The company providing health care in Illinois prisons was the subject of several confidential court settlements about complaints of poor care, even as it held the $1.4 billion state contract for prison health care, Clarissa Donnelly-DeRoven found in an investigation for the Chicago Reader, with support from the Fund. The company, Wexford Health Services, has worked with the Illinois state ...
Speculators have rushed to the Western U.S. to mine for lithium, a sought-after metal that is used in electric-car batteries – but many of the companies involved intend to stake a claim to land with lithium and sell the land, rather than actually mining it, reporter Alex Lubben reported with a grant and editorial support from the Fund. For Vice, ...
Grantee finds evidence that Wisconsin company is using prison labor in China to make workers’ gloves
Zhen Wang, who is working at Wisconsin Watch on the Fund’s Diversity Fellowship, found that prisoners in China’s central Hunan Province were forced to make Milwaukee Tool-branded work gloves under grueling conditions at Chisan Prison, earning pennies each day. A supplier for Milwaukee Tool subcontracted work to the prison, two former prisoners said in separate interviews conducted in Mandarin. Regulatory ...
As Chicago began to integrate its neighborhoods in the late 1940s, Tudor Gables emerged as one of the first Black-owned cooperative apartment buildings in Chicago’s Drexel Boulevard, the boundary between white Hyde Park and Bronzeville, a Black neighborhood. Black Chicagoans had been developing cooperative businesses such as groceries and credit unions for years, but in the 1940s, aided by a ...
San Francisco Public Press, with support from the Fund, found that officials have significantly underestimated the risk of flooding on Treasure Island, which is likely getting worse. Treasure Island sits in the middle of San Francisco Bay and is the focus of a $6 billion development, expected to be occupied by more than 20,000 people. Reporter Kristi Coale found that ...
With support from the Fund, reporter John Washington of Arizona Luminaria is investigating the unusually high rate of deaths at the Pima County jail. In 2022, at least 12 people died in the jail. In the latest installment in an ongoing series, Washington looked at the quality and quantity of medical care for inmates and found it extremely deficient. He ...
Reporters Clarissa Sosin and Daryl Khan, with support from the Fund, published a five-part investigative series in Verite that examined the inner workings of the Internal Affairs Division of the Baton Rouge Police Department – the watchdog that is supposed to police the police. What they found, after scores of interviews and examination of hundreds of documents, was an agency ...
Wisconsin Watch, with a grant from the Fund for stories on threats to democracy, conducted the most comprehensive accounting of Wisconsin election fraud cases to date. The reporting found that, despite efforts to use the specter of fraud to restrict voting, there is very little actual election fraud. Reporter Matt Mencarini found that fraud prosecutions are disproportionately aimed at people ...
Reporters Daniel Rivero and Joshua Ceballos, reporting for public radio station WLRN with support from the Fund, probed the publicly funded Guardianship Program in Dade County, Florida, which is supposed to raise funds through property sales to help incapacitated owners who lack other support. The reporters found that two politically connected real estate firms were often the biggest beneficiaries. Following ...
For decades, there’s been little hope for people sentenced to life in prison in the United States. But, as Sylvia A. Harvey reported for the Imprint, “second look” laws are revisiting lengthy sentences handed down to people who committed major crimes while they were younger than 25. With support from the Fund, Harvey looked at how the prospects for a ...