As Wes Clark’s career takes off, he comes across a police report that reveals a stunning clue about how the Rutherford County juvenile justice system really works.
A young lawyer can’t get a juvenile court to let his clients out of detention — even when the law says they shouldn’t have been held in the first place.
For over a decade, one Tennessee county was arresting and illegally jailing hundreds of children. A four-part series reveals how this came to be — and what it would take to stop it.