The Chicago Reporter Cover Stories

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Seventeen Seventeen-year-olds are minors in the eyes of the law if they’re the victim of a crime, but not if they commit a felony. A Chicago Reporter analysis found that hundreds of minors are being prosecuted in adult court and serving hard time in Illinois’ adult prisons with other adult felons. All this before these teens are allowed to vote, buy cigarettes or join the military.
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Is Anything Working? Despite millions of dollars spent and thousands of people served, young people on the South and West Sides of Chicago have some of the highest rates of chronic unemployment in the country.
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Taser Timeout A jail with a dubious record of Taser use is being used as a timeout for Cook County detainees. According to recent lawsuits, some inmates at the Jerome Combs Detention Center in Kankakee, Ill., are being shocked with Tasers as a first, not last, resort—in some cases, when they’re already bound by handcuffs or in a restraint chair.
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Home Loan Purgatory On March 4, 2009, homeowners could start applying to have their unaffordable monthly mortgages altered as part of a $75 billion loan modification program—the Home Affordable Modification Program. One year later, a Chicago Reporter investigation shows that many Chicagoans have less than a 50-50 chance of getting those modifications—even with the help of government-certified homeownership counselors.
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Dirty Secret Pollution from rail yard emissions in the Chicago area plagues the health of nearby residents.
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Landing A Green Job Low-income workers could get a smaller slice of proposed environmentally responsible jobs.
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Black And White, Seeing Red All Over Major retailers' search for green kicks up racial tension in Chicago's gentrifying areas.
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Lower Standards A Chicago Reporter analysis shows that the quality of black seniors' nursing home care is drastically behind that of white seniors.
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Closing Arguments Refusal by the Illinois State Police to enforce court orders hurts those who are trying to get their criminal records expunged or sealed.
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Driving While Latino Officers are pulling over Hispanic drivers at a disproportionately high rate, and the consequences can go well beyond a ticket. This investigation was supported, in part, by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
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Big Money, Few Results Illinois has spent millions to fight HIV and AIDS, but African Americans still struggle to receive needed treatment.
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Fallen And Forgotten Congress approved the extension of immigration benefits to families of fallen U.S. service members four years ago, but the families say they never received them.
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Not A Priority Illinois law provides in some ways for children whose parents are incarcerated, but a survey of the agencies involved reveals that often their needs are addressed on an individual basis.
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A Renter's Nightmare Foreclosures burn tenants who find themselves wrongfully evicted when their landlords can’t keep up with the payments.
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Car Sick Organizations work to find transit alternatives for the entire region to ease congestion, spending.
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The Road Less Traveled While more than half of Illinois’ prisoners come from the Chicago area, a similar proportion of correctional facilities are more than 200 miles away. In some cases, the distance and cost of travel are big hurdles for families of prisoners.
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Disappearing Act Some blame gentrification and aggressive developers for pushing seniors out of their Chicago neighborhoods.
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Terrorism Sting Busts Immigrants An examination of Operation Chicagoland Skies reveals that the “web of terrorism prevention” has largely come up empty.
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To Serve and Protect Some say fatal shootings could have been prevented if the Chicago Police Department kept better watch over its officers.
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Broken Workers, Broken Promises Many undocumented Latino immigrants injured on the job qualify for workers’ compensation benefits, but employers often make them hard to access.
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The Best of All Bad Choices Most Mexican migrants make their way to the U.S. illegally because, despite the difficulties of living "in the shadows," that's the only practical option available to them.
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Shifting Gears Gone are the days when a vast majority of blue-collar black workers held jobs in manufacturing, transportation and other manual, low-skilled industries.
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» Headlines

Building power
Catching up
Sold in the U.S.A.
Fighting the Odds
Retail Runaround
The Good Ol' Days
Dumping Grounds
Down the hole
Growing Fears: Arabs Still Reeling from 9/11 Backlash
Foster Children Clustered in Few Schools
Illinois Lottery: The Poor Play More
The Go-Between
African Ed
Mom Without Me
Uncounted and Unseen
Cash and the City
Paper Pushers
No Turning Back
Classes Pose Hurdle for New Immigrants
Invisible Victims

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