Jail deaths happen with alarming regularity. The Badge probes the responsibility of sheriffs. This is part one of The Badge, a Political Report series on the powers and responsibilities of sheriffs.

White voices and victims dominate the genre, which can skew the perception of what constitutes a crime. I called Lowery not long ago to talk about that whiteness, which swamps the genre across books, ...

On the hook to repay $1.3 billion of debt this year, the nation’s largest prison telecom company, Securus, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Its failure would represent a remarkable victory for advocates ...

The latest frontier in drug reform has been the loosening of legal restrictions on psilocybin—the psychoactive compound in “magic mushrooms.” Psilocybin reform is an important development for at least ...

Gerry Armbruster went to the doctor in May 2014, complaining of tingling and numbness in his arms and hands. He told the doctor how pain in his legs was making it hard to walk, too. “I knew something ...

Internal emails and their attachments show that a roving Metropolitan Police Department unit attempted to suppress robberies in 2012 and 2013 by stopping and frisking and surveilling residents of ...

This year’s presidential contest will be the first since a federal judge lifted a decades-old consent decree barring the Republican National Committee from engaging in “ballot security,” or voter ...

“They were destroying me,” said one person placed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s “Program for the Aggressive Mentally Ill Offender.” In the nine months after Edee Davis arrived at the ...

After decades of protests over police violence, many cities have created non-police crisis response teams. These unarmed first responders typically answer 911 calls for people having mental health ...

On April 14, 2021, Dr. David Fowler, Maryland’s former longtime chief medical examiner and one-time president of the National Association of Medical Examiners (NAME), took the witness stand and ...

“A normal heterosexual person would not be so offended […] as to murder,” a prosecutor argued in a capital case in the late 1990s in rural Illinois. “I hope you die in prison like all the rest of your ...

Welcome to “Ask the Appeal,” the first in an ongoing series of pieces in which we answer common questions about the criminal legal system—and how it intersects with everyday life. For our inaugural ...