It rained heavily the night before the retaking of New York's Attica Correctional Facility. A guard, William Quinn, had been killed. Negotiations had ended. The men on the D yard waited for the inevitable.

Four days earlier, on September 9, 1971, 1,281 prisoners had wrested control of Attica, taking 42 prison staffers hostage and delivering a manifesto demanding humane treatment including adequate healthcare, independent oversight, and an end to racial discrimination.

"We are men," said L.D. Barkley, one of the leaders of the revolt. "We are not beasts, and we do not intend to be beaten or driven as such."

In the early-morning light on September 13, men in D yard heard the thrum of a helicopter as it flew over Attica's 30-foot stone walls and flooded the yard below with tear gas. Steady gunfire from ground forces tore through the gas clouds, chipping the concrete and shredding the bodies of hostages and prisoners alike. Terrified, the men desperately searched for cover. They found none. One prisoner was shot 12 times at close range by two separate guns. Another lay dying of a gunshot wound when a New York state trooper stepped up to finish him off, firing buckshot directly into his neck. A paramedic later testified he saw a trooper execute a prisoner begging for help at point-blank range. State troopers and corrections officers fired nearly 400 shots, killing 39 people — 29 prisoners and 10 prison staff — and wounding 89 more.

The surviving prisoners were corralled and moved to A yard, stripped, and ordered to lie face down in the mud. If they moved, troopers beat them and threatened to shoot them where they lay. Hours later, still naked, they were ordered to stand and run, hands above their heads, through what judges would later refer to as the "gauntlet" — a tunnel leading inside that was lined with troopers and corrections officers. They struck prisoners with clubs and hurled racist epithets. Many prisoners stumbled to the ground and ended up crawling on pavement littered with shattered glass. Once inside, officers threatened some prisoners with castration. Others they forced to play Russian roulette with live ammunition or lined up against the wall in mock executions.

It took nearly three decades for the surviving D yard prisoners to reach a final resolution on their claims that those nightmarish days and nights constituted "cruel and unusual punishments," in violation of the Eighth Amendment. In the intervening period, a series of new laws and legal standards changed the landscape for incarcerated plaintiffs. The Supreme Court introduced one standard in 1976, further codified in 1994, that prison officials violate the Constitution only when they are "deliberately indifferent" to a prisoner's suffering. And in 1986, the court granted broad protections to law enforcement, as long as their actions were not "malicious and sadistic." Guards, the justices found, often had to make decisions "in haste, under pressure, and frequently without the luxury of a second chance."

One set of claims, over the failure of New York's corrections commissioner, Russell Oswald; Attica's warden, Vincent Mancusi; and other senior officials then in charge to provide adequate medical care and prevent retaliatory violence by officers after the uprising was quelled, was decided on the new deliberate-indifference standard. Those claims settled in 2000 without state officials admitting any wrongdoing; damages were capped at $10,000 for anyone not subject to torture, serial beatings, or gunshot wounds.

Another set of claims, covering the planning and execution of the retaking itself, was decided in 1991 on the malicious-and-sadistic standard. The plaintiffs' lawyers argued that the standard had been met, as defendants were responsible for the "wanton infliction of pain and suffering for the purposes of 'maliciously and sadistically' punishing rebellious prisoners."

The judges of the 2nd Circuit disagreed. Aspects of the plan, such as declining to give prisoners an ultimatum before opening fire or allowing correctional officers to participate in the retaking "despite the extreme hostility the officers bore toward the prisoners as a result of the takeover," might constitute negligence or even indifference, Judge Jon O. Newman wrote. But that was not enough, without evidence that those elements were designed to wantonly inflict pain. "Tactical decisions needed to be made," he wrote, and courts cannot substitute their own judgment for that of law enforcement officials on the ground.

One of the most infamous campaigns of state violence against incarcerated people in US history did not, in the eyes of the court, constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

A lone prisoner victory

Senior corrections officials agree that physical force is sometimes necessary to maintain order and safety for both staff members and the prisoners in their care. If prisoners are harming themselves or another person, for example, quick intervention can be critical.

Training documents Business Insider obtained from 37 state departments of correction show that officers in most states are guided to use the minimum amount of force necessary to maintain order. Many departments train officers on de-escalation techniques meant to defuse violence before force is necessary and instruct them to use force "only as a last resort."

But in the 50 years since the Attica uprising, many corrections departments have failed to check staff violence when it tips into excess. Government oversight reports and journalistic investigations over the years have documented systemic abuse in multiple state prison systems: guards brutalizing incarcerated people in New York state, a pattern of sexual assault committed by prison staff in California, and a culture in Alabama prisons in which "unlawful uses of force" were common, including two beating deaths by staff in 2019 alone.

In the face of these institutional failures, federal courts have declined to step into the breach. BI analyzed a sample of nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment lawsuits, including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards. Of these, 208 cases involved claims of excessive force.

In analyzing these cases, BI found that courts have often sanctioned extreme acts of violence by guards against prisoners. Dozens of plaintiffs in BI's sample said they were beaten while immobilized in restraints. Another dozen said they were subjected to racist abuse or threatened with retaliatory violence. Others said they were placed in life-threatening chokeholds or hit with plastic or rubber bullets shot at such high velocity they cracked femurs and skulls. Multiple people said they were sexually abused by prison staff, including two while in restraints. All of these plaintiffs lost their cases.

Judges dismissed many excessive-force claims under strict administrative requirements imposed by the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a 1996 federal law designed to curb "frivolous" prisoner lawsuits. Judges dismissed others for failing to meet the malicious-and-sadistic standard, or due to doctrines that protect law enforcement officials like prison guards. Judges rarely questioned the authority of prison staff to determine when a use of force was justified.

Sixty-one of the excessive-force cases, almost a third, settled. Only one of the excessive-force plaintiffs, Jordan Branstetter, won his case in court.

In that case, Branstetter said a corrections officer at a state prison in Hawaii had viciously assaulted him for nearly 20 minutes, punching him in the back of the head as he curled into a fetal position on the floor, then kneeing him in the back, breaking two ribs, and choking him.

The Hawaii Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not respond to requests for comment.

Less than a third of the cases reached settlements — far less than is typical for civil suits filed in the outside world. Of the excessive-force settlements made public, two were for more than $1 million, but the typical award was about $9,000. None of those cases involved an admission of wrongdoing. Whether for technical reasons or because they viewed the use of force as necessary, federal courts across the country offered impunity to officers accused of excessive force the vast majority of the time.

In September 2022, Judge James Jones of the District Court for the Western District of Virginia ruled that officers at Virginia's Red Onion State Prison were justified in deploying a dog to attack Cornelius Lightfoot. Two officers, thinking Lightfoot had a weapon, tried to frisk him and, when he resisted, tackled him to the ground; a handler then allowed his dog to tear open the flesh of Lightfoot's thigh. An incident report showed that Lightfoot was unarmed by the time the dog attacked; he said in his complaint that the officers had acted in retaliation, taunting him just before the attack that the dog would get his "grievance-filing ass."

The officers said they thought Lightfoot had posed "a serious threat to staff safety." Jones reviewed surveillance footage and determined that Lightfoot was resisting the officers as they tried to subdue him and dismissed the case, ruling that "no reasonable jury could find that any of the defendants used physical force or the canine 'maliciously and sadistically to cause harm.'"

The UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich discussed the malicious-and-sadistic standard in a 2022 Harvard Law Review article. "That this standard is intrinsically defendant friendly," she wrote, "is undeniable."

Jones, and every other judge mentioned in this story, declined to comment on the record for this story or did not respond to queries. Kyle Gibson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Corrections, declined to comment on the Lightfoot case but said that the agency had "zero tolerance for excessive force or abuse" and that violators "are disciplined according to agency operating procedures."

At about the same time as Jones' ruling, judges with the 5th Circuit appeals court ruled that five officers at a Texas prison known as Coffield Unit were justified when they pepper-sprayed a prisoner who had refused to leave his cell, then put him in a chokehold and wrestled him to the ground. The prisoner, Robert Byrd, was serving a life sentence for capital murder; as he was splayed under the weight of four officers, a fifth officer smashed his outstretched arm with a riot baton, breaking a bone.

While officers later photographed a wooden shank they said was recovered from Byrd's cell, an internal prison investigation determined that Byrd was restrained and unarmed when he was struck and that at least one officer, the one wielding the baton, had deployed excessive force. Still, the appeals court decided that even if Byrd was unarmed, he was violently resisting, so force was "obviously necessary." All the officers had deployed force, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote in the majority opinion, "in a good-faith effort to maintain or restore discipline."

Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said the video footage of the incident was key to the state's case because it showed a "'hostile, combative, utterly noncompliant' prisoner who was committed to violent resistance."

"We are to accord prison officials 'wide-ranging deference,'" Duncan, one of the 5th Circuit judges who heard Byrd's case, wrote, quoting case precedent. "The Supreme Court has told judges not to micro-manage the force necessary to quell such volatile situations."

Judges dismissed other cases on technicalities.

In August 2022, D'Andre White, a prisoner at Ionia Correctional Facility in Michigan, filed suit claiming that, earlier that year, he'd been shackled by his hands and feet in a bathroom stall during a court appearance when he asked a guard to uncuff one hand so he could more easily use the toilet. The guard refused, White said, then grew irate at how much time White was taking. White said the guard then grabbed him by the throat, slammed him to the ground, kicked him repeatedly, and dragged him to the court's holding cell.

Robert Jonker, a judge in the District Court for the Western District of Michigan, ruled against White, finding that he had not fulfilled his prison's internal grievance process before filing suit, as required by the PLRA.

The Michigan Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

Two years later, in 2024, Judge Christine O'Hearn of the District Court for the District of New Jersey dismissed the case of Tyrone Jacobs, a federal prisoner who said that four officers had retaliated against him for filing complaints against the prison. He said the officers handcuffed him, pulled him from his cell, and, out of view of surveillance cameras, slammed his head against the wall and dragged his face along the concrete. Jacobs said one officer screamed, "I will fucking kill you."

Because Jacobs had missed a deadline to appeal his internal prison grievance, O'Hearn decided in favor of the defendants.

A 'good-faith effort' to restore discipline

In BI's sample of excessive-force lawsuits, one facility stood out: California State Prison, Sacramento, popularly known as New Folsom. The vast complex surrounded by steel fences and guard towers was built in the 1980s, just across from the Gothic granite tower of Old Folsom, the site of Johnny Cash's legendary 1968 live album. The new facility has a reputation for violence. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation data shows corrections officers there deployed force at a far higher rate than any other California prison over the past decade. In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, New Folsom officers used force — fists, baton strikes, pepper spray, or high-velocity less-lethal ammunition — in nearly 700 documented incidents. That's nearly twice a day. By comparison, officers at the California City Correctional Facility, a high-security facility in Southern California that was recently decommissioned, used force 192 times — less than four times a week.

Violence by guards at New Folsom sparked three complaints of excessive force in BI's sample; all of the plaintiffs lost.

The allegations contained in the legal complaints, together with evidence from state oversight reports and criminal cases against former officers there, hint at a corrections culture in which casual violence prevails and retaliatory cruelty often goes unchecked.

Terri Hardy, a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, emphasized that in each California case mentioned in this story, the department prevailed, and said the department "takes every allegation of employee misconduct seriously."

One complaint describes an incident that took place in February 2015, in New Folsom's C yard, where a man named Tshombe Kelley, who was serving 52 years for murder, approached a group of officers to ask a question. When he and another prisoner didn't immediately comply with an order to back away and drop to the ground, incident reports show, officers swiftly reacted. One officer, who said he saw Kelley clench a fist, blasted him in the face with pepper spray. Kelley said he reeled back and stumbled to the ground; officers said he again failed to comply with an order to lie flat. Two other officers then deployed physical force, an incident report shows; Kelley said they punched him, kicked him, and dragged him in the dirt. Transcribed surveillance video describes the officers wrestling Kelley into handcuffs and pinning him down with their knees on his shoulder and back, as he pushed against their combined weight.

An officer heard him plead, "I can't breathe."

Instead of easing up, officers deployed a spit mask, a cotton bag that covers the face and head. Blinded and panicked, his throat burning from the pepper spray, Kelley later said, he lost consciousness.

Kelley sued and lost. Officers said in court filings that they feared Kelley and another prisoner might attack them; they said Kelley had refused a direct order to hit the ground and resisted their attempts to restrain him, and only one recalled hearing Kelley say he couldn't breathe. Surveillance video showed that as Kelley was pinned down — and struggling to breathe — he arched his back and thrashed his legs. Carolyn Delaney, a magistrate judge with the District Court for the Eastern District of California, found that the officers' use of force was necessary to combat Kelley's "ongoing resistance."

Judges also sided with guards who injured prisoners they didn't perceive to be resisting.

In October 2020, less than a year after Kelley's case was dismissed, a prisoner named Nathanael Carter Jr. noticed a fight erupt in the New Folsom B yard, according to his civil suit. Guards ordered all prisoners to the ground. Carter immediately complied, dropping to his stomach, arms spread-eagled. From the guard tower, an officer fired two less-lethal rounds from his state-issued 40 mm launcher into the crowded yard, according to multiple incident reports. Both shots missed the men fighting. But one round smashed into Carter's skull, leaving a hematoma the size of an egg and triggering migraines, blackouts, and memory loss.

Like Kelley, Carter lost his case. He'd argued in court filings that he was an innocent bystander who was shot despite "getting on the ground following instructions." The guard said he'd hit Carter by accident, and Dennis Cota, an Eastern District magistrate judge, ruled that the use of force related to "the prison's legitimate penological interest in maintaining security and order."

In more than a dozen cases in BI's sample, judges found that the question of whether a use of force was malicious and sadistic was immaterial, as long as officers were doing their job.

Federal courts grant broad protections to law-enforcement officers for actions taken "under the color of law" — in the line of duty.

That's how one California prisoner's case failed before the District Court for the Eastern District of California. In his complaint, the prisoner said that six corrections officers at a federal prison in Atwater in April 2021 threw him to the ground, handcuffed him, and slammed his head against the wall before dragging him to a holding cell where they physically and sexually assaulted him while calling him racist slurs.

Magistrate Judge Stanley Boone recommended dismissal of the case, finding that any remedy the court might impose "risks interference with prison administration." District Judge Jennifer Thurston agreed and dismissed the case.

Ben O'Cone, a spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, did not address the Atwater case but said the agency "does not tolerate excessive use of force" and thoroughly investigates all allegations of employee misconduct.

Cases against corrections officers run into another set of challenges under the doctrine of "qualified immunity." Unless a court has previously found that a particular use of force constituted a constitutional violation, a defendant is given the benefit of the doubt under the doctrine. The Supreme Court standard, established in 1967 and refined in 1982, shields public officials from civil liability when they're legitimately acting in the line of duty. The standard has drawn national attention as an obstacle to police accountability. In prisons, BI has found, qualified immunity has also protected corrections officers who have been accused of excessive force.

That's how things played out in court in the wake of a December 2016 incident at the Darrington Unit, now called Memorial Unit, in East Texas. That day, a prisoner named Marquieth Jackson threw water at a corrections officer passing by his solitary-confinement cell. Incensed, the officer brandished his pepper spray and threatened Jackson. He then spun and blasted a prisoner in a nearby cell in the face at point-blank range.

Why he did so is contested: The officer, Tajudeen Alamu, said that after he was doused with water, he ran for cover by the cell of the other prisoner, Prince McCoy Sr. Alamu said that McCoy threw something that hit him in the face — court documents later identified it as a wad of toilet paper — and that his mind then "went blank" and he reacted instinctively. McCoy denied throwing anything and said Alamu attacked him in anger "for no reason at all."

