By Paul Kiel
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]wo years ago, the president of Credit Management Services, a collection agency in Grand Island, Nebraska, presented a struggling local family with the keys to a used 2007 Mercury Grand Marquis. To commemorate the donation, the company held a ceremony that concluded outside its offices, where the couple and their two young girls could try out their new car.
By Joaquin Sapien
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t 14, Deshaun Becton’s life is a roadmap to California’s faltering efforts to care for its most troubled children.Over more than a dozen turbulent years, he lived with a half-dozen foster families and in five different group homes. Now he is among the more than 900 children that California sends to out-of-state residential facilities, most of them in Utah, a ProPublica analysis shows.
By Paul Kiel and Annie Waldman
[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n a recent Saturday afternoon, the mayor of Jennings, a St. Louis suburb of about 15,000, settled in before a computer in the empty city council chambers. Yolonda Fountain Henderson, 50, was elected last spring as the city’s first black mayor.
On the screen was a list of every debt collection lawsuit against a resident of her city, at least 4,500 in just five years. Henderson asked to see her own street. On her block of 16 modest ranch-style homes, lawsuits had been filed against the occupants of eight. “That’s my neighbor across the street,” she said, pointing to one line on the screen.
By Nicole Coleman Bronzan via ProPublica. Includes podcast.
Midterm races are approaching, and tax returns continue to yield telling tidbits from the 2012 election. In their campaign finance reporting, ProPublica’s Kim Barker and Theo Meyer look for ways to help Americans understand the effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling on political spending.
By Nikole Hannah-Jones. Republished from ProPublica.
Claire Rembis, 33, holds her daughter Cora, 1, at their rental home in Warren, Mich., on Dec. 19, 2012. The family moved there after facing what the Department of Housing and Urban Development contends was illegal discrimination. (Jeffrey Sauger for ProPublica)
The four-bedroom house advertised on Craigslist sounded like just what Claire Rembis and her husband had been looking for. It sat on two verdant acres with plenty of room for their seven home-schooled children to run and play. And the $850 monthly rent was much cheaper than the prices for other homes they’d looked at.