Prize Winners

Across California, 44,241 people are being held in a county jail without being convicted or sentenced for a crime. That’s three quarters of all inmates. At least 1,317 people have been waiting in county jails for more than 3 years. For 332 of them, it’s been longer than 5 years. In 32 counties that gave […]

From the first documented case of COVID-19 to the search for a vaccine, the coronavirus pandemic has touched the lives of every Californian in 2020. Here are some of their stories.

Mary Nichols has been pivotal in California’s war on smog. But as her tenure ends next week, activists say she didn’t do enough to protect low-income communities and they scuttled her candidacy for Biden’s top environmental post. Wounded but tenacious, she’s contemplating her next battles.

Enjoying nature while preserving it is an age-old conflict in California, but nowhere is it more fraught than at Oceano Dunes. Can Mad Max-like racing and endangered species coexist?

After the Great Recession, California signed an exclusive contract with Bank of America to distribute unemployment benefits through prepaid debit cards. A CalMatters investigation reveals that to this day, no one knows how much the bank has made off the deal. Lawmakers are examining the bank’s role in mass account freezes and untold amounts of missing money for thousands of struggling jobless Californians — as well as where the bank may have failed to keep unemployment money safe from fraud.

You can’t always get what you want, but for special interests in California politics, spending $34 million sure does help. That’s the amount of unrestricted political spending that industries and unions with regular business in the capitol pumped into Legislative races across the state this year. As CalMatters reported before Election Day, the oil industry, […]

As California’s new requirements for forever chemicals kick in, small providers in remote towns struggle to clean up their water.

They’re everywhere. They last forever. They’re dangerous. They’re expensive to remove. And many Californians don’t even know they’re drinking them.

November’s election results showed that most of California’s Democratic counties moved further away from President Donald Trump — and the bulk of its Republican counties did too. With fewer than 1 million ballots left to count, the 2020 election here was an unsurprising blowout for President-elect Joe Biden. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton nabbed 62% of […]

Two years ago, Democratic newcomers across the state were swept into Congress atop a frothing “blue wave” of anti-Trump fervor — a result that only became apparent late in the vote count. This year’s election has been playing out a little like 2018 in reverse.  This time the Democrats led early on, only to see their […]