Alamu did not respond to requests for comment by phone and mail.

After losing at the district court level, McCoy appealed and got a rare finding from the judges of the 5th Circuit. They decided that Alamu had been "malicious and sadistic" in his use of force, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. But after finding that no previous case in the 5th Circuit had established that pepper spraying a man confined in his cell constituted excessive force, they granted Alamu qualified immunity.

"How could any guard not know that an unprovoked use of pepper spray is unlawful?" Gregg Costa, one of the appeals court judges, wrote in a furious dissent. "Yet the majority concludes it would have been reasonable for a guard to think the law allowed him to gratuitously blind an inmate."

The other judges' reading of the qualified-immunity standard, Costa wrote, "ensures vindication of the most egregious constitutional violations."

McCoy appealed, and the case made it to a jury, which again found for the defendant. But the jury disagreed with the 5th Circuit on one critical point: The pepper-spray deployment, they found, had not been malicious and sadistic.

A culture of silence

This pattern of rejection by the courts is especially devastating to prisoners, given how hard it is for them to file suit in the first place.

For nearly 30 years, thanks to the PLRA, any prisoner who wants to file an excessive-force claim has to first file an internal grievance — a petition to prison administrators to address violations committed by their staff. But it can be dangerous for prisoners to report an incident involving the very officers who control every aspect of their daily lives. The cases BI reviewed contain multiple claims of retaliation against prisoners who decide to complain.

One complaint, filed by a New Folsom prisoner named Christopher Elliott, offers a window into the ordeal prisoners often face when they seek redress.

In January 2021, Elliott tried to raise an excessive-force complaint, filing a grievance that said a corrections officer had shoved him onto the concrete floor of his cell and jumped on him while his legs were shackled and his arms were cuffed behind his back. Medical records show a laceration on his left hand, which he said got pinned behind him in metal cuffs, spattering blood across the floor.

After Elliott filed the grievance, he said in a court filing, the corrections officer returned to his cell to issue a threat: If Elliott didn't stop pursuing the grievance, the officer would force Elliott to perform oral sex on him — and order Elliott killed.

When asked about allegations of violent retaliation by prison staff, Hardy, the California corrections spokesperson, said the department had "fundamentally reformed" its approach to investigating allegations of staff misconduct and had deployed body cameras and audio surveillance to "create an environment in which incarcerated and supervised persons are comfortable raising concerns without fear of retaliation."

Akiva Israel, a transgender woman who was incarcerated at another California men's prison, Mule Creek, filed an internal grievance in April 2021 accusing an officer named J. Padilla of threatening to sexually assault her. She said other gay and transgender prisoners immediately warned her to be careful: Reporting the officer might invite even worse consequences.

Israel later filed a civil complaint saying that a week after she submitted the internal grievance, officers handcuffed her and brought her to a prison administrator's office where they hurled transphobic and homophobic slurs and again threatened her with sexual violence. "You fuck with Padilla," she quoted one officer saying, "You fuck with me."

She said the officers then marched her to solitary, stripped her naked, threw her to the floor, and kicked her in the head. They then yanked her off the ground, she said, suspending her by the metal cuffs, causing "excruciating agony," and slammed her to the concrete floor.

Kimberly Mueller, a judge with the District Court for the Eastern District of California, dismissed Israel's case without prejudice on a technicality. Handling her case without an attorney, she had missed a deadline to file an amended complaint while being treated for breast cancer.

In Elliott's case, Kendall Newman, a magistrate judge in the same court, also recommended dismissal on technicalities: Elliott might have a case, Newman said, but he had not signed his complaint filing and his claims of retaliation were unsupported by evidence.

It has become so rare for the courts to find constitutional violations that the wins send shock waves through prison communities. On October 17, 2022, William Shubb, a senior judge in the Eastern District, sentenced a former New Folsom guard, Arturo Pacheco, to 12 years in prison for knocking the legs out from under a handcuffed 65-year-old prisoner who landed face-first on a concrete walkway, breaking his jaw. The prisoner, Ronnie Price, suffered a pulmonary embolism and died two days later.

In the lead-up to Pacheco's sentencing, a New Folsom prisoner named Mario Gonzalez fired off an urgent letter to Shubb, saying Pacheco and another indicted officer "know more than what they've shared." He said many more staff there should be prosecuted, including corrections officers who he said "cuff us and beat us" and lieutenants who he said had lied in incident reports to cover up excessive force.

In an earlier civil suit, Gonzalez said he'd reported to his prison psychologist that a group of officers was committing "illegal beatings of fellow inmates" and that he feared for his safety. Soon after, he wrote, four officers cornered him in his cell: One put Gonzalez, who then used a walker, into a headlock, wrenching his spine backward until he feared it would snap. Three others kicked him in the ribs, torso, back, and groin, then scooped urine and feces into his mouth.

"My back was broken. My ribs were broken," Gonzalez wrote to Shubb, injuries that he had documented in his civil suit and in prison grievances. "I have night terrors at least 4-5 times a week. I also cannot get that piss and shit taste out of my mouth." He said he reported the incident but believed no internal investigation had taken place. His case was dismissed repeatedly over six years while he was in prison, most of the time without a lawyer. He wrote to Cota, the Eastern District magistrate judge, alleging that officers were retaliating against him for being outspoken by locking him in solitary confinement and inciting fellow prisoners to attack him.

"I pray you please take action cause my life is endangered," he wrote in one letter.

Still, his complaint languished. Only after Gonzalez got a new lawyer and was released from prison in the fall of 2023 did Cota allow his case to continue. (The case remains ongoing.)

The California state prison system has been under official scrutiny for decades, springing from a 1995 decision by a federal judge finding a pattern of egregious violence perpetrated by guards at Pelican Bay State Prison, some 380 miles northwest of New Folsom, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. California prison officials, the judges found, "permitted and condoned a pattern of using excessive force, all in conscious disregard of the serious harm that these practices inflict."

It remains the only case decided under the malicious-and-sadistic standard to spark significant prison reforms in the state.

The court mandated a suite of new oversight mechanisms, including the appointment of a special master and a new use-of-force action plan.

Nearly a decade later, the special master issued a scathing evaluation: California prison officials had deliberately misled the court by filing false or misleading reports. The report found that administrators had endorsed a "code of silence" — an informal but aggressively policed policy under which corrections officers refuse to report misconduct to avoid being labeled "a rat."

The special master found California's entire system for investigating and disciplining officers accused of excessive force was "broken to the core." The court ordered a new plan, which included direct oversight and annual reports from the state's inspector general.

The special master's mandate has long since expired. Yet the inspector general's annual reports continue to identify severe deficiencies in how California prisons deploy and investigate the use of force.

In 2023, the most recent year examined, the inspector general reviewed 730 use-of-force incidents and identified 225 that appeared to involve staff misconduct, including 82 incidents where staff may have deployed excessive force. Prison officials initially failed to refer nearly half of those 225 incidents to internal affairs for investigation, including incidents involving the potential use of excessive force and those involving the potential withholding of medical treatment or failure to follow protocol.

The inspector general found that officers repeatedly failed to turn on their body cameras, sometimes wrote misleading or blatantly untrue use-of-force incident reports, or failed to report deployments of force at all. In the vast majority of cases, supervisors rubber-stamped the use of force as acceptable, often without interviewing the prisoner in question or reviewing all of the available video evidence. Even after the inspector general's investigators identified cases that appeared to involve excessive force, they found that prison officials sometimes declined to open internal affairs investigations into the officers involved.

These patterns had been long documented. In each of the five years preceding 2023, the inspector general found that California prison staff appeared to have violated use-of-force policies in at least 40% of the hundreds of incidents the office reviewed. Each year, the office also found significant deficiencies in how managers investigated use-of-force incidents — and found that supervisors regularly declined to take action against officers who deployed "unreasonable force."

If the courts were expected to provide a backstop, they failed.

Over the same five years in BI's sample, no federal judge found for the plaintiff in a single excessive-force claim filed by a California prisoner.

Over the past decade, Minnesota's prisons have experienced officer assaults, lockdowns, and chronic staffing shortages. They have faced allegations of substandard medical care, inhumane living conditions, sexual abuse by guards, and retaliation against prison employees who have sounded the alarm. "It's a very sick system," one former lieutenant told Business Insider. Officers "have each other's back," she said, "even if that means lying."

Within this troubled system, officers and prisoners said one facility has stood out: Minnesota Correctional Facility–Rush City.

A former Rush City therapist described it as one of the state's most dangerous prisons, and a former corrections officer there recalled near-daily fights. "The staff up there are a bunch of cowboys," a former Rush City lieutenant said. Officers there "go hands-on much quicker than they would at any other facility," he added. "It was a culture that was just ingrained from the day it opened."

The first lieutenant, who spent a year at Rush City, described the place as a "time bomb."

The routine brutality earned Rush City a moniker: Gladiator School.

Despite the frequent violence, Dario Bonga, a longtime Rush City prisoner, said one assault, in particular, had stuck with him. It was the day a prisoner bashed in James Vandevender's head.

Bonga was one of six prisoners and officers who said the attack was so brutal they still remembered it over a decade later.

A methodical attack

On June 8, 2012, Vandevender, then 25, had only a few months left on his yearlong sentence over assaulting someone during a fight. He and Bonga were working that day in the prison's industry area, folding balloons, when Bonga was startled from his work by a loud thud. A prisoner had swung at Vandevender's head with a four-by-four wooden post. Bonga watched in shock as the man, later identified as Mark Latimer, continued his methodical attack.

Surveillance footage obtained by BI corroborates Bonga's account. It shows Latimer pick up an unsecured wooden board from a shelf in the woodworking area, drop it, and walk away. A few seconds later he's back, and this time he quickly pulls out a wooden post. No officers are visible in the video; the unguarded woodshop wasn't operating that day.

In the surveillance footage, Latimer saunters several hundred feet across the workshop with the four-by-four. No one tries to stop him — no corrections officer; no one from Minncor Industries, the corrections division that oversees prison labor — as he approaches Vandevender's worktable, hoists the post over his shoulder, and begins to swing.

Only after the sixth blow — after Vandevender has collapsed onto the table, bleeding from his nose and mouth, and after Latimer has slipped into the crowd of panicked men — do officers come running.

Later, at the hospital, a doctor told Vandevender's mother, Peggy Vandevender, that her son had a 20 to 30% chance of survival. He spent 45 days in a coma and woke up 40 pounds lighter. His face was numb, and he couldn't speak or read. He thought he had a prison softball game that weekend, not processing that he had been in the hospital for a month and half.

Years later, the effects of Vandevender's traumatic brain injury persist. Tests indicated a decline in cognitive function. Seizures have forced him to take epilepsy medication. Deep depression sent him in search of meth, which landed him at Rush City again.

When Vandevender arrived back, about four years later, Bonga thought he was seeing a ghost. No one thought he could have survived that beating.

'Unacceptable' risks

In 2018, Vandevender filed a lawsuit alleging that prison officials, by failing to protect him from the attack that day, had violated his Eighth Amendment rights to be free from "cruel and unusual punishments." His attorneys argued that officials had been aware of the risks: For several months before the assault, officials had specifically instructed prisoners to pile and store the boards in an unsecured area that was accessible to prisoners, against prison policy. Vandevender's complaint said that in the weeks before the attack, a prisoner had warned a guard that "the open pile of wood was a threat to the health and safety of all of the inmate population and could be used as a weapon against him and other inmates." The prisoner said the guard told him it was none of his business and "not to worry about it."

There was reason for concern: Vandevender's complaint cited an incident in which, he said, one Rush City prisoner had assaulted another with the wooden handle of a pitchfork, "causing serious head injuries." When, six years after Vandevender's assault, a corrections officer named Joseph Gomm was killed by a prisoner wielding a sledgehammer taken from a work area at another Minnesota prison, Gomm's family sued, alleging a "long-standing culture" in which Minncor's revenue was prioritized over safety.

"Had there been more staff, had there been more cameras out there, absolutely Officer Gomm would not have been killed," a former Rush City corrections officer told BI. "Same thing with Vandevender."

Aaron Swanum, an information officer for the Minnesota Department of Corrections, said that among Minncor staff, only production supervisors are required to receive security training. At Rush City, he said, there is just one.

After reviewing the circumstances surrounding Vandevender's attack for his case, Tim Gravette, a corrections consultant, concluded that Rush City staffers were negligent for failing to properly follow state correction policies, and that if they had, Latimer couldn't have attacked Vandevender in the way he did. "I find the lack of work material accountability to be unacceptable practice," he wrote.

Paul Schnell, Minnesota's corrections commissioner, said that while he couldn't comment on Vandevender's case because it predated his tenure, "obviously we want to be in a place where we're trying to take the steps to keep people safe."

He said that since he became commissioner in 2019, he'd established an Office of Professional Accountability to address employee complaints, revived an independent ombudsman office to address internal grievances, started a body-camera pilot program, and, in the wake of Gomm's murder, increased the number of staff and cameras in the industry area of the prison where he died. The department confirmed that there have been no such changes at Rush City.

Whether a prisoner wins or loses a lawsuit, Schnell said, "we're certainly looking at our practices no matter what."

He said that "everything's incremental" when it comes to corrections reform.

"The challenge is that we were struggling to get our staffing complement up in general, so while we may have put more bodies in Minncor, we were shorter elsewhere," he said. "It's always give-and-take."

A guardrail against cruelty

From its beginnings, the Eighth Amendment was understood as a guardrail against unabashed cruelty; by the mid-20th century it was also being used to push back against inhumane prison conditions, violence, and medical neglect. Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, as mass incarceration was on the rise, the Supreme Court issued a series of opinions that shifted the focus away from these underlying abuses to the question of prison officials' intent.

In practice, these decisions made it difficult for prisoners to assert their constitutional rights.

One of those pivotal cases was 1994's Farmer v. Brennan. The court unanimously ruled that prison officials were liable for Eighth Amendment violations only if they acted with "deliberate indifference" to a prisoner's suffering. To meet this standard, Justice David Souter wrote, prisoners must show that officers were aware of and disregarded a serious risk of harm, saying this approach "comports best with the text of the Amendment." Officials were now on the hook only if they had the knowledge that a particular harm would occur if they didn't act.

While Souter said a court could infer awareness if the risk was obvious, the standard still required incarcerated plaintiffs to marshal proof of something ineffable — a prison official's inner thoughts.

Business Insider's analysis of a sample of nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment cases — including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards — shows that mindset has become an extremely difficult standard to meet. For the vast majority of prisoners in BI's database who filed their suits without counsel, proving mindset can be almost impossible — 85% of their cases decided under the deliberate indifference standard lost.

All of the remaining pro se cases settled, often for modest amounts.

"However obvious the circumstances, people may at times remain oblivious," Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at UCLA, wrote in an anthology on the Eighth Amendment. "And when this is true of prison officials, no constitutional liability may lie, however 'soul-chilling' the conditions."

Deference to officials, coupled with "the long and troubling history of unspeakable maltreatment against incarcerated people by the very actors charged with their protection," she wrote, has created a landscape where "the power that prison officials have over incarcerated persons is sure to be abused."

In BI's sample, a few attorneys successfully proved mindset, sometimes by obtaining explicit circumstantial evidence, such as email exchanges introduced in the case of one Illinois prisoner that show prison healthcare providers floated the possibility of sending him to hospice care after his oncologist recommended treatment that would cost $15,000 a month. But such cases were rare.

