The IRE Resource Center is a major research library containing more than 23,250 investigative stories — both print and broadcast. These stories are searchable online or by contacting the Resource Center directly (573-882-3364 or rescntr@ire.org) where a researcher can help you pinpoint what you need. Browse or search the tipsheet section of our library below. Stories are not available for download but can be easily ordered by contacting the Resource Center:
Search results for "prison towns" ...
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Small Town Justice
Jean Claude Meus was convicted of vehicular homicide and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The Florida Highway Patrol put together evidence showing Meus fell asleep at the wheel, lost control of his semi truck and overturned on minivan, killing a mother and daughter. The investigative team interviewed the first witness on the scene of the accident, who said Meus was alert and helpful immediately after the crash. Using evidence obtained from measurements, photos, etc., the asked an outside expert to map the scene and reconstruct the crash. The conclusion? Meus was awake and intentionally steered his truck off the roadway. The story fit with what Meus said, that he had swerved to avoid an oncoming car and lost control before overturning onto the van. When two jurors on the case agreed to meet with the new team and look at the new evidence, they concluded they would not have been able to convict Meus if this information had been presented at trial.
Tags: wrongful conviction; Florida; vehicular homicide; reconstructed evidence; mapping; highway patrol
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Agriprocessors and Beyond: Inside the Kosher Meat Industry
This series of articles looked inside the kosher meat industry, a quietly guarded world worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The reporting began two years ago when the Forward's Nathaniel Popper wrote about the working conditions at the nation's largest kosher slaughterhouse, Agriprocessors, in Postville, Iowa, setting off a wide-ranging debate in Jewish community. The paper has continued to follow the problems at Agriprocessors and reported early in 2008 on the debate withing the kosher industry about a widely used but apparently cruel method of kosher slaughter known as shackled and hoist. Then, in the middle of the year, federal agents, citing the Forward's reporting raided the Agriprocessors' plant in Iowa. Since the raid, the Forward has followed each legal development, but has also reported on elements of the story that were being overlooked. The first such article detailed the way in which Agriprocessors had handled immigrants and unions at its Brooklyn warehouse-sparking a case that went to the Supreme Court. The next set of articles investigated the working conditions in the rest of the kosher eat industry, with particular attention paid to the labor battles at Agriprocessors' biggest competitor, Alle Processing, which had been completely ignored. The article and chart on industry-wide conditions were the first effort to systematically set down the relative size and production of the major players in the kosher meat industry. The Forward also wrote a lengthy report on the immigrant workers from Agriprocessors who had been released from prison and ordered to testify in federal court against their supervisors, but were given no means to support themselves before the hearing date. After Agriprocessors declared bankruptcy, the Forward reported on the unnoticed consequences for the town and its inhabitants, from the lowly turkeys to the local bankers.
Tags: meat processing; kosher meat; agriculture; Agriprocessors; meatpacking; immigrant workers
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Undue Force in Seaside Park
"A band of night-shift cops known as the "Justice League" would kick, beat, abuse and sometimes cripple handcuffed prisoners for little or no reason. Internal reports of abuse were ignored by the mayor and chief of police, even when they came from a dispatcher who witnessed the abuses. The officer that headed the Justice League is from a highly regarded family of judges, lawyers and real estate moguls, who became untouchable in the small town."
Tags: police brutality; Justice League; night-shift cops; prisoner abuse
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Losing Faith in "Bishop"
A gentleman identifying himself as "His Grace Bishop Frumentius" offered a $56 million investment to build a housing project on the former Saginaw Fairgrounds. That 57-acre parcel of land was owned by the local Housing Commission, which was being forced to sell it due to a ruling that it had purchased the land without authority. But the bishop was revealed as Daniel Earl Phelps, "a parolee who served 10 years in prison on financial improprieties." Phelps' stated education history as well as the church he said he represented were shown to be nonexistent, with his main history shown to be tales of similar cases in other towns.
Tags: fraud; housing development; religious impersonation; fraudulent bishop
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Nuestra Familia/Our Family
The Center for Investigative Reporting did a series of binational reports on the inner relationships of Northern California farm town gangs to the Nuestra Familia prison gang, and on law enforcement's questionable use of informants to infiltrate the gang. For years, Nuestra Familia and its rival prison gang the Mexican Mafia have controlled much of California's drug trade.
Tags: Latino; youth; gang; crime; Mexican Mafia; prison; Chavez
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A Darker Shade of Rose
In 1977, 19-year-old Tommy Gioiosa's life would change forever after meeting major-league slugger Pete Rose at a motel in Tampa, Florida. Over the course of the next 10 years the two would become inseparable as Rose took in the young aspiring baseball player and give him a life outside of "dead-ending" in his home town of New Bedford, Mass. In over 100 hours of interview with Gioiosa, Vanity Fair's Buzz Bissinger dissects the relationship between the two, ending with Rose being banned from baseball and investigated for tax fraud and gambling and Gioiosa being sentenced to five years in prison in 1990. As Bissinger writes, "The relationship between Rose and Gioiosa reveals a tale quintessentially American in all its hues - about the tantalizing power of money and materialism, about hero worship and the false immunity it creates, about the price of loyalty."
Tags: Sports; Major League Baseball; Pete Rose
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Faces of the Uncounted
In the spring, Chicago had the lowest rate of return on Census forms among the nation's ten biggest metros. Some blamed the laissez-faire attitude of the city's census office, which failed to make a push for returns among residents. By June, the counting rate was notably more rapid, giving rise to questions about the accuracy of the data collected. In 1990, Chicago was under-counted, missing many of the neighborhoods where services are especially crucial."
Tags: census; minorities; 2000; racial demographics; English; prison towns; suburbs; projects; Latino and immigrant populations
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The Promise and Peril of Private Prisons
This three-part series shows how a group of exported felons created jobs and contributed to the economic growth of small towns in the south where other industries failed. Most of them are murderers, sexual offenders from Wisconsin's over crowded prisons who were relocated to prisons in small towns in Tennessee and Texas. The move, however, also brought perils to these towns. A local guard was beaten up by inmates. He is now permanently disabled.
Tags: Inmate imports; prisoners; private prisons; CAR
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Steel Town Lockdown
Mother Jones reports, "Corrections Corporation of America is trying to turn Youngstown, Ohio, into the private-prison capital of the world." Since opening the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in 1997, the author writes, CCA has done a poor job of maintaining an efficient and safe prison facility. This article discusses how CCA has benefited from the private-prison boom.
Tags: Corrections facilities; Private prisons; Corrections Corporation of America
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No title (id: 13438)
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette investigates the consequences of Act 309, a 1983 law in Arkansas which allows state prisoners to be assigned to county jails to relieve prison overcrowding. Under Act 309 in Wayne, Ark. convicted murderers slept with members of the opposite sex outside the jail, drove around town at will in a sheriff's cruiser and performed work that helped the sheriff and his family personally. (May 12, 1996)
Tags: Davis Hillier The Unusual freedoms of prisoners in Cross county Criminal justice 8 pgs.