In liberal Buncombe County, elected officials have watched the state shrink their powers over detention and immigration. Now that looms large over the March race for district attorney.

Governors Lujan Grisham and Moore signed laws barring local sheriffs and police from partnering with ICE’s 287(g) program, ...

This article is part of our coverage of how a pending Supreme Court case on the Voting Rights Act may affect local political power; read our earlier article on Tennessee. It was published in a ...

The U.S. Postal Service began piloting a cost-cutting plan in 2023 to remove the machines that sort and postmark mail from local offices and instead consolidate mail processing in regional centers. As ...

Chicago’s public defenders are among the best-resourced in Illinois, but even there, massive case loads have attorneys and investigators stretched paper-thin. The Cook County Jail has swelled under ...

When Australia holds its federal elections on Saturday, it’ll do so with the requirement that all eligible citizens head to the polls and vote. If they don’t, the Australian Electoral Commission will ...

LaDerrick Campbell has an IQ in the 60s. His defense counsel described him as “the most profoundly mentally ill client” they had ever encountered. Daniel Blank’s confession was coerced; one of the ...

Donald Trump’s promise of “mass deportations” looms over millions of people who live in the United States. But the infrastructure to detain immigrants didn’t start with Trump. U.S. Immigration & ...

This article was produced as a collaboration between Bolts and The Intercept. Alan Miller had spent the six months leading up to his execution confined to his cell. Though Miller was never given an ...

In 2017, Seattle implemented a democratic reform that accomplished the seemingly impossible, diversifying and growing the pool of people giving money to political campaigns, and making city races more ...

Morris mostly lived in solitary confinement from the time he went to prison in 1978, the year “Grease” was released, until he got out in 2017—alone 23 hours a day inside a cell the size of a parking ...

After years of being whittled away by federal judges, the Voting Rights Act unexpectedly survived an existential threat in 2023 when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld what’s left of the landmark civil ...