Few sitting judges would comment to BI about the deliberate-indifference standard; some did not respond to interview requests, while others declined to comment. One who did, Lawrence Piersol, a federal judge in South Dakota, decided a case under the standard filed in 2020 by a prisoner named Jason Dunkelberger. While incarcerated at the South Dakota State Penitentiary, Dunkelberger said, the tips of his fingers were severed by a metal shear in the prison machine shop that he'd never been trained to use; in a deposition, he said he was told he'd be sent to solitary if he refused the assignment, given to him by a fellow prisoner put in charge by the machine shop's supervisor. He said he waited 90 minutes before being sent to the hospital, where the fingers were amputated.

The South Dakota Department of Corrections did not respond to requests for comment.

In his lawsuit, Dunkelberger argued that prison staff had violated his constitutional rights by failing to keep him safe. Because the directive to use the machine had come from a prisoner, and not an officer, Piersol ruled that officials couldn't be considered deliberately indifferent. Piersol said his decision spoke for itself, but he agreed to comment on Eighth Amendment cases generally.

"It's difficult for a prisoner to succeed," Piersol said. "But sometimes there are some decent settlements."

Dunkelberger's claim couldn't meet that high bar. Vandevender's didn't either.

Donovan Frank, a federal judge with the District of Minnesota, granted the prison officials qualified immunity in the Vandevender case, finding that he had failed to prove they "were subjectively aware of a substantial risk posed by the wooden boards." Even if they should have known that leaving them unsecured violated Rush City's tool policy, Frank wrote, that "does not satisfy the subjective-culpability requirement."

He dismissed the case before Vandevender could take discovery.

After Vandevender appealed, the 8th Circuit agreed with Frank, deciding that Vandevender was the victim of a surprise attack and that corrections officers therefore could not have violated his rights by failing to protect him. The court determined that the prior assault with a wooden pitchfork handle hadn't signaled a "pervasive risk."

When BI spoke with Mark Bradford, Vandevender's attorney, two years after he lost the case, he seemed defeated.

"I'm not sure what more you could possibly do to show deliberate indifference," he said. "It really is a troubling standard that the 8th Circuit has employed here."

Appended to the appeals court's judgment is a separate opinion, authored by Judge Jane Kelly, who wrote that she concurred only because she was bound by 8th Circuit precedent. "Our caselaw may set the bar too high for the typical inmate to sufficiently plead prison officials were deliberately indifferent to a substantial risk of serious harm in a case like this one."

'The easiest lie to tell'

The Eighth Amendment cases BI reviewed include claims of untreated cancers and heart disease, retaliatory beatings, sexual assaults, limb amputations, and prisoners wasting away in squalid cells littered with feces and dead flies. There was a New York teenager who said he was put in a vermin-infested cell in late 2021 where he was attacked by a bat and bitten by a poisonous spider, an Arizona prisoner who said in 2020 he was given only Tylenol to treat a broken jaw, and a Michigan man who filed a complaint in 2019 saying his eyesight deteriorated because prison doctors refused to conduct cataract surgery. Again and again, courts dismissed these cases, finding that prisoners had failed to meet the deliberate-indifference standard. The standard introduced three decades ago by the Supreme Court — and its interpretation by federal courts in the years since — has created formidable obstacles to accountability in this country's prisons.

The Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry did not comment on the broken-jaw claim but said that Gov. Katie Hobbs had appointed a new corrections director, Ryan Thornell, in January 2023 "to make needed changes to the correctional system" and that he was ensuring "high-quality, patient-centered care and wellness are becoming standard practice." The New York and Michigan corrections departments did not respond to requests for comment.

Of the cases in BI's sample, 1,361 were argued under the deliberate-indifference standard. Only 10 plaintiffs prevailed in court; another 164 cases settled without the prison admitting liability. All 10 of the successful plaintiffs were among the minority in the sample who were represented by counsel.

David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU, told BI the standard has been "an enormous barrier to justice for incarcerated people." If prisoners encounter conditions that are "inhumane, unhealthy, dangerous, or even lethal," he argued, "that should be enough to violate the Eighth Amendment — you shouldn't have to go looking for someone who was thinking bad thoughts."

David Shapiro, the executive director of the Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, has litigated dozens of Eighth Amendment cases on behalf of prisoners.

"I didn't know this person was going to get attacked by another incarcerated person," he said of defenses under the deliberate-indifference standard. "I didn't know that this person was having chest pains because they were experiencing a heart attack."

As long as prison officials assert that they didn't know about the risk, he said, a federal court will rarely find an Eighth Amendment violation.

"What is the easiest lie to tell?" he said. "I didn't know."

'A dark and evil world'

For generations, the federal courts took a mostly hands-off approach to conditions in America's prisons. That changed in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, as judges began to issue Eighth Amendment rulings that secured key rights for prisoners.

In 1970, for instance, a federal judge put every Arkansas prison under court order, calling the state system "a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world." Six years later, another federal judge found prisons in Alabama "wholly unfit for human habitation" in violation of the Constitution.

About this time, a Texas prisoner named J.W. Gamble sued his facility over inadequate medical care, arguing that officers had failed to treat his intense pain after a 600-pound cotton bale fell on him during a work assignment. While the Supreme Court found that Gamble's constitutional rights hadn't been violated, the 1976 decision, written by Thurgood Marshall, established that prisoners have a right to medical care under the Eighth Amendment.

"Deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners constitutes the 'unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain,'" Marshall wrote. "An inmate must rely on prison authorities to treat his medical needs; if the authorities fail to do so, those needs will not be met."

It was a consequential decision. It was also, fatefully, the court's introduction of the phrase "deliberate indifference."

"There it sat," John Boston, the former director of the Prisoners' Rights Project of the New York City Legal Aid Society, said, "extremely vulnerable to a more conservative court coming along and trying to define it downward in ways disadvantageous to prisoners."

That shift occurred quickly. As President Ronald Reagan ramped up the war on drugs, legislators from both parties, committed to a tough-on-crime agenda, began to pass a raft of criminal-justice measures. The impact of these policies is now well known. In less than 30 years the country's penal population grew sixfold to a peak of more than 2 million, leaving the US incarcerating more people than any other country.

The critical Farmer v. Brennan case came when Dee Farmer, a transgender woman, filed a claim saying federal prison officials had failed to protect her from sexual assault. In an interview, she described how, after being raped by another prisoner at knifepoint, she was sent to segregation for over a year.

When Farmer won her case before the Supreme Court, it was hailed as a major victory for transgender rights. The decision also cemented the current deliberate-indifference standard.

Farmer's lead attorney, the ACLU's foremost prison expert, Elizabeth Alexander, argued that the standard should hinge on what officials had the professional responsibility to know. The solicitor general, Drew Days III, disagreed, contending that officials should be held liable only for risks they were aware of. "Petitioner's 'should have known' approach ignores the 'deliberateness' requirement of the 'deliberate indifference' standard," he wrote in his brief.

The Supreme Court agreed with Days, finding that officials were liable only if they personally knew of and disregarded the risk, regardless of the gravity of the harm to the prisoner.

Some issued warnings at the time. Michelle Alexander, the noted civil-rights lawyer and author, who was then a clerk for Justice Harry Blackmun, suggested that the majority opinion "would allow a prison official to argue to the jury that although a particular risk of harm was plainly obvious, and a reasonable prison official would have been aware of it, he wasn't."

In his own concurring opinion, Blackmun described the new standard as fundamentally misguided. "A punishment is simply no less cruel or unusual because its harm is unintended," he wrote.

Alexander, in a recent email, described the decision as one of many during that period that created what she called "unconscionable obstacles to meaningful relief for people ensnared by our criminal injustice system."

Vandevender is one of hundreds of prisoners in BI's sample for whom those obstacles were insurmountable. Prisons are inherently dangerous places, the 8th Circuit concluded in his case, and "inmates bent on assaulting other inmates will use even the most harmless objects as weapons."

Judge James Loken, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that, for Vandevender, "the outcome was tragic, and an assault with this weapon was, in hindsight, no doubt avoidable."

Still, he concluded by quoting the Farmer decision, writing, "an official's failure to alleviate a significant risk that he should have perceived but did not, while no cause for commendation, cannot under our cases be condemned as the infliction of Eighth Amendment punishment."

A fiancée's warning

Six years after Latimer's assault on Vandevender, Rush City experienced another violent attack. This time, officials were repeatedly warned of the risk.

Trina Murray was at home in bed one night when she got the call. She was confused; her daughter never phoned that late. She listened with a rising panic as she learned that her only son, David Hodges, had been assaulted at Rush City.

Hodges is a large man, tall and broad-shouldered, with the word "family" inked onto his right forearm. But Murray still worried about his exposure to violence when, in 2011, he was sent to prison for sexual assault. She knew what Minnesota's prisons could be like, having worked in two of them.

She tells one story from when she was an officer at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Lino Lakes, a medium-security prison outside Minneapolis, in the 1990s. There, in her telling, she witnessed a group of officers placing bets on how many prisoners they could send to solitary confinement. When she reported the behavior, she became the target of a campaign of retaliation. The officers, all men, followed her to her car. They called her the N-word, she said, and told her to go back to Africa. Later someone threw a rock through the window of her home. Eventually, she quit.

After the call that evening in September 2018, she scrambled to learn what had happened to her son. In incident and investigative reports, Hodges claimed that another prisoner, Courtney Osgood, had entered his cell with a shank, angry that Hodges had refused to pay off a debt owed by Hodges' cellmate. Osgood grabbed Hodges' locs, ripping some out, and attempted to stab him. Hodges, who had been making coffee on a small hotplate, threw the boiling water at Osgood, who raced out of the cell.

Prison officials weren't aware of the altercation, according to an incident report, until Hodges' then-fiancée called the prison, concerned about his safety. Once alerted, Hodges' subsequent civil complaint said, they sentenced Osgood to 20 days in segregation — and gave twice that to Hodges. Gene Olson, a prison lieutenant who investigated the incident, said in a deposition that he couldn't prove Hodges' account of the attempted stabbing because officials couldn't track down the shank. Osgood also denied Hodges' account in a message to BI, calling it a "fabricated narrative."

In segregation for about six weeks, locked in a tiny cell, the lights on 18 hours a day, Hodges said, he obsessed about one thing: what was waiting for him when he got out.

"It's prison politics 101, if I assault you and I hurt you real bad, you're looking to get your lick back," he said. "Needless to say, I'm a big guy, and I know this time he was coming with help."

Hodges begged officers to move him to a different unit, verbally and in writing. Murray, his mother, along with his fiancée, his sister, and his grandmother, called and wrote over a period of six weeks to the prison and to state corrections headquarters, imploring officials to take action because they feared for his life. "What exactly must he do to get a transfer to another facility for his safety?" his fiancée asked in a late-October email to the warden at the time, Jeffrey Titus. "Why must something really bad happen before he is taken seriously."

Every prison in Minnesota has an incompatibility-review committee composed of prison staff that meets to decide whether particular prisoners pose a risk to each other and need to be separated. Their deliberations, a former corrections staffer at Rush City told BI, are usually documented in great detail. Rush City's panel, which included Olson, had met in late September 2018 and decided that Hodges and Osgood didn't need to be separated. Ashlee Berts, a corrections program director who oversaw the committee, said in a deposition two years later that no notes were kept to explain their rationale. She said she didn't remember who was on the committee, whether it had convened in person or over email, and what was discussed. Olson said under oath that, despite the pleas from Hodges and his family, he didn't believe Hodges faced any threats.

Schnell, the corrections commissioner, said he expected his staffers to fully document incompatibility reviews. "It's news to me that there wasn't that information," he said of Berts' claim that no records were kept. "We want to be in a position where we can say that we have documentation that we did that and the basis for it."

In early November, just hours after Hodges was released from segregation, Osgood and a fellow prisoner assaulted him in the living unit, throwing a mixture of hot water and capsaicin, a chili-pepper extract, in his face. Surveillance video shows Hodges trying to escape as the two men come toward him. They land a series of punches as Hodges waves his arms in a futile attempt to make contact with his assailants. His eyes were blinded and burning, he told BI, saying it felt like an eternity before officers arrived. Medical records show he suffered a nasal fracture, second-degree burns, and an eye injury.

Ten days after the assault, the committee made a new determination: Hodges and Osgood were incompatible, and Hodges' transfer request was granted.

Almost five years later, Hodges discussed the incident while sitting in an empty visitors' room at Minnesota Correctional Facility–Moose Lake, a state hospital turned prison an hour north of Rush City. The window blinds concealed a barbed-wire fence just outside. He wears wire-framed glasses now, to help with the blurred vision he's lived with since the attack. "I had a lot of sleepless nights," he said. "Every time I think about the situation, I'll have flashbacks." In a July 2019 incident report, an officer described finding him crying in the midst of an anxiety attack.

Like Vandevender before him, Hodges filed a lawsuit alleging that prison officials at Rush City failed to keep him safe.

With Vandevender, the court's ruling hinged on the fact that he'd experienced a surprise attack. But the attack on Hodges came after a campaign of urgent warnings that he feared for his life.

The defendants argued that launching the incompatibility review was itself proof they hadn't been deliberately indifferent to Hodges' welfare. A federal judge, Wilhelmina Wright, accepted the officers' claim that they had determined in good faith that Osgood no longer posed a threat.

"The fact that this conclusion proved to be incorrect does not demonstrate that Defendants recklessly or intentionally ignored an obvious risk," Wright wrote in deciding in the officers' favor. The 8th Circuit — the same appeals court that decided Vandevender's case — agreed with Wright on appeal, finding that the officials had simply "predicted incorrectly." Hodges' claim failed.

A modern-day 'Lord of the Flies'

The sample BI analyzed is full of cases in which officers failed to act on warnings that prisoners were at risk.

Marc Bakambia, another Rush City prisoner, said that after a group of prisoners beat him up and threw him over a railing, he was placed in their same unit and assaulted again, leaving him with bone fractures and a traumatic brain injury. Craig Shipp claimed he had sought orthotic shoes for his diabetes and degenerative joint disorder but Arkansas prison and medical staff denied his repeated requests; he said he eventually developed an infection severe enough to result in the amputation of his right foot. Mitchell Marbury claimed he requested a transfer after a friend warned him that a fellow prisoner was out to get him; he said an Alabama corrections officer laughed and told him to get a shank. Less than a week later, he said, he was stabbed in the facility's day room.

The Arkansas and Alabama corrections departments did not respond to requests for comment; the Minnesota corrections department did not comment on the Bakambia case.

"Marbury's argument is essentially that every prisoner who tells prison officials about an unspecified threat from an unspecified inmate without more is entitled to protective custody or a transfer," 11th Circuit judges wrote in the majority opinion. "Our caselaw establishes a higher standard for deliberate indifference."

"The Eighth Amendment does not allow prisons to be modern-day settings for Lord of the Flies," Judge Robin Rosenbaum wrote in a scathing dissent. By not holding officials responsible, she said, "the Majority Opinion condones this behavior and ensures it will occur again."

In reviewing Hodges' appeal, Kelly, the 8th Circuit judge, wrote her own opinion, as she had in the Vandevender case. She disagreed with how her colleagues assessed the question of mindset, writing that a committee finding alone should not release prison officials from liability. She also noted that "the absence of documentation regarding prison decisions or prison officials' inability to remember events central to their decision-making process may be relevant," raising the question of whether those gaps could have been deliberate.

