In five jurisdictions reviewed by The Appeal, prosecutors have filed or are considering filing 187 charges against 66 protesters—including alleged hate crimes on cops, mob action, and attempted ethnic intimidation.
The “crime panic” was a myth. But an analysis by The Appeal shows the narrative helped local police buy facial recognition software, drones, license plate readers, social media surveillance tech, and more.
For more than 10 years, a group of incarcerated men have said Illinois prison guards forced them into painful stress positions and forced them to rub their genitals on one another.
From changing policy to helping people get a shot at freedom, we’re proud of the vital work we published in 2024.
Illinois Governor JB Pritzker tried to use the state’s parole board to safely free more people from prison. But after Republican backlash, the board’s work has essentially been frozen.
A college student was convicted of murder for a death he did not cause. Reforms to the controversial law that landed him in prison have not led to his freedom.
In 2022, Timothy Tyler was chosen to lead the Champaign Police Department — despite a string of misconduct allegations from his first policing job in the south Chicago suburb of Markham through his time at the Illinois State Police.
Advocates say the Cook County Sheriff’s Department’s house-arrest policies trap women in unsafe situations—and often force mothers to choose between their safety or their children.
An internal review by the Champaign Police Department found a “systematic” pattern of noncompliance with state law.
In Illinois alone, around 500 people are currently serving first-degree felony murder sentences for killings they did not commit themselves or intend to commit. Reform efforts must consider past injustices as well as future abuses.
Four years after a settlement agreement that was meant to compel improvements, the Illinois Department of Corrections is still failing to provide adequate care for the state’s oldest and sickest prisoners.
A federal monitor says substandard healthcare persists—with horrific consequences—more than a decade after a lawsuit was supposed to compel changes.
Water at 12 state prisons has tested positive for the bacteria this year.
Legionella bacteria was found in five Illinois prisons in March.
The move is part of a broader criminal justice reform bill that also ends prison gerrymandering, and mandates body cameras for all police departments.
In Granite City, Illinois, landlords have been penalized for refusing to evict tenants who have criminal records or are simply living with someone who does.
A growing body of evidence suggests that it’s possible to reduce or even eliminate the use of money bail without increasing crime.
“This economy doesn’t work for everyone; it works for very, very few people,” Newman said.
Newman, who is running for a U.S. House seat, wants Medicare for all, green jobs, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
A coalition of organizations is hoping Michael Toomin, who is also unwilling to implement diversion programs, loses his retention election.
President Trump has appointed a quarter of active federal appellate judges, and they have decisively hampered legal efforts to force prisons and jails to address the coronavirus.
Lawsuits from Joliet Police Department officers are among at least 12 current federal complaints against the agency. The men say their civil rights lawsuits are part of a decades-long history of discrimination.
After protests broke out in several cities in response to George Floyd’s death, the agency ordered the first nationwide lockdown in 25 years.
Health officials say hand washing is key to avoiding the novel coronavirus, but millions of homeless people continue to have little or no access to hygiene stations.
For weeks, two houses in Illinois’ Vienna Correctional Center ran on generator power and had intermittent failures, multiple prisoners told The Appeal. The outages made it harder to use the shared bathroom, one of the few places they could wash their hands.
As infections and deaths mount, state leaders and law enforcement are turning to tough-on-crime tactics in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak.
Prisoners are “especially vulnerable to contracting and spreading COVID-19,” Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker wrote in his executive order.
With one term under her belt as Chicago’s top prosecutor, Foxx says she has more work to do to right a system that has been “unfair, and totally unjust.”
On Thursday, the state of Georgia is set to execute a 58-year-old man for a crime that would not receive the death penalty today. Jimmy Meders was convicted of murder and sentenced to die for the October 1987 killing of a convenience store clerk during a robbery. His lawyers want the state parole board to […]
On the eve of the state’s marijuana legalization law going into effect, Governor J.B. Pritzker of Illinois announced that he would issue 11,017 pardons to people with low-level marijuana convictions.
According to a complaint, police in Oak Lawn, a suburb of Chicago, subjected Tylus Allen Jr. to invasive searches, all of which turned up nothing.
On Nov. 1, the FBI released a trove of previously undisclosed documents related to a decades-old investigation of police misconduct. In the 1990s, the agency investigated allegations of torture at the hands of Chicago police at the department’s Area 2 headquarters, where heinous acts of violence and psychological abuse were perpetrated against over 100 Black men and women under the supervision of then-commander Jon Burge.
Even after a major class action suit required Illinois to revamp its prison healthcare system, doctors whose alleged neglect resulted in major injury or death still remain on the prison system payroll.
Earlier this year, Danville prison removed about 200 books, many of which dealt with race issues. But the new rules don’t go far enough, says one advocate.
A Prisoner Review Board memo released in July requires a minimum of 12 hours of movement with ankle monitors, but some people say they’re still being given far less.
In Cook County, Illinois, 99 percent of defendants deemed ‘high risk’ for pretrial violence don’t reoffend.
A new report shows that a progressive approach, like the one advanced by Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, can help decrease jail populations—and crime.
Cook County has a new contract for juvenile ankle monitors that critics say are an invasion of privacy.
There are more than 2,700 people on electronic monitoring in Cook County, Illinois, alone.
A lawsuit accuses Illinois of cutting off LGBTQ prisoners’ lifeline to supporters.