Jail 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 videos are an extension of the Jail Crunch visualization and provide a personal window into how crime works in the region.

Last year, the numbers show, 60 percent of the murders, rapes, robberies, larcenies, auto thefts, burglaries and assaults happened in the districts that contain public housing. A high concentration of drug arrests and drug seizures occurred in those areas as well.

Attorney General Greg Abbott has made his office’s prosecution of online child predators a centerpiece of his decade-long tenure as the state’s top lawyer, as well as a promotional sound bite in his run for governor this year.

But a detailed review of Abbott’s record in pursuing online solicitation cases — those in which adults try to meet children for sex using the Internet — reveals that pursuit has occurred in an oddly limited way: In recent years, the vast majority of such cases developed and investigated by his office have been brought in Williamson County, a conservative area long viewed as tougher on crime than neighboring jurisdictions. 

The Virginian-Pilot reports that investigators are trying to figure out how Jeffrey Tyrone Savage, a 35-year-old truck driver with a violent criminal record, accessed the Navy’s largest base.

Savage Monday night climbed aboard the guided missile destroyer Mahan, disarmed a guard and used the weapon to kill a sailor who tried to intervene.

According to the Pilot:

“Savage had a valid Transportation Worker Identification Credential, commonly known as a TWIC card. The TWIC program was created by the Department of Homeland Security primarily to ensure security at civilian marine terminals, but the government ID can also be used to access military bases.

To get a TWIC card, a worker must provide personal information, including fingerprints, and pass a background check conducted by the Transportation Security Administration. More than 2 million people nationwide hold valid TWIC cards.

Some felonies disqualify applicants from receiving the security pass, but manslaughter is not listed among them. Savage’s drug conviction might have disqualified him had it happened within the past seven years, according to TWIC guidelines.”

Read the entire story here.

Restraining-order applications, as well as no-contact orders based on criminal complaints, have foreshadowed the violent deaths of at least 11 Rhode Islanders since 2000 — including the stabbing deaths of two abusive men slain by fearful women in self-defense.

During this period, such orders, and the allegations of abuse that accompany them, preceded at least 20 percent of 55 domestic violence-related homicides involving men and women who had either lived together or engaged in romantic relationships.

The story of Suntech’s fall links China to Italy, Germany, London and Wall Street, passing through some of the world’s leading tax havens and ending up — Dolce Vita fashion — in some of the most luxurious spots in Rome.

It’s a tale about the nexus of offshore financial secrecy and Italy’s onshore culture of corruption, featuring a cast of characters that includes figures linked to a businessman who has served, authorities allege, as a front for Mafia clans.

The story can be told in full detail for the first time thanks to secret offshore files and court records from around the world obtained by Investigative Reporting Project Italy and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists as part of ICIJ’s “Offshore Leaks” probe.

Jared Remy had glided through his first five criminal cases, but prosecutors thought the sixth one would be different.

Compared to what he had been charged with in the past — beating and choking his ex-girlfriend while she held their baby, cracking a friend over the head with a beer bottle in a jealous fit, elbowing and cursing out a police officer — the case that landed in Lowell District Court in January 2001 seemed minor: Threatening to commit a crime.

But for the first time, prosecutors had a victim willing to testify against Remy, son of one of the most beloved figures in New England.

Unless courts or the governor intervene, the state of Mississippi will execute a woman whose son repeatedly confessed to the killing she is slated to die for — evidence the jury never heard.

Across the United States, police and prosecutors are allowing tens of thousands of wanted felons — including more than 3,300 people accused of sexual assaults, robberies and homicides — to escape justice merely by crossing a state border, a USA TODAY investigation found. Those decisions, almost always made in secret, permit fugitives to go free in communities across the country, leaving their crimes unpunished, their victims outraged and the public at risk.

Read the USA TODAY report. Check out some of the local reporting that’s come out of the project.

Since taking office in 2009, State Attorney Angela Corey has had the chance to speak to a lot of people trying to get their loved ones’ killers sentenced to death. She has put more people on Death Row than any other prosecutor in Florida.

Corey’s office has sent 21 people to Death Row, and 18 of them are still there with the other three getting off Death Row on appeal. No other current prosecutor in the state has put more than seven people on Death Row since the start of 2009.