Many corrections officers are made aware of the mindset standard. BI requested officer training materials from every state prison system and obtained them from 37 — most of which explicitly trained on deliberate indifference. Taken together, the documents indicate that the standard, as interpreted by federal courts, could encourage prison staff to remain incurious about what goes on in their facilities.

As Oregon's training materials say, "basically, deliberate indifference is a cognitive choice to do what you did."

Fathi, of the ACLU, reviewed a sample of the training materials BI obtained and said the guidance might lead officers "to act in ways that violate people's rights and that harm people very severely."

Many of the materials, he said, appear to train officers to treat prisoner complaints with suspicion. In a 2021 Mississippi slide deck, for instance, corrections officials were told prisoners try to compromise their integrity "as entertainment and for their amusement" or "to facilitate an escape, assault, rape or murder." A slide in a 2018 Utah training PowerPoint displayed the header "inmates do crazy things… then sue YOU for it."

"It's good to train them on the law," Fathi said. "But they should also make clear that we expect more than the absolute minimum that's required to avoid violating the Constitution."

Memory issues

On a muggy June morning in 2023, as the sun was just beginning to peak out in Euless, Texas, James Vandevender was already up in his father's modest one-story house in the Dallas suburb, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He had moved there from Minnesota, after his last prison stint, looking for a fresh start.

He was dressed in khakis for his job installing high-end appliances. A tattoo of his son's name showed below his shirt sleeve, and a scar cut across his cropped brown hair.

He moved through the same routine as every morning: packing his lunchbox, scarfing down breakfast, and swallowing an array of anti-seizure pills and antidepressants.

Still, that day, he forgot to put the ice pack in his lunchbox and had to redo it. When he headed outside to toss out the trash, he couldn't remember where he stowed the garbage bins. By the time he and his coworkers gassed up and headed off to the first house, Vandevender had misplaced his phone.

As they wrapped up their first job and headed back to their truck, Vandevender realized he'd left his tool bag inside.

At the next house, the men were tasked with installing a mounted range hood they'd never encountered before. It was a tricky job, Vandevender said. By late afternoon, visibly frustrated, he called the installation a "fucking joke."

His coworker Mike, in a black baseball cap to protect from the sweltering sun, took a breather in the driveway, away from the tension inside. "He's been having memory issues all day long. It's an everyday thing," he said of Vandevender. "That's when he gets frustrated."

Ashley Christen, the mother of Vandevender's 20-year-old son, said that when the two of them were growing up in rural Minnesota, Vandevender was smart and quick-witted, known for delivering the best one-liners. As a kid, he loved to hunt and spend time on his grandfather's dairy farm; his mother, Peggy, said he was fun and lovable, always offering to help out around the house.

But since the assault, they both said, he's struggled to communicate. He's forgetful, irritable, and prone to snap. Peggy said he relied on scribbled notes to get through the day.

"It shouldn't have happened," she said. "It was because of their lack of watching the people," she added. "It was due to their negligence."

On a recent fall afternoon, 12 years after Latimer bludgeoned him with the wooden post, Vandevender sat down with a friend to watch surveillance footage of the attack for the first time. He doesn't remember anything from that day; his first recollection is waking up weeks later, confused and shackled, in a hospital bed flanked by corrections officers.

"I just want to make sure you're mentally prepared to see it," the friend told him, before pressing play. "I want to," Vandevender said.

When the video finished, there was a long silence.

Eventually, he started talking. He said the footage took him back to his time in prison — the smell, the barbed wire, the disrespect. He said that he noticed Latimer picked up the post from an unauthorized part of the industry area, where prisoners weren't allowed, and that any unused lumber should have been disposed of. He said he felt the weight of what it must have been like for his mother, when she got the call every parent of an incarcerated child dreads.

When asked about the life he could have had, the one where he got out of prison at age 25 without the burdens of a traumatic brain injury, he struggled to respond.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said.

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Nearly three years into Bill Clinton's first term as president, US senators took to the floor to tackle an urgent concern. Prisoners across the country were filing too many lawsuits.

"The vast majority of these suits are completely without merit," Sen. Orrin Hatch, the Republican chair of the Judiciary Committee, said in September 1995. "It is time to lock the revolving prison door and to put the keys safely out of reach of overzealous federal courts."

Sen. Harry Reid, who would go on to become the Senate Democratic majority leader, ticked off a litany of ridiculous cases he said were clogging up the nation's courts. There was the Missouri prisoner who sued because his facility didn't have salad bars on the weekends. And the Nevada prisoner who said his constitutional rights had been violated when he received chunky peanut butter — not smooth — from the prison canteen.

"And to think, we, the taxpayers, are paying for all of this," Reid said.

Reid and Hatch were speaking in support of the Prison Litigation Reform Act, introduced by the most powerful man in the Senate at the time, the Republican Bob Dole. Dole, then the majority leader, had pitched it as a common-sense reform that would sharply curb such "frivolous lawsuits." Hatch insisted it wouldn't affect prisoners who raised legitimate claims.

The National Association of Attorneys General helped craft the legislation and circulated top-10 lists of "frivolous" prisoner lawsuits, including the complaints about salad bars and peanut butter, to garner support. A few attorneys general — from red and blue states alike — took their case to The New York Times. "We feel strongly that convicted criminals should not be granted unlimited free access to our courts to conduct their costly and most often frivolous lawsuits," they wrote.

"It was about resources," a former attorney general who backed the legislation said. "You are just struggling to run what was then the state's largest law office. So to me it was a question of degrees. Let's find some balance and look at cases that need to be looked at and get rid of steak and wine and peanut butter cases."

Some elected officials issued warnings. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts called the bill "patently unconstitutional," and Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator, said it placed "too many roadblocks to meritorious prison lawsuits." But it passed easily, buried in an omnibus appropriations bill, with little legislative debate about its potential repercussions.

In April 1996, Clinton signed the PLRA into law.

A separate system of justice

While it had never been easy to file a lawsuit from prison, the rules of play had been roughly the same as for any other indigent person seeking redress in court. The PLRA changed that, effectively carving out a separate and unequal system for prisoners.

Prisoners could now win monetary damages only if the harm they endured was physical, rather than mental or emotional. Strict caps on attorney fees discouraged lawyers from representing prisoners, leaving the vast majority of plaintiffs, many without a high-school diploma, to file on their own.

Many prisoners would no longer get their day in court: A judge or staff attorney would screen cases before any evidence could be presented or any motions could be made. If the screener deemed a case frivolous or decided it had failed to clearly state a constitutional claim, the judge could simply dismiss the case. A prisoner who had three suits dismissed in this way — the "three strikes" rule — would be barred from filing another without paying prohibitive court fees.

Crucially, any claims that made it to court would be dismissed if a prisoner could not show they had exhausted their prison's internal grievance process — procedures that a number of state corrections departments have turned into arcane, highly technical affairs.

"In a busy court, there's a template to get rid of the cases," Nancy Gertner, a former federal district judge in Massachusetts, said of the PLRA, "and invariably they're gotten rid of."

The senators were right that there had been an uptick in prisoner lawsuits. But that increase closely tracked the rise of the prison population as the war on drugs and punitive sentencing laws more than doubled incarceration rates from 1986 to 1996, the year the PLRA became law.

Reid had compared prisoners to "an alcoholic locked inside a liquor store," abusing the nation's legal system with easy access to the courts. But legal scholars have found that the rate of prisoner legal filings had actually stayed relatively consistent.

In fact, Margo Schlanger, a law professor at the University of Michigan, found that in the year before the PLRA was signed into law, prisoners filed a similar number of lawsuits per capita as people on the outside.

Within five years of its passage, prisoner suits dropped by 43%, even as the prison population continued to grow, according to Schlanger's research. Schlanger examined prisoner filings again in 2022 and found that the filing rate never rebounded.

Cases that prisoners have filed since the law's passage, she found, have struggled to succeed. To understand why, Business Insider analyzed a sample of nearly 1,500 federal cases alleging "cruel and unusual punishments" in violation of the Eighth Amendment, including every appeals court case we could locate with an opinion filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant Supreme Court cases and standards.

Some were filed by former prisoners after their release, or by their families, who were not bound by the PLRA. But in an examination of the roughly 1,400 cases filed by people while they were imprisoned, the impact of the PLRA jumped out — 27% of those cases failed because of the law's requirements.

In BI's district court sample, the PLRA's effects were more dramatic — 35% failed because of the law.

A few dozen of the claims BI examined appeared to center on minor matters: For instance, an Indiana prisoner claimed he developed a rash after he wasn't allowed to shave, an Alabama prisoner said he was served undercooked food, and a Michigan prisoner sued saying he'd been denied shoes while being held in a dirty shower. But the vast majority clearly involved claims of substantive harm. Among them were dozens of claims that prisons had allowed retaliatory beatings, stabbings, sexual assaults, and egregious forms of medical neglect.

These include the case of Kenneth Coleman, a Florida prisoner. He said prison officials put him in the same cell as an "enemy" who later assaulted him, leaving his left eye with a sag. He lost his case for failing to complete the prison's grievance process before filing suit. They include a case out of Colorado, in which the plaintiff said she began self-mutilating after medical providers failed to dispense the hormone blockers that had been prescribed to treat her diagnosed gender dysphoria; her case was dismissed because the court ruled that self-harm didn't count as a physical injury. And they include the case of Benjamin Gottke in Louisiana, whose left leg was amputated below the knee after, he said, corrections officials failed to protect him from being assaulted. His case was dismissed at screening for failure to properly state his legal claim.

The Louisiana and Colorado corrections departments declined to comment on the record. A spokesperson for the Florida Department of Corrections did not comment on the Coleman case but said, "We ensure the safety and healthcare of our inmate population in accordance with Florida law."

When prisoners' cases are knocked out by the PLRA, they rarely succeed on appeal. Such appeals, BI found, failed nine out of 10 times.

Victor Glasberg, a civil-rights attorney in Virginia, has represented prisoners for decades and successfully litigated an Eighth Amendment case about conditions on the commonwealth's death row. "The Prison Litigation Reform Act is the worst piece of federal legislation to have been enacted in my lifetime, and I was born in 1945," he said. "It is malicious, vindictive, and grossly unfair."

An undiagnosed tumor

Kevin Harrison Jr. was 24 years old and not long into a life sentence for murder when he first noticed lumps on the left side of his chest. In July 2011, he saw Michael Hakala, a doctor at Southeast Correctional Center in Missouri who worked for a prison healthcare company called Corizon Health, now YesCare, which was then contracted to provide healthcare to the state's prisoners. In a civil complaint he would later file, Harrison said Hakala assured him that the lump was benign without ordering a biopsy.

Two years later, the lumps had grown considerably, Harrison's complaint said. During shirtless basketball games, he said, other prisoners told him he looked as if he'd been shot.

Harrison said Hakala again assured him that nothing was wrong.

More than seven years after his first appointment, in November 2018, Harrison said he was granted a visit with another doctor; that doctor also worked for Corizon. Concerned by what had become a gnarled mass, the doctor ordered a biopsy. At 31 years old, Harrison was told he had a rare form of skin cancer.

He underwent what he described as a grueling, invasive surgery that required doctors to cut deep into his pectoral muscle to remove the tumor. He wore a bandage for months as his chest slowly healed, and he lived with debilitating pain. Several years later, the muscle pain and spasms have barely abated, he said, and with his follow-up appointments often delayed he worries the cancer will return.

In March 2022 he filed suit against Hakala and other medical staff alleging that they had violated his constitutional rights by failing for years to biopsy his tumor.

His case was dismissed during screening.

Patricia Cohen, a magistrate judge for the Eastern District of Missouri, found that his handwritten complaint, filed without counsel, had failed to make a clear Eighth Amendment claim: He hadn't shown he could prove the defendants had intentionally delayed his treatment.

As in many claims dismissed at screening, the judge gave Harrison 30 days to file an amended complaint. In this case, a court clerk, Nathan Graves, said Cohen had provided Harrison with "clear instructions" for how to do so. Harrison, whose request for an attorney was denied by the judge, told BI he missed the deadline because he was locked in solitary confinement for assaulting two corrections officers. He refiled the case last year, which is still pending; the defendants have yet to respond to the underlying claims.

Tad Eckenrode, Hakala's attorney, declined to comment on the pending litigation but noted that Harrison's claims remained unproven allegations; the Missouri Department of Corrections declined to comment. A YesCare spokesperson declined to speak about Harrison's case but said by email, "Our industry is filled with mission driven professionals who are committed to serving incarcerated individuals, many of whom have never received healthcare in their life, within a challenging prison environment," adding that "ignoring the many successes and positive advancements in our industry only serve to make it more difficult to retain and recruit medical professionals to serve incarcerated populations."

Of the 376 cases in BI's sample disqualified by the PLRA, 75% were dismissed at screening, denying the plaintiffs the chance to argue their case in court — or seek discovery. Over half of those cases involved allegations of inadequate medical care, including several for potentially fatal illnesses, such as Harrison's cancer.

"As a result of the PLRA, people who have suffered horrific harm, people who have extremely meritorious and compelling cases, get thrown out of court for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of their case," said David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU. "It just tilts the playing field against prisoners across the board."

Several cases in BI's sample dismissed at screening involved claims that negligence had left prisoners with permanent disabilities. A Kansas plaintiff said one of his feet was amputated after an infection was allowed to fester; a prisoner in California said he was left with persistent migraines and dizziness after a guard, while trying to quell a fight between two other prisoners, shot him in the head. Eight prisoners who alleged that they'd been sexually assaulted had their cases dismissed at screening.

The Kansas Department of Corrections declined to comment; a spokesperson for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation did not address the shooting claim but said the department had "fundamentally reformed its approach to addressing allegations of staff misconduct to enhance staff accountability and improve transparency."

A ticking clock

Prisons are hierarchical systems, largely insulated from the outside world, where corrections officers control every aspect of a prisoner's life. The PLRA effectively requires prisoners experiencing abuse or neglect to confront those officers directly, mandating that they pursue grievances internally before they have the right to seek redress in court. Prisoners in multiple cases said that requirement came with consequences.

In the spring of 2016, a Texas prisoner named Juanita Ornelas began a prolonged battle with the prison bureaucracy. Ornelas, a transgender woman who said she presents as masculine in prison for safety reasons, said she was being repeatedly sexually and physically abused by another prisoner at the William R. Boyd Unit in East Texas.

Ornelas, who was serving time on weapons charges, was required by Texas corrections policy to try to resolve the issue informally and then to submit a formal grievance, on a specified form, all within 15 days of the incident. The unit's grievance coordinator would then have at least 40 days to respond, at which point, if Ornelas wasn't satisfied, she would have another 15 days to file an appeal.

In a complaint that she would later file in the Western District of Texas, Ornelas said she had been terrified her attacker would kill her if she filed a grievance. She said that she had witnessed attacks on other people who had filed grievances and that it was common knowledge that officers at Boyd often ratted out prisoners who disclosed sexual abuse. When Ornelas finally asked an officer for a grievance form, she said in a memorandum she introduced in court, the officer refused and instead told her to stop snitching.

Desperate for help, she said, she instead submitted several I-60s — a form Texas prisoners use for routine transfer requests — to Alexander Hamilton, an investigator in the criminal justice department's office of the inspector general who had once visited the unit. Ornelas thought if she reported the assaults directly to Hamilton, she would have a better chance at getting moved out of danger.

But her I-60s to Hamilton went unanswered and the abuse continued, she said.

Amanda Hernandez, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said that Ornelas' claims were investigated and could not be substantiated and that "the agency takes all allegations of abuse seriously," promptly forwarding them to the appropriate authorities. The office of the Texas attorney general, which represented Hamilton, did not respond to queries.

