned Google accounts to work on lessons and send emails to teachers and classmates. What many parents and teachers don’t know is that Google is scanning and indexing every email that those students send and receive. The company recently disclosed how it processes the…
Read MoreFifteen felons voted in 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election
Though felons are prohibited from voting in Maryland, 15 of them cast ballots in the 2010 gubernatorial election, according to a recently released audit. The finding in an Office of Legislative Audits’ report criticized the State Board of Elections, saying the agency “did not have an effective process to ensure that individuals serving a sentence…
Read MoreVA pays out $200 million for nearly 1,000 veterans’ wrongful deaths
In the decade after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs paid $200 million to nearly 1,000 families in wrongful death cases, according to VA data obtained by The Center for Investigative Reporting. In that time, CIR found the agency made wrongful death payments to nearly 1,000 grieving families, ranging from decorated Iraq War veterans…
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