Last fall, Goshen, Indiana, seat of the conservative Elkhart County which overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 election, was approached by private prison company CoreCivic with plans for a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility. However, instead of quickly signing on the dotted line with the promise of financial windwall, the Goshen citizenry took pause, and began to voice their concerns.

Want to stay up-to-date on how the incarceration industry is growing? Visit MuckRock’s Private Prison Project page and check out years’ worth of articles covering the micro to the macro.

Are you a journalist? An activist? A concerned citizen who thinks there should be better accounting behind corporatized corrections? Help contribute to the Private Prison Project.

Here are five close-to-home ways for you to learn more about the private prison industry, and to contribute to the ongoing discussion about their use.

As one of the most prominent figures of the 20th Century - not to mention an ardent pacifist during the height of the Cold War - it’s not altogether surprising that Albert Einstein’s Federal Bureau of Investigation file stretches several thousand pages. But while Einstein’s sharp critique of U.S. policy at home and abroad gave the J. Edgar Hoover’s Bureau plenty to work with, some of the other concerns raised in the file were dubious at best. At worst, there were Nazi death beams.

With nationwide protests calling for the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and countercharges alleging that such movements are the work of sinister foreign agents intent on sowing discord, it’s worth revisiting a similar period in American history when the Federal Bureau of Investigation framed opposition to House Un-American Activities Committee as Communist agitation - and faced pushback even within its own ranks.

Starting in 1942, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation began keeping tabs on the famed Hungarian looker with a long history of husbands and “housekeeping” - Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Beginning in the early ’50s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began keeping what would become an extensive file on the singer and civil rights activist Josephine Baker, tracking with great interest her comments in the international press critical of racial discrimination in the U.S. Though the Bureau never formally opened an investigation into Baker, it fielded several requests from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to collect derogatory information that would help make the case for denying her a visa and barring her entry to the country.

Although our reporting on the rape kit backlog is often bleak, there is some good news - lawmakers in Alaska are taking a step in the right direction by adding $2.75 million to the budget for the testing of every backlogged kit.

Vanessa Nason, who runs our “Counting the Uncounted: The Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit Project,” reflects on a year spent tracking down the extent of the rape kit backlog in America.

A public records request with the Columbus Police Department revealed that until a year ago, the department tagged rape kits in evidence as “other,” a designation also used for shopping carts and cell phones.

For the last year, we’ve been requesting data surrounding the national backlog of untested sexual assault evidence. While we still don’t know the actual number- so far more than 225,000 rape kits have been found sitting on evidence collection shelves and in hospitals from coast to coast - we have a greater understanding of the many hurdles victims and law enforcement face. There are many reasons rape kits go untested, and the lack of forensic funding continues to exacerbate the problem.

Investigative data reporter for Buzzfeed Kendall Taggart joined us for MuckRock’s Friday FOIA Chat last Friday on Slack to talk about where to find data - and more importantly, what to do with it.

Grab your life jackets as we take a dive into this week’s round-up as we look at the Trump Administration’s plans to turn dumps into detention centers, utility bills that show a Congressman’s unquenchable thirst, and an argument over police misuse of military gear turns a quiet Delaware beach town upside-down.

One of questions we’re most frequently asked at MuckRock is how to request the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s files on an individual. To help clear up the process, we’ve compiled this simple flowchart to make sure you have everything you need before you file that FOIA.

WBUR’s digital content and data producer, Ally Jarmanning, joined us last Friday at MuckRock’s Slack Channel to discuss her latest efforts to create an open Google Doc where journalists and experts in the court system can recommend resources and tips to each other.

Now you can edit Assignments, making it easy to correct typos, fix attribution, or otherwise update entries. See how you can help improve MuckRock in this week’s release notes.

We’ve tweaked our filing tool to make it easier to see when which requests will use a proxy when filing in states that bar out of state requesters.

Last week there were a number of bug fixes pushed out, including fixing one bug report that netted the reporter three requests as our thanks. See below for all the updates and how to help make MuckRock even better.

Our public-facing pace of development is going to slow a bit as we focus on reworking a lot of our user authentication and permissions systems, but we did fix up some RSS feeds last week so now you can subscribe to your favorite MuckRock requesters and get updates on what they’re filing.