In early June 2016, officials moved Ornelas to a different prison. It had nothing to do with the rape allegations, she told BI; she'd been accused of housing a weapon in her cell, though she said it wasn't hers. There, 200 miles away, she submitted a series of grievances to document the abuse she said she experienced at Boyd. Even then, Ornelas said in her memorandum, officials repeatedly refused to process the forms or said they hadn't received them. In January 2017, she said — nine months after she had sent her first I-60 to Hamilton and four months after she went on a hunger strike — a grievance form was finally processed.

"I couldn't believe it was so hard to report something like that," Ornelas said. "They just completely ignored and disregarded the sexual-abuse report."

A year later, Ornelas filed a pro se lawsuit alleging that Hamilton had violated her Eighth Amendment rights by failing to protect her from repeated sexual assaults. Though Ornelas said the rapes were so violent they left her bloodied, the attorney general never weighed in on the underlying claims in court, focusing on Ornelas' failure to meet the deadline for submitting a prison grievance before filing suit; a district judge, Alan Albright, agreed with that assessment and dismissed her case. On appeal, the 5th Circuit ruled that even if Ornelas had followed prison protocols, she'd still lose the case: She had offered no proof that Hamilton ever saw or received the letters.

The offices of Albright and the other federal judges who presided over cases decided in this story declined to comment, didn't respond to interview requests, or, in the case of Cohen, the judge in Missouri, said the decisions spoke for themselves.

'Byzantine grievance processes'

The requirement to exhaust a prison's internal grievance system before filing suit is one of the PLRA's most significant obstacles. Of the prisoner cases knocked out by the law in BI's sample, nearly one in four failed because judges decided the plaintiff had not fully complied with the grievance process.

"The exhaustion-of-remedies requirement definitely incentivizes prison systems to create Byzantine grievance processes," Corene Kendrick, the deputy director of the ACLU National Prison Project, told BI. "If you fail to meet a single deadline, or if you worded something in a way that wasn't quite specific enough, the courts will often just throw the cases out."

Legal scholars have described prison grievance procedures as something out of Kafka.

In Colorado, for instance, a grievance can be denied if the handwriting is deemed illegible or if the prisoner uses more than "one line of dialogue" to describe the abuse allegation. In Florida, a grievance can be rejected if more than one issue is discussed in a single form. In West Virginia, only one staple may be used to attach the pages.

Many states require prisoners to use an official grievance form, which prisoners sometimes depend on corrections officers to supply. Once filed, the form may go into oblivion.

"A lot of times, especially in segregation, you give the grievance to an officer," one West Virginia prisoner told BI. "Nine times out of 10 it's going in the garbage."

Andy Malinoski, a representative of the West Virginia Department of Commerce, responding on behalf of the state corrections division, said the agency "adamantly denies" the prisoner's claim and "is committed to the safety, quality of life, and well-being of those in the care of the legal system in our state."

Tiffany Yang, an assistant law professor at the University of Maryland, authored a study last year finding that the PLRA had effectively provided a playbook to prison systems on how to narrow the pathway to judicial relief. She documented instances in which state corrections departments had responded to a successful prisoner lawsuit by amending their grievance requirements to make the rules more complex. She called this cycle the "prison pleading trap."

"Each prison system can define its own internal grievance procedure, and that decision has created a system that is designed to fail the very people that it should protect," Yang told BI. "Even if an incarcerated person is successful in overcoming administrative exhaustion, what prison officials can do with that defeat is to transform it into a blueprint for how to amend the grievance policy to make it more difficult for future litigants."

In her study, Yang discussed a 2005 case in Arkansas in which the courts allowed a prisoner to move his case forward against medical staffers he said had denied him dental treatment, ruling that they were identifiable even though his grievance listed only their job titles, not their names. The state corrections department then updated its procedures to require all Arkansas prisoners to specify, in their first grievance, the full names of each individual involved. As Yang wrote, that alone can prove to be an impossible hurdle in situations in which officials don't wear name badges, hide their badges, or refuse to provide their names to prisoners.

The Arkansas Department of Corrections did not respond to queries.

In a 2022 legal brief, the ACLU joined with other civil-rights groups in arguing that because prison administrators design the procedures that prisoners must follow before suing them, there is "a perverse incentive to make grievance processes as impenetrable as possible."

The statute of limitations for civil suits is typically measured in years. But most prisoners must file a grievance on a much tighter timeline. In Louisiana, prisoners are encouraged to seek an informal solution and then have three months to file a grievance. In Arizona, they have 10 days to make an informal complaint and then five days after that to file the formal grievance. In Michigan, they have two days to resolve the issue informally and then five days after that to submit a grievance form. If they don't file on time, they can't win in court later.

Even when an incident has left a prisoner consigned to the hospital or solitary confinement, the clock can continue to tick.

A former Minnesota prison lieutenant told BI that, at the facilities where she worked, "a fairly high percentage" of prisoners had no idea how to navigate the grievance process. She said that prisoners were alerted to its existence, but only through a "two-second conversation" during intake. Prisoners at facilities in several states told BI they were never instructed by staff on how to properly complete these forms, and instead relied on rare visits to the library or on fellow prisoners — untrained jailhouse lawyers — for guidance.

Paul Schnell, Minnesota's corrections commissioner, said the department continually tries to improve its grievance system. He expressed surprise at the lieutenant's claim, "given the number of grievances we get."

"If the door is closed for people, that's not OK," he said. "We want to make sure people have a mechanism" for exercising their due-process rights.

In any case, filing a grievance comes with risks. The risk of retaliation from other prisoners and staff, as Ornelas feared in Texas. Or the risk of formal punishment. In some states, such as Alaska, officials can hand down disciplinary action if they believe a prisoner has abused the grievance system.

Again and again, a law meant to end frivolous prisoner lawsuits has halted Eighth Amendment claims on technicalities regardless of the underlying merits of their case. Many were thrown out over missed grievance deadlines; others because a prisoner failed to provide the full name of a staffer or use the proper terminology in stating their claim.

Unintended consequences

From the moment it was enacted, the PLRA faced intense criticism. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 1996, an advocate for incarcerated teenagers warned that the law "contains several provisions that hinder efforts to protect children from danger and abuse" in juvenile institutions; the American Bar Association admonished Congress for passing a law that it said contained "unconstitutional" provisions.

David Keene, as chair of the American Conservative Union, called for the law to be reformed, saying in a 2008 op-ed article that "it had the unintended consequence of virtually insulating prison officials from external oversight." In 2014, the United Nations' Committee Against Torture expressed concern that the law was "curbing prisoner lawsuits at the expense of inmates' rights."

One of the most sustained efforts at reform coalesced in 2007, more than a decade after the PLRA was signed into law. The bipartisan SAVE Coalition rallied behind a bill introduced by Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia that sought to ease some of the law's most onerous requirements. "It needed reform because there's so many instances where legitimate claims couldn't be heard," Scott told BI. "On the meritorious cases, prisoners just don't have rights."

Those who testified on behalf of the bill included a retired federal judge who said the PLRA "unnecessarily constrains the judge's role, limiting oversight and accountability"; a former director of the California prison system, who said the legislation created "often-insurmountable obstacles" for prisoners; and a former Republican attorney general who, after himself spending time in prison for mail fraud, called the PLRA a "deeply flawed" law that "undermines the protection of constitutional rights that all Americans, including prisoners, share."

Sarah Hart, as an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, had assisted Congress in drafting the PLRA and testified against the proposed reforms, arguing that "the current system allows corrections managers to learn of serious problems in the prison, take prompt action to stop them, and remedy past problems."

Keene, who went on to serve as president of the National Rifle Association, told BI that one of the reasons he took up criminal-justice reform was that his son had spent time in a federal prison. During testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in 2007 in support of Scott's bill, Keene said it was impossible for his son to properly file grievances, accusing prison officials of intentionally giving him the wrong forms and of reading his confidential legal mail. "The process is broken," he said, quoting a letter his son wrote from prison. "It feels like I'm playing poker in a rigged game."

In their March 1995 letter in The New York Times, the state attorneys general insisted that the PLRA wouldn't block meritorious cases, that "no reasonable individual would accept that cases of sexual assault by prison guards or unchecked and rampant tuberculosis within the prison population should be dismissed or disregarded as nonmeritorious."

On the contrary, in the decades since the law was enacted, many prisoners accusing guards of assault have had their cases blocked by the PLRA. In BI's sample, PLRA technicalities likewise knocked out cases involving allegations of sexual harassment by a corrections officer, delayed treatment for hepatitis C, and prolonged stints in solitary confinement.

Just months after the PLRA became law, Jon O. Newman, a federal judge on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, authored an article in the Brooklyn Law Review. In it, he examined the three lawsuits attorneys general cited as frivolous in their New York Times op-ed, at least two of which made their way onto the Senate floor. He found that the Nevada prisoner hadn't filed suit because he preferred chunky peanut butter over creamy. He sued because he said that the commissary had charged him $2.50 for the jar — nearly a week's wages for a prisoner — and that he never received the item. "I readily acknowledge that $2.50 is not a large sum of money," Newman wrote. "But such a sum is not trivial to the prisoner whose limited prison funds are improperly debited."

The Missouri prisoner who was ridiculed for wanting a salad bar, meanwhile, had filed suit with dozens of other prisoners alleging major deficiencies at their facility, including insufficient food, meals contaminated by rodents, a lack of proper ventilation, and dangerous overcrowding that the plaintiffs said had resulted in the housing of healthy people together with those with contagious diseases.

"The prisoners' reference to salads was part of an allegation that their basic nutritional needs were not being met," Newman wrote. "The complaint concerned dangerously unhealthy prison conditions, not the lack of a salad bar."

Decades later, it was as if Newman's article had never appeared. In a 2015 brief before the Supreme Court, Michigan's attorney general at the time, Bill Schuette, pulled out the peanut-butter anecdote again to argue that a prisoner's case should be dismissed under the PLRA.

His brief used the word "frivolous" 48 times.

The prisoners write in carefully lettered script or on old electric typewriters. There are sometimes grammatical errors or misspellings. But the language is direct. They describe facing Stage 4 cancer after their symptoms went undiagnosed for years. The denial of orthotic shoes to treat a diabetic condition that led to a severe wound and amputation. Nineteen years locked in solitary confinement.

Some describe beatings and sexual assaults by fellow prisoners that they say corrections officers failed to prevent. Others say they were assaulted by officers themselves.

The Eighth Amendment, which bars "cruel and unusual punishments," was intended by the founders as a bulwark against prisoner abuse. Over the years it came to mean any treatment that "shocked the conscience." But prisoners and civil-rights attorneys have said that it is now nearly impossible to win such claims in court.

To investigate whether that constitutional protection holds, a Business Insider team read tens of thousands of pages of court records for nearly 1,500 Eighth Amendment complaints, including every appeals court case with an opinion we could locate filed from 2018 to 2022 citing the relevant precedent-setting Supreme Court cases and standards. We reviewed hundreds of pages of training materials, medical records, incident reports, and surveillance footage. We read cases from prisoners convicted of violent and nonviolent crimes — some who have spent decades behind bars for murder or sexual assault, others sentenced to short stints for marijuana possession or third-degree assault. We spoke with more than 170 people, including prisoners and their families, attorneys and legal scholars, correctional staff and prison healthcare providers, and current and former federal judges.

We uncovered a near evisceration of protections for this nation's 1.2 million prisoners, largely propelled by legal standards and laws put into place at the height of the war on drugs.

In our analysis, plaintiffs prevailed in only 11 cases, including two class actions — less than 1%.

"If a right is unenforceable, then it's not much of a right," Paul Grimm, a former federal judge for the District of Maryland, said after reviewing BI's findings. "It is essentially unavailable."

One Tennessee prisoner wrote a letter to the court after failing to overcome these steep odds in his own case.

"To everyone I tried to talk to and ask to file grievances and complaints to bring the wrongs to light," he wrote, "I'm sorry that I tried to bring hope and law and order to a place that has no hope or process of order."

Failed oversight

Over decades, federal and state oversight agencies have repeatedly found that US prison systems have failed to protect prisoners in their care. Just this year, an inspector general found that staff in federal prisons had failed to adequately respond to medical emergencies, contributing to 166 prisoner deaths. The Department of Justice recently found that people held in Georgia state prisons had experienced "horrific and inhuman conditions" stemming from what the DOJ called "complete indifference" by the institutions. "Inmates are maimed and tortured," the department wrote, "relegated to an existence of fear, filth and not so benign neglect."

Some years ago, an oversight monitor found that California prisons' system for disciplining officers accused of excessive force was "broken to the core."

For prisoners inside these systems, the courts are often the only backstop left.

But in the 1980s and 1990s, as the nation's prison population exploded, a new law and a series of revised legal standards radically restricted the ability of prisoners to prevail in Eighth Amendment lawsuits.

The 1996 Prison Litigation Reform Act, passed with robust bipartisan support, effectively carved out a separate and unequal system for prisoners who seek to file suit.

It required prisoners to complete a prison's internal grievance process before filing a claim in court — and then survive a screening process. After that, their claims faced exacting Supreme Court standards. Claims that guards had used excessive force were now decided under a 1986 standard that granted broad protections to prison staff as long as their actions were not "malicious and sadistic." Claims that prison staff have failed to keep prisoners safe — whether from violence, negligent healthcare, or inhumane conditions of confinement — were now decided under a Supreme Court standard, refined in 1994, which says such failures violate the Constitution only if officials were "deliberately indifferent."

Together, the standards shifted the focus away from the underlying claims of abuse, however extreme, and onto the question of prison officials' intent.

David Fathi, the director of the National Prison Project at the ACLU, said the emphasis on mindset has become "an enormous barrier to justice for incarcerated people." If abuse or neglect exists in prisons, he said, "that should be enough to violate the Eighth Amendment."

"You shouldn't have to go looking for someone who was thinking bad thoughts."

Altogether, said Kathrina Szymborski Wolfkot, a former appellate attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, these laws and standards have made federal courts "inhospitable places for incarcerated people." Though some attorneys turn to state courts instead, there they face another set of challenges, such as caps on damages for malpractice claims or, in some cases, weak state constitutional protections.

The Department of Justice, the ACLU, and other powerful litigators have sometimes succeeded in winning Eighth Amendment cases that usher in reforms through consent decrees or injunctive orders. But such outcomes are rare. The DOJ has secured consent decrees in just four prison cases over the past decade.

A separate and unequal system

In restricting access to the courts, lawmakers in the 1990s argued that most prisoners filed suits over "frivolous" matters. Yet only a few dozen of the claims in BI's sample were over minor complaints, such as being denied shoes to wear in a dirty shower.

Among cases that prisoners lost, we logged 161 claims that guards had failed to protect a prisoner from being beaten or stabbed, including four fatalities. We identified 42 failed cases alleging untreated cancer, heart disease, HIV, or hepatitis C. We logged 78 claims of untreated mental illness, including eight that ended in suicide. There were 21 claims of sexual assault by prison staff. There were claims of confinement in extreme filth, including exposure to poisonous spiders, black mold, and feces.

The vast majority of prisoners, BI found, are navigating all of this without attorneys, in part because of the PLRA, which prevents attorneys from recovering their full litigation costs.

In the outside world, most civil suits settle — about 73%, one study found. In BI's sample, only 14% of prisoner lawsuits did, sometimes for paltry amounts or no damages at all. One North Carolina prisoner who said guards beat him while he was in restraints settled for $250.

By the time the cases were settled or decided in favor of the plaintiffs, those in charge — the wardens and medical directors — had almost always been dropped as defendants, limiting the ability of those judgments to drive institutional change.

Billions of taxpayer dollars go to corrections contractors, to run everything from food services to healthcare to staffing to data management, and the legal obstacles introduced in the 1980s and '90s have shielded these for-profit companies as well. For example, hundreds of private prison health providers or their employees were named as defendants in BI's sample. Of these cases, 14% settled and plaintiffs prevailed in less than 1%. One law-review article concluded that the low risk of liability had influenced companies' cost-benefit analysis and "leads to dangerous, ineffective healthcare that is shielded from constitutional challenge."

More than one federal judge described prisoner claims as tragic — before going on to cite precedent or the narrow standards in deciding against the plaintiffs. Several issued fiery dissents. One was issued in an August 2019 case filed by a prisoner who was denied a transfer he said was necessary for his safety. "We do not sentence people to be stabbed and beaten," Judge Robin Rosenbaum of the 11th Circuit wrote.

"The Eighth Amendment does not allow prisons to be modern-day settings for Lord of the Flies," she went on. "The Majority Opinion condones this behavior and ensures it will occur again."

This project was supported by a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. Data analysis and visualization were supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
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Hello there! Value meals are practically extinct these days, but one place is holding the line: Chili's. The chain's CMO told BI why deals like the Triple Dipper and the 3 for Me combo aren't going anywhere.

In today's big story, the Fed is likely to cut rates again today, but don't bank on more coming after that.

What's on deck

Markets: This $19 billion hedge fund's old-school approach still relies on its founder's big bets.

Tech: AppLovin is a Wall Street darling, with shares up more than 780% this year. Can its incredible run last?

Business: How Sean "Diddy" Combs' professional and personal life crumbled amid a flurry of allegations.

But first, it might be the last one for a while.

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The big story

Here today, gone tomorrow

Enjoy today's rate cut because it might be the last one for a while.

The Fed is expected to make its third-straight rate cut this afternoon, but the certainties end there, write Business Insider's Ayelet Sheffey and Madison Hoff.

Plenty of people on Wall Street believe today marks the end of the Fed's three-month rate-cutting spree, writes BI's Matthew Fox. Yardeni Research and Goldman Sachs both warned the Fed might take a breather when it meets again at the end of January.

Apollo's top economist, Torsten Sløk took things a step further, suggesting a potential rate hike in 2025.

So what's giving the Fed … pause? (Sorry. I had to do it.)

First, inflation is still very much a thing. While prices have improved since 2022, we're not at the 2% target Fed chair Jerome Powell set as a long-term goal. It's also ticked up a bit, with the consumer price index hitting a 2.7% year-over-year growth rate in November.

Meanwhile, the recent jobs report also shows the labor market is in a decent spot.

Those figures aren't exactly where the Fed would like them to be, but they're also not so bad that the central bank would adjust rates after today's announcement to enact change.

One other factor has market watchers unsure about the Fed's next move: the incoming president.

President-elect Donald Trump has made clear he intends to make big changes once he's in office. Talk of widespread tariffs, in particular, has some investors on edge.

Many economists believe Trump's trade plans will lead to higher inflation, as companies raise prices to pass on the taxes they face to customers.

(It's not a bulletproof prediction. Trump implemented tariffs during his first term and inflation decreased, and some believe that could happen again.)

There's another twist: Trump might not do anything with tariffs. The president-elect's tough talk could be a negotiation tactic to get better terms from China, Canada, and Mexico on various topics.

All that uncertainty puts the Fed in a tricky spot. Powell recently said the Fed couldn't make policy changes based on something that "lies well into the future." Instead, it needs to focus on the here and now.

So that means a rate cut today, and who knows tomorrow.

News brief

Top headlines

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• Amazon commits another $10 billion to Ohio data centers amid questions about energy costs and supply.
• Verily's plan for 2025: Raise money, pivot to AI, and break up with Google.
• Walmart is testing body cameras for some front-line employees in Texas.
• Nvidia stock's correction has accelerated since Microsoft's CEO hinted the frenzied demand for AI chips may be waning.

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3 things in business

1. Rapper unraveled. Since his rise to fame in the late 1990s, Sean "Diddy" Combs had built a business empire and become one of the richest and most well-connected entertainers of all time. But it all began to unravel when he was hit with a criminal indictment — which he pleaded not guilty to — and dozens of civil lawsuits. How his world fell apart in a year.
2. Rich musicians got millions in pandemic relief — and American taxpayers footed the bill. Stadium performers like Lil Wayne and Chris Brown billed US taxpayers for luxury hotels, private jet flights, and shopping sprees. They did it by taking advantage of a pandemic relief program intended for smaller arts organizations, a BI investigation found.
3. Don't trust that Zestimate. Zillow's popular automated home valuation is wrong. A lot. But Americans still love it — and that obsession is a big win for Zillow.

In other news

• The cancellation of 'Freaks and Geeks' broke Linda Cardellini's heart. It also taught her a valuable lesson.
• 56 million Americans don't have access to a retirement plan at work — and Social Security may not be enough to keep them afloat as they age.
• How Alex Karp built the 'cult' of Palantir — 'with no sex and very little drugs.'
• Wealth strategies that used to be reserved for billionaires are becoming more accessible.

• Juror 'misconduct' battle brewing in Trump hush-money case.

  ---

  What's happening today

• Federal Reserve interest rate decision.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Hello there! Have you ever watched a Hallmark movie (it's ok to admit it) and wondered: Where did they film this thing? The answer is usually Victoria, British Columbia. Someone who lives there describes what it's like living in a place built for the perfect happy ending.

In today's big story, we're looking at how the uproar over mysterious drones has people doing some investigating of their own.

What's on deck

Markets: Bitcoin predictions for 2025 are rolling in, and there's a wide range of possibilities.

Tech: Amazon's RTO plans have one problem: There's not enough office to return to.

Business: Not as big and a lot more expensive. Welcome to the new American dream.

But first, what is everyone droning on about?

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

It's a bird, it's a plane, no it's…

Mysterious aircraft have taken over the night sky this month, but they probably aren't bringing us gifts on the 25th.

Santa Claus might have some company in the sky as dozens of unidentified aircraft continue to pop up across the East Coast. See for yourself some videos of the sightings that are sparking concern.

The good news: Officials have stressed drones aren't the work of a foreign adversary or a public threat. The bad news: That's about all they are saying.

Donald Trump addressed the buzzy topic Monday during his first press conference since his election win. The president-elect criticized the government for not providing more details to the general public and said he canceled an upcoming weekend trip to his golf club in Bedminster, N.J.

The entire episode also reflects a growing challenge for the US military, writes Business Insider's Jake Epstein. Multiple military installations have spotted drones in their area, which could be spying on military bases or become a hazard to their operations.

The lack of information isn't stopping people from taking matters into their own hands.

Videos captured with Ring doorbells of potential drone sightings are being widely shared, writes BI's Ana Altcheck. The app's "Neighbors" section, typically for sharing info about lost pets or stolen packages, has become inundated with written reports and videos speculating about mysterious aircraft.

Of course, give the internet an inch, and it'll take a mile. While some of the posts are earnest, there's plenty of trolling going on. In some cases, users have gotten annoyed they're being bombarded with notifications about drone posts.

Trying to explain the phenomenon behind the drones represents the perfect thread for conspiratorial minds to pull on, writes BI's Katie Notopoulos.

To be fair, it's only natural to want to do a bit of investigating. I admit, I've spent a bit more time staring at the sky than I normally would, hoping to glimpse our new "friends" (hopefully).

If you do decide to do a bit of sky gazing, it's important to remember there are plenty of things up there that aren't mysterious. The Federal Aviation Administration handles 45,000 flights every day.

So before you get excited about what you think is another drone flying over your backyard, check out this piece from BI's Taylor Rains on how to distinguish what's flying overhead.

News brief

Top headlines

• Trump's hush-money conviction survives his 'immunity' challenge — for now.
• Bernie Sanders says Amazon's warehouse worker injury rates are far worse than the company lets on.
• Elon Musk wants to turn SpaceX's Texas 'Starbase' into its own city.
• Trump is threatening the press. We should take him seriously — and literally.
• Ads took over streaming this year — and they're just getting started.
• The head of Russia's chemical weapons was killed when a scooter bomb exploded in Moscow.
• TikTok's CEO met with Trump as the fight to delay the app's ban heads to Supreme Court.
• The latest change for Starbucks under its new CEO? Baristas can get triple the amount of paid parental leave.

3 things in markets

1. Enjoy this week's rate cut because it might be the last one for a while. Wall Street forecasters aren't banking on the string of rate cuts to continue into early next year. A strong economy coupled with sticky inflation has experts projecting the central bank will pause easing its policy for a bit.
2. Two sides of the same (bit)coin. The crypto bears see bitcoin dropping to $45,000 in 2025 (BCA Research), while the bulls see the asset climbing as high as $500,000 next year (Fundstrat). President-elect Donald Trump's plan for bitcoin will have a massive impact, but there are also big moves being made at the state level.
3. SoFi's head of investment wants to vibe-check the market. Liz Young Thomas told BI it's hard to ignore all the positive signals in the market. However, aggressive speculation that the rally won't end despite stocks being overvalued could create a situation where the market gets too "frothy," she added.

3 things in tech

1. Exclusive: Amazon delays its five-day RTO mandate for some employees. The retail giant doesn't have enough office space in certain locations, and internal notifications reviewed by BI show some RTO policy delays stretching as late as May. But this isn't the first time Amazon has run into workspace capacity issues.
2. Inside Wiz's plans to become the world's biggest cybersecurity company. The cloud security startup has expanded at a breakneck pace, raising $1.9 billion in just four years and passing on a $23 billion acquisition offer from Google. Raaz Herzberg, Wiz's VP of product strategy, told BI where it plans to go from there.
3. Klarna says it will start drug testing workers in Sweden. The buy-now, pay-later firm, which is gearing up for an IPO, said the move was part of a wider effort to "strengthen security" in an internal Slack message sent Monday.

3 things in business

1. The American dream is a lot smaller these days. Fewer kids. Smaller homes. Less free time. Oh, and everything costs a lot more, and you probably won't be happy. The American dream sure looks a lot different than it used to.
2. Move over, Bluesky. Thousands of users have ditched X in the wake of the 2024 presidential election, with many flocking to platforms like Bluesky. But instead of shouting into the void and giving in to doomscrolling, some are turning to their group chat with friends for more meaningful interactions.
3. Introducing BI's 10 industry innovators of 2024. What do the CEO of Nvidia, the commissioner of the WNBA, and the head of Amazon Prime Video have in common? They're all shaking up and transforming their industries in their own ways.

In other news

• Why Arm and Qualcomm's legal battle could have big implications for the chip world.
• How rising US debt could compound into a crisis, according to 'bond king' Jeffrey Gundlach.
• Reid Hoffman says he's not planning on leaving US, but puts odds of Trump retaliation at over 50%.
• Chipotle's new CEO is trying to keep robots out of your burrito assembly line.

• Apple is working on a foldable iPad that has no screen crease, reports say.

  ---

  What's happening today

• Electoral College meets to certify presidential election results.
• Federal Open Market Committee meeting.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

(Slightly) new name, who dis? I didn't catch enough sun in Florida to get a proper tan, but I am bringing a fresh look to the newsletter. All your favorite parts are still here, just with an updated feel. Like that friend who suddenly has a great hairline a few months after their trip to Turkey.

In today's big story, Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old charged with the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, made a vocal first appearance in court.

What's on deck

Markets: Microsoft investors take a pass on holding bitcoin on the balance sheet.

Tech: Amazon's pharmacy business is quietly crushing it.

Business: It turns out taking it easy during retirement isn't all that easy.

But first, all rise.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Heading to the courtroom

The case against the man accused of killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is coming into focus.

Luigi Mangione appeared in a Pennsylvania court Tuesday for a hearing about his extradition to New York, where he faces a second-degree murder charge in the death of Thompson last week.

The high-profile case already included fireworks, as Mangione shouted at the press while being escorted into the local courthouse. Although it wasn't entirely intelligible, Mangione called something "completely out of touch" and "an insult to the American people." There was also a reference to a "lived experience."

Mangione brought some of that fight into the courtroom, as his lawyer, Thomas Dickey, said he was contesting his extradition to NY. Doing so won't ultimately stop him from being brought back to New York to be arraigned, but it could delay the process by weeks.

A key piece of the case will likely be a "ghost gun" — or untraceable firearm that can be assembled at home — that police say they found on Mangione. Joseph Kenny, the New York Police Department's chief of detectives, previously told reporters the gun could have been made on a 3D printer.

Shares in health insurers have also taken a dip as the market wonders if Thompson's death will lead to wider scrutiny of the industry.

One thing that does seem clear is the gap between how much health insurance companies spend on executive security compared to their Big Tech peers.

In the meantime, details on Mangione continue to emerge.

A review of Mangione's deleted X posts by Business Insider's Jack Newsham and Katherine Long offers a look inside the 26-year-old's mind.

His deleted social media posts show skepticism toward doctors, President-elect Donald Trump, and President Biden. One repost also suggests he supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

It's just some of the vast online trail the Ivy League graduate created. An app founder who talked about AI on X, Mangione attended elite schools and wrote a favorable review of the Unabomber Manifesto.

News brief

Top headlines

• Bankruptcy judge rules against The Onion's acquisition of Infowars.
• GM gives up on robotaxis after a string of troubles with Cruise.
• Jay-Z's response to sexual assault allegations was missing one key thing, according to PR pros.
• Scoop: Particle Health lands $10 million in funding after lobbing antitrust lawsuit against medical records giant Epic.
• The US is striking targets across Syria, and it isn't the only one dropping bombs in this uncertain moment.
• Trump said he'd consider raising the minimum wage. Here's where it stands in every state and the raises both parties have proposed.
• LinkedIn wants to have its TikTok era.

3 things in markets

1. Microsoft shareholders shut down a bitcoin investing bid. A think tank proposal called for Microsoft to evaluate the benefits of adding bitcoin to its corporate balance sheet. But investors shut the proposal down, saying it prefers to stick with less volatile assets.
2. The market's green flags could actually be red ones for 2025. Contrarian investor Edward Yardeni explains why seemingly strong market indicators, like an elevated Bull/Bear ratio and the S&P 500 trading above its 200-day moving average, might lead to a pullback.
3. Speaking of cautious outlooks… Some Wall Street forecasters see the stock market's good times hitting a wall in 2025. Whether it's concerns over consumer spending waning or a feeling that stocks are just too pricey, some experts see a market correction coming early next year.

3 things in tech

1. Amazon Pharmacy's potential sales boom. A record 45% of Amazon's customers are "very interested" in buying medications from its pharmacy business, an Evercore analysis found. As shopper interest skyrockets, Amazon Pharmacy's revenue is expected to reach $2 billion this year, according to the report.
2. YouTube star Marques Brownlee has some questions for OpenAI. The AI giant recently released Sora, an AI video generator, to help creators like popular tech reviewer Brownlee. But Brownlee didn't sugarcoat his skepticism in his review of the AI tool and wanted to know if OpenAI used his videos to train Sora without his knowledge.
3. Google's Gemini woes. As Google pours money into AI, the tech giant is hoping products like Gemini for Google Workspace will turn the investment into revenue. However, according to internal documents reviewed by BI, Workspace's Gemini tools trailed its key rivals when it came to brand familiarity and usage.

3 things in business

1. Kroger's $25 billion acquisition is not to be. Kroger's proposed acquisition of Albertsons was blocked by a federal judge, who agreed with the FTC that the merger would weaken competition for US grocery shoppers. It would be the largest supermarket merger in history, but the ruling could ultimately sink the deal.
2. Ball is not life, after all. Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was widely criticized by Wall Street after losing NBA rights to competitors. But WBD is doing just fine, securing higher rates for most of its TV networks from Charter and Comcast, the two largest cable providers in the US, people familiar with the terms of the deals told BI. (NBA execs, on the other hand, are fighting an early-season ratings slump with an NBA Cup they hope will reignite interest.)
3. America is doing retirement all wrong. Plenty of older Americans envision themselves strolling through golf courses, lounging by pools, or binge-watching TV shows in retirement. But research suggests a life of pure leisure doesn't make you happier or healthier. In fact, it may even prevent you from living longer.

In other news

• Timothée Chalamet's Bob Dylan can really sing, even if 'A Complete Unknown' doesn't hit all the right notes.
• I asked ChatGPT to help me decide what to get my family for Christmas. It gave me suggestions I never would've thought of.
• Ex-Abercrombie and Fitch CEO requests a hearing to determine if he's mentally fit to be tried on sex trafficking charges.

• Was your 2024 Spotify Wrapped disappointing? A former engineer explains why it felt like a flop this year.

  ---

  What's happening today

• Macy's reports earnings.
• The White House hosts a conference on women's health research.
• CPI data is released.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Hello. Luigi Mangione, a 26-year-old Ivy League graduate, has been charged with murder in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Mangione was arrested in Pennsylvania on Monday and initially faced local gun and forgery charges. Our team has been covering this developing story — keep up with our coverage here.

In today's newsletter, the $13 billion Omnicom-IPG megamerger reflects a new era as Big Tech and AI upend the ad industry.

What's on deck:

• Markets: Nvidia shares fell after China hit the chipmaker with an antitrust probe.
• Tech: Former Google employees on being laid off from the tech giant and their advice for those in a similar position.
• Business: Rupert Murdoch lost a 'Succession-like' legal battle over future control of his media empire.

But first, a new ad-venture.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

The ad industry's new era

It's already been a big week for the ad industry.

Omnicom Group said it had reached an agreement to acquire Interpublic Group, a merger worth more than $30 billion that would create the world's largest ad conglomerate.

Across the pond at Paris-based Publicis Groupe, the party hats might be staying in the drawer. Just last week, Publicis recruited Snoop Dogg for a video to help celebrate the firm usurping London's WPP to become the world's largest ad holding company.

But it's not just about being No. 1. For ad industry insiders, the proposed takeover reflects an ad sector under threat from Big Tech and AI, writes Business Insider's Lara O'Reilly. By creating a larger company, Omnicom-IPG will have a bigger base to deploy data and technology, which could give it leverage to secure beneficial and exclusive deals with partners such as cloud providers.

Keep in mind, however, that in the short term mergers can be highly disruptive.

Concerned clients. Bruised egos. Job cuts.

Integrating two companies with 100,000 people combined, dozens of different agency brands, and hundreds of offices across the globe will not be a simple task. There will likely be synergies — including job cuts. "It will be harder to climb the career ladder. Superstar creators and creatives will also be in demand, as well as good strategists, in all disciplines. But, lots of other roles will become diminished," Simon Francis, who leads the marketing consultancy Flock Associates, told BI.

However, as Lara highlights, that could create opportunities for smaller agencies, especially as the merged company works its way through the disruption caused by integration, egos being knocked out of joint (it wouldn't be the first time), and potential client conflicts where the new entity suddenly works with two or more fierce rivals in the same sector.

"From an M&A perspective, it's only going to add fuel to the fire."

That's according to William Ritchie, founding and managing director of advisor firm WY Partners. "I'd expect there is going to be more competition for the best assets and more focus on building a streamlined data and tech-first offering which can compete," he told BI.

Private equity has been circling the ad industry, too. Apollo, KKR, and Blackstone have shown interest in media and entertainment. Industry insiders have speculated for months that WPP could be taken private — or at least some parts of it could be.

News brief

Top headlines

• What we know about Luigi Mangione, the Ivy League grad charged with murder in UnitedHealthcare CEO's killing.
• Jay-Z asks judge to unmask Jane Doe who said in a lawsuit that he and Diddy raped her when she was 13 years old.
• Trump says he's 'having dinner' with Jeff Bezos. It's the latest development in their long history.
• AMD downgraded after BI report on weak demand for its AI chips among AWS customers.
• Post-Assad Syria will be a new challenge for America's Middle East strategy.

3 things in markets

1. Nvidia stock drops as China probes the chipmaker over potential antitrust violations. China's government is looking into Nvidia's acquisition of chip design firm Mellanox, which it previously approved. Nvidia stock fell by more than 2.5% early Tuesday.
2. Microsoft and Amazon investors are eyeing pieces of the bitcoin pie. Shareholders at Microsoft and Amazon will decide this week if their respective companies should consider investing in bitcoin. The cryptocurrency recently blew past a $100,000 milestone that bestowed great gains on MicroStrategy, which saw triple-digit gains after buying up bitcoin this year.
3. Some advice from Citi's newly minted MDs. Citi appointed its largest class of managing directors under CEO Jane Fraser last week. Five of the new MDs told BI their best career advice and reflected on the bank's massive transformation.

3 things in tech

1. Life after Google. The past few years have been rough for those in the tech world as the industry faced historic layoffs. Eight ex-Googlers — including one who has since returned — shared what it was like to lose what some considered their "dream job," and how they found their footing after.
2. Inside MrBeast City. Jimmy Donaldson, the creator better known as MrBeast, shared photos of the "city" he built for his upcoming "Beast Games" show. He said it cost more than $14 million to build.
3. OpenAI's shiny new video generator is open to the public. Sora, which can generate videos up to 20 seconds long from written prompts, went live Monday. Its product lead said a team of about five or six engineers built the generator in months.

3 things in business

1. Murdoch's "Succession" battle. Life imitates art, or perhaps, art imitates life. Rupert Murdoch lost a legal case over the future of his media empire in a real-life succession battle on Monday. Rupert, 93, and his son Lachlan took on three other Murdoch children in court — and lost, for now.
2. Thinking outside the deck. For better or worse, slide decks have been at the crux of how Americans work in the nearly four decades since PowerPoint launched. But they've also faced a lot of backlash, including from CEOs like Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai. Does that mean the deck is in jeopardy? Next slide.
3. AI's pollution price tag. AI-related emissions will soon rival that of all the cars in California, according to a new study. In just six years, the study found, AI electricity consumption could pollute the air so much that asthma-related deaths could spike by more than a third. By 2030, researchers calculated, AI's health impact could total up to $20 billion.

What's happening today

• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu testifies at his corruption trial in Jerusalem.
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks at Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit.
• Nobel Prizes, including the Nobel Peace Prize, are presented in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Insider Today team: Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This is an excerpt from the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

The crypto community keeps racking up wins.

President-elect Donald Trump lived up to his self-appointed title of "crypto president" by picking a big supporter of digital assets to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Trump nominated Paul Atkins, who served as an SEC commissioner under George W. Bush, for the role of Wall Street's top cop. Atkins has been a part of the Token Alliance, an advocacy group for crypto, since 2017.

That wasn't the only victory the "hodlers" were celebrating. Bitcoin surpassed the all-important $100,000 mark for the first time on Wednesday. It's the latest in a historic run for an industry still basking in the afterglow of what a Trump win means for its market.

Atkins, if confirmed, is a stark contrast to current SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who already announced his intentions to step down in January.

A former Goldman Sachs partner who also taught a class on blockchain at MIT, Gensler didn't initially draw the ire of the crypto world. It wasn't long before he started ruffling feathers — to put it mildly — with his push for more oversight and attempts to stop some new products from coming to market.

So while the bar for getting an SEC leader the crypto community liked more than Gensler was essentially on the floor, Atkins, who has spent the past few years advising crypto companies, is a best-case scenario for digital-asset supporters.

Trump's picks for the key people overseeing the economy and Wall Street are now mostly in.

While some of his nominations have turned heads — leading a few to even withdraw from consideration — Trump's finance-focused selections are viewed as more traditional.

Howard Lutnick, Trump's pick for commerce secretary, found success beyond the financial services firm (Cantor Fitzgerald) and the brokerage (BGC Group) he runs.

He also orchestrated the purchase of commercial real estate services firm Newmark in 2011 for a little more than $60 million. In the years since he's helped turn Newmark into a real-estate powerhouse with a market cap of roughly $3.8 billion, writes Business Insider's Dan Geiger.

Meanwhile, Scott Bessent, Trump's Treasury pick, is also unsurprising. (Elon Musk even labeled him a "business-as-usual pick.") The billionaire investor spent time as George Soros' righthand man before launching his own hedge fund.

The picks haven't elicited the strong reactions other members of his proposed Cabinet have, but maybe that's the point. What the market hates more than anything is uncertainty, and with this group, it seems, what you see is what you get.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Spriha Srivastava, UK bureau chief, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Hello. South Korea's president rescinded his martial law declaration. Its government is still in crisis, and opposition lawmakers have started impeachment proceedings. Our global news team has been covering this developing story — keep up with our coverage here.

In today's newsletter, Amazon's touting new hardware it hopes can help it unseat Nvidia as the king of AI chips.

What's on deck:

• Markets: These charts show how stretched stock market valuations are.
• Tech: Keep an eye on these 45 VCs who are set to do big things in 2025.
• Business: Gen Z's credit-card debt is becoming a problem.

But first, I don't need the name-brand stuff.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Amazon's affordable AI

'Dupes' are all the rage these days, so why not make one for AI chips?

That's basically Amazon Web Services' idea for breaking Nvidia's stranglehold on the AI market. The cloud giant made several announcements at its annual re:Invent conference focused on the cost efficiencies its tech can bring to AI development.

At the core is AWS' Trainium chip. The tech giant's homegrown chip is its answer to Nvidia's all-powerful GPUs, which are widely used for training AI models.

Chips are only half the battle, though. As the expectations for AI models keep rising, so does the number of chips needed to train them. Companies have to be creative about combining so many chips (and avoid overheating issues), and Amazon thinks it has a solution for that, too.

AWS CEO Matt Garman detailed how customers can get the most out of their AI chips with 'UltraServers' — multiple Trainium servers smartly pieced together — and the 'UltraCluster' — what you get when you combine multiple 'UltraServers.'

That might sound like a lot of fancy names and confusing terminology (and it is), but it boils down to AWS pitching itself as a cheaper way to leverage more compute as concerns grow about AI bottlenecks.

Amazon can't just rely on offering a cheaper alternative when taking on Nvidia.

Yes, diversifying your supply chain so you don't have to rely on a single company for a key piece of hardware is a good selling point.

Nvidia has a trump card, though: CUDA. The acronym (I could tell you what it stands for, but would it really matter?) represents a big moat Nvidia has around its business.

CUDA is a software platform that developers use to work with Nvidia GPUs. What started small in 2007 has evolved into a trove of training data, tools, and other assets that are helpful for customers building with AI.

It's a problem AWS has even acknowledged, at least internally. Documents viewed by BI's Eugene Kim repeatedly cited CUDA as the biggest hangup stopping customers from leaving Nvidia.

The CUDA conundrum could come to a head soon. AI startup Anthropic, which also uses Nvidia GPUs, is helping AWS build out its 'UltraCluster.' It's part of a $4 billion investment Amazon recently made in the AI startup, which includes Anthropic using AWS as its "primary cloud and training partner."

News brief

Top headlines

• A grad student who joined a protest against martial law in South Korea last night told BI what he saw.
• Marc Benioff ruptured his achilles tendon. He said he doesn't give a 'Fakarava' as Agentforce hope stirs Salesforce stock.
• Elon Musk lost his Tesla pay fight. Here's what he can do next.

3 things in markets

1. Crypto investing for dummies. Bitcoin is nearing the $100K mark off the back of President-elect Donald Trump's victory last month. A financial advisor who specializes in alternative assets shared common mistakes to avoid before diving into crypto investing. (Rule No. 1: Just because it's good now doesn't mean it'll stay that way, so don't go crazy on crypto.)
2. See how the stock market has been pushed to the limit. The S&P 500 is up more than 27% and notched over 50 record closing highs. But stocks' sky-high valuations have some analysts concerned the market is stretched too thin. These five charts show how pricey things have gotten.
3. How Bank of America sees 2025 shaping up. The bank forecasted US GDP growth of 2.3% next year, but it sees sticky inflation as a potential headwind. BofA is also predicting three more rate cuts — December, March, and June — before the Fed settles on a rate of 3.75% to 4%. (However, Ned Davis Research sees 2025 being an uphill battle for stocks.)

3 things in tech

1. Introducing VC's rising stars. BI readers and top venture capitalists named 2024's best up-and-coming investors. They come from firms both big and small, and invest in startups across all sectors and stages.
2. Intel could consider splitting off its chip factories. Intel's former CEO Pat Gelsinger opposed this strategy. The recent news of his exit has reopened the question, but a break up wouldn't be easy since the company must maintain majority control for its CHIPS Act funding. Regardless, Intel's interim leaders and Gelsinger's successor face an uphill battle. The contest to become the new CEO is on, and the chipmaker is reportedly looking at two candidates, including an outsider.
3. This year's Cyber Monday just shattered e-commerce records. Depending on which you ask, US shoppers spent $13.3 billion (per Adobe) or $12.8 billion (per Salesforce) on Monday alone. Deep discounts made the e-tail holiday the biggest online shopping day ever.

3 things in business

1. Life with plastic is fantastic, but beware of all that debt. Gen Z is much more comfortable using credit cards than their millennial counterparts were at that age. The younger generation tends to prioritize fun over finances, and it's led them to rack up debt at a faster rate than any other age group.
2. Call Her Bartender. Recent trademark filings suggest the "Call Her Daddy" podcaster is looking to launch her own alcohol brand under the name "Popular Vodka by Unwell." The product would make her the latest to join the celebrity booze-biz game.
3. Is time up for BuzzFeed? The digital publisher was supposedly worth $2 billion a few years ago. It's now worth much less and has been scrambling to solve a looming $124 million debt problem. All of it is expected to come to a head this week, and BuzzFeed may have to sell assets, like its interview show "Hot Ones."

What's happening today

• US Supreme Court hears case on gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
• French Prime Minister Michel Barnier's minority government faces two votes of no confidence in Parliament.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Spriha Srivastava, UK bureau chief, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Good morning! We've officially entered the season of company holiday parties. An etiquette expert shared some helpful tips to follow. (Take it easy on the booze.)

In today's big story, an automaker CEO's resignation shows how tough a year the industry is having.

What's on deck:

• Markets: Hedge funds' November report cards are in.
• Tech: Tesla shareholders approved Elon Musk's massive pay package. A judge didn't agree.
• Business: Incorporating more auctions for buying US homes could help ease the process.

But first, I'm just trying to get out of first gear.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Running on fumes

As dealerships look to clear their lots to make room for next year's models, automakers are also doing some housecleaning.

Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares resigned this weekend as the Jeep and Chrysler owner battles sliding sales. His expedited departure — Tavares was scheduled to leave in 2026 — shows how choppy the automotive industry remains.

Stellantis' struggles have been particularly bad. Tavares's cost-cutting approach initially helped, but more recently the company's US sales were down 17% this year compared to last year, writes Business Insider's Nora Naughton.

The new boss will have plenty of issues to sort through, including a legal battle with the United Auto Workers union, writes BI's Tom Carter.

So, what's got the auto industry stuck in gear?

There are three big issues at play here:

The EV problem: Arguably the biggest issue facing automakers is slowing demand for electric vehicles. While EV sales are still rising, they aren't pacing how they were a few years ago. That's forced automakers to recalibrate strategies that were anticipating the EV good times would keep rolling. Hybrid cars are also making a comeback, further complicating plans.

The China problem: As if the EV market wasn't hard enough, there's the added challenge of Chinese competitors gaining market share. Their budget-friendly EVs are proving to be a huge hit in the world's largest auto market (China), much to the annoyance of Tesla. They also turned heads at Europe's largest auto show this year. Even Ford CEO Jim Farley acknowledged how much he enjoyed a Chinese EV. (It hasn't been a complete lovefest; he also called China's auto industry an "existential threat.")

The tariff problem: President-elect Donald Trump's surprise announcement to enact a 25% tax on goods imported from Mexico is the newest hurdle for automakers. The US imported more than $65 billion worth of car parts from Mexico last year. Tesla also previously announced plans for a new $10 billion factory in Mexico. Trump's trade plans might not ultimately be implemented, but the uncertainty means car manufacturers could reconsider their supply chains.

News brief

Top headlines

• Exclusive: Tesla tells workers on Cybertruck line no 'need to report to work' for the next three days.
• Trump ramped up trade threats. Here's what the US buys from nine new countries at risk.
• Jaguar released a concept for its new EV model after a fierce controversy over its rebranding.
• Fidelity just boosted the value of its stake in Elon Musk's xAI by 70%.

3 things in markets

1. Balyasny tops among multistrat giants last month. The Chicago-based fund posted a 3.9% gain in November, pushing its year-to-date performance to 11.6%. Check out how other top hedge funds like Citadel, Millennium and Schonfeld Partners fared.
2. What does "de-dollarization" even mean? President-elect Donald Trump recently threatened countries that are trying to move away from using the US dollar as a reserve currency. "De-dollarization" is about trying to reduce reliance on the dollar in cross-border trade and investments, undermining the US along the way.
3. Explaining BlackRock's latest big push into private credit. The massive money manager announced plans to acquire HPS Investment Partners, a private credit behemoth managing $148 billion, for $12 billion. The deal shows how BlackRock sees big opportunities growing its business in the lucrative private markets.

3 things in tech

1. Elon Musk's Tesla pay package gets shut down — again. A Delaware judge decided against reinstating Musk's $55 billion pay package despite shareholders approving it in June. The judge, who had previously ruled to void the agreement in January, stuck to her earlier finding that Tesla's board was unduly influenced by Musk when it came to creating his compensation package. Musk wrote that the ruling was "totally crazy" and "absolute corruption" in posts on X.
2. Intel tries to regroup after its CEO's surprising exit. Intel's top boss Pat Gelsinger stepped down as the US chipmaker looks to right the ship and reverse a massive slide in its stock price. The company's interim co-CEOs addressed the workforce Monday in what one Intel employee described as "damage control."
3. Exclusive: Amazon plans to ramp up cloud work by leveraging consultants. Amazon Web Services wants to work with more consulting services, like Accenture, as part of its broader goal to spur growth, according to an internal document. It's a notable shift, as AWS previously has done a lot of work with customers through in-house cloud advisors.

3 things in business

1. The secret to eliminating some of the guesswork out homebuying might be Down Under. About a third of homes sold in Australia are done by auctions giving sellers and buyers a clearer picture of how the winning bid is reached. Some companies are trying to bring the US a version of the approach.
2. Why Netflix could raise prices again — and soon. Some on Wall Street think the streaming giant will raise prices soon to keep its growth going. New survey data from Evercore ISI suggests it has room to do so. Almost half of the respondents said they'd be more likely to keep Netflix if more live content — like the Jake Paul and Mike Tyson fight — was added.
3. How Disney's 'Moana 2' won at the box office. The sequel to the 2016 movie hit broke Thanksgiving box office records and brought in $380 million globally. Its success was much needed for Disney, but none of it would have happened if the company kept its original plans to make "Moana 2" a Disney+ series. It's now Disney's "hottest IP."

What's happening today

• Today is Giving Tuesday, where people around the globe celebrate generosity.
• Salesforce reports earnings today after the bell.
• Billboard reveals the top pop star of the 21st century.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Spriha Srivastava, UK bureau chief, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Welcome back! Didn't scratch that consumerism itch enough during Black Friday? Cyber Monday kicks off today, and we've got a rundown on all the best deals.

In today's big story, Corporate America doesn't seem interested in bringing back the middle managers it's spent the past few years kicking out.

What's on deck:

• Markets: A $14 trillion market with little transparency is a growing concern to the rest of the financial world.
• Tech: How Netflix absolutely crushed it this year.
• Business: The incredible — and heartbreaking — untold story about the invention of Yeti Coolers.

But first, we're managing just fine.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Middle managers' new reality

Missing: Open positions for middle managers.

Corporate America's push to flatten organizations isn't going away, and it's put middle managers on the endangered species list, writes Business Insider's Aki Ito.

Data Aki collected from workforce analytics provider Revelio Labs shows hiring for white-collar jobs is bouncing back with one noticeable exception: middle managers. According to Aki's analysis, employers are advertising 42% fewer middle-management positions than they did in April 2022.

A hiring slump is one thing — Aki has covered the ongoing white-collar recession extensively — but the diminishing need for middle managers could be a new reality for the role. Companies keep touting the benefits of shrinking the distance between leaders and people on the front lines doing the work.

If anything, it could get even worse. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have already signaled plans for significant layoffs via the new Department of Government Efficiency. Their strategy includes only keeping the minimum number of staffers needed for departments to function effectively, which might spell more trouble for middle managers.

In the meantime, recovering middle managers are left fighting for anything they can get.

In desperate need of work, some people are heading further down the corporate totem pole, applying for entry-level jobs.

That's led to an interesting dynamic. Applicants are trying to appear less qualified over fears their senior-level experience might scare away recruiters of lower-level jobs.

As Aki points out, things could eventually turn around for middle managers. The downsides of fewer middle managers — burnt-out supervisors, fewer mentors for young employees — are already coming to light.

The clock is ticking, though. The middle-management culling is largely impacting people in their late 40s to 50s who are starting to eye retirement. That age demographic, which is prime Gen X, is already dealing with challenges around personal finances.

If their struggle to find work continues, limiting their ability to save, it could further strain a system already having a hard time helping retirees who didn't save enough.

News brief

Top headlines

• President Joe Biden has issued a pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, for federal gun and tax evasion charges.
• Elon Musk is seeking an injunction against OpenAI to stop it from dropping its nonprofit status.
• Donald Trump threatened 100% tariffs on BRICS nations if they try to 'move away' from the US dollar. That could hurt the US.
• Zelenskyy agrees on X to a '3 hour' Lex Fridman podcast appearance as Musk touts another win for the platform.

3 things in markets

1. Risks in the private markets could become very public. A note from Rosenberg Research warned of the growing leverage in the $14 trillion market, which includes investments in startups, real estate, and direct lending. Fund managers "are resorting to an ever more creative array of temporary fixes" which is "increasing the interdependence and circular lines of credit between parties in the system," the note said.
2. A longtime Tesla investor isn't sold on it getting a Trump bump. Ross Gerber disagrees with the widely held belief that the close ties between Elon Musk and President-elect Donald Trump will benefit the EV giant. Gerber, whose fund has been selling down its stake in Tesla since late last year, told BI problems around Tesla's tech can't be fixed by Musk's new friends in Washington.
3. Thanks for the memories, small-cap stocks' rally. The surge in US small-cap equities following Trump's win doesn't have legs, according to some market experts. Adam Turnquist, LPL Financial's chief technical strategist, said small-cap revenue growth has been disappointing, especially compared to the S&P 500.

3 things in tech

1. Five factors behind Netflix's totally awesome, very good year. Netflix emerged as the clear winner of the streaming wars this year, boasting a soaring stock and forecasting billions of dollars in profits. Strategies like pushing into live sports and overhauling film leadership helped push it to the top of the streaming game.
2. Buying Twitter? Bad move. Owning X? Not a bad idea. When Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, an analyst called it, "One of the most overpaid tech acquisitions in the history of M&A." Two years later, it's looking like it could be a steal. Musk used the platform, now called X, to train his xAI venture that's valued at $50 billion. It was also the focal point for his advocacy for Donald Trump, whose reelection sent Tesla's stock and Musk's personal wealth soaring.
3. We drove the Chinese EV Ford's CEO loves. Jim Farley, Ford's CEO, didn't want to give up his "fantastic" Xiaomi SU7, despite the fact it was made by a rival car company. BI's reviewer took it for a test spin in China to see what the fuss was about, and said it was one of the best-handling Chinese EVs he'd driven. Impressive for a company that hadn't made a car before this year. Just don't expect to get it outside China, unless you're Jim Farley.

3 things in business

1. An origin story with a deadly twist. Brothers Roy and Ryan Seiders launched the wildly successful drink cooler brand Yeti — a business now worth $3.5 billion — out of their father's backyard. But years ago, the shocking murder of their business partner triggered a succession battle that nearly stopped the company in its tracks.
2. How hard is home buying? See it to believe it. American homeowners are older, wealthier, and less likely to have kids than ever before, according to data from the National Association of Realtors. These nine charts show just how bad the affordability crisis has become.
3. Automaker CEO departs, effective immediately. Stellantis CEO Carlos Tavares has stepped down, the company announced on Sunday, and its shares fell by more than 8% on Monday. The automaker, which owns Chrysler, Jeep and Maserati, saw its profits shrink and stock slump dramatically this year.

What's happening today

• First Lady Jill Biden unveils 2024 White House Christmas decor.
• DEA hearing on proposed rescheduling of marijuana.
• Oxford's word of the year is announced.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Spriha Srivastava, UK bureau chief, in London. Jack Sommers, deputy editor, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• Amazon has faced repeated delays in launching a new AI-powered Alexa.
• Integration with partners like Uber and Ticketmaster has complicated troubleshooting processes.
• Latency and compatibility issues have also caused delays.

Amazon's Alexa seems like the perfect product for the generative AI era.

Getting this powerful technology to actually work well with the digital assistant is a monumental challenge that's been plagued by gnarly technical problems and repeated delays.

Customer-friction concerns, partnership hiccups, compatibility questions, latency problems, and accuracy issues have snarled progress, according to internal Amazon documents and multiple people involved in the project.

The Alexa team is under immense pressure to get something out. A decade ago it launched with Echo speakers and became a household name. But that early success fizzled and the business has so far failed to become profitable, leading to drastic cutbacks and layoffs in recent years.

Some company insiders consider this AI moment to be a seismic opportunity for Alexa, and potentially the last chance to reignite consumer interest in the voice assistant through the power of large language models.

A product of this scale is "unprecedented, and takes time," an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. "It's not as simple as overlaying an LLM onto the Alexa service."

"RED" warning

One of the main challenges facing the new Alexa relates to how the digital assistant will interact with other companies and services, and who is responsible for customers if their requests, orders, and payments don't go smoothly.

In late August, Amazon was working on integrating 8 third-party applications, including Uber and Ticketmaster, into the upcoming AI-powered Alexa to handle various user inquiries.

At that time, the goal was to launch the new Alexa around mid-October, according to one of the internal documents obtained by Business Insider. However, it was still unclear which companies would be responsible for customer support issues, like payment and delivery errors, this document stated.

The lack of clarity could cause Amazon to send "frequent" customer contacts to the partner companies. Then, those partners would sometimes redirect the users back to Amazon, the document explained.

"This level of support would cause significant customer friction, when some of the orders/purchases are time-sensitive (meal orders or rideshare trips) and purchase mistakes can be expensive (e.g. buy Taylor Swift tickets)," the document said, assigning it a "RED" warning.

Release dates pushed back

Snafus like this have caused Amazon to push back the release date, almost on a weekly basis, according to some of the people involved in the project, which has been codenamed "Banyan" or "Remarkable Alexa." BI's sources asked not to be identified because they're not authorized to talk to the press.

For example, without more clearly defined responsibilities with third-party partners, Amazon expected further delays in the launch. "Alignment on customer support plans between Product teams and the 3P partners may push this timeline further out if any delays occur," one of the documents warned.

The company had once planned for a June launch, but after repeated delays, it told employees late last month that the new Alexa would launch "no earlier" than November 20, one of the documents said.

A few of people BI spoke with recently are even talking about the Alexa upgrade rolling out in early 2025, which would miss the key holiday period. Bloomberg earlier reported on a 2025 launch plan.

As of late October, Amazon had not settled on an official brand for the updated voice assistant, and instructed employees to simply call it the "new Alexa" until further notice, one of the documents said.

Alexa's huge potential

To be sure, Alexa has significant long-term potential in the generative AI era — as long as Amazon can iron out problems relatively quickly.

Time is of the essence, partly because the existing Alexa business has lost momentum in recent years. According to a recent report from eMarketer, user growth for major voice assistants, including Alexa, has declined significantly in recent years.

The sudden rise of ChatGPT has showcased what is possible when powerful AI models are integrated smoothly with popular products that consumers and companies find useful.

Some Amazon leaders are bullish about the AI-powered Alexa and a new paid subscription service that could come with it. At least one internal estimate projected a 20% conversion rate for the paid subscription, one of the people said. That would mean that out of every 100 existing Alexa users, roughy 20 would pay for the upgraded offering. Amazon doesn't publicly disclose the number of active Alexa users but has said it has sold more than 500 million Alexa-enabled devices.

An internal description of the new Alexa shows Amazon's grand ambitions: "A personalized digital assistant that can handle a wide range of tasks, including drafting and managing personal communications, managing calendars, making reservations, placing orders, shopping, scouting for deals and events, recommending media, managing smart home devices, and answering questions on virtually any topic," one of the documents said.

Customers will be able to access the new Alexa "through natural language using voice, text, email, shared photos, and more across all their devices like Echo, Fire TV, mobile phones, and web browsers," it added.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy shared a similar vision during last month's earnings call, saying the new Alexa will be good at not just answering questions, but also "taking actions."

In an email to BI, Amazon's spokesperson said the company's vision for Alexa is to build the world's "best personal assistant."

"Generative AI offers a huge opportunity to make Alexa even better for our customers, and we are working hard to enable even more proactive and capable assistance on the over half a billion Alexa-enabled devices already in homes around the world. We are excited about what we're building and look forward to delivering it for our customers," the spokesperson said.

Smaller AI models

Still, the project has grappled with several challenges, beyond customer friction and partnership problems.

Latency has been a particularly tough problem for the AI Alexa service. In some tests, the new Alexa took about 40 seconds to respond to a simple user inquiry, according to three people familiar with the test results. In contrast, a Google Search query takes milliseconds to respond.

To speed up, Amazon considered using a smaller AI model, like Anthropic's Claude Haiku, to power the new Alexa, one of the people said. But that dropped the quality and accuracy of the answers, leaving Amazon in limbo, this person said. In general, smaller language models generate quicker responses than larger models but can be less accurate.

Amazon had initially hoped to use a homegrown AI model, one of the people said. Last year, Alexa head scientist Rohit Prasad left the team to create a new Artificial General Intelligence group at Amazon. The stated goal of the new team was to create Amazon's "most expansive" and "most ambitious" large language models.

However, this AGI team has not produced notable results so far, which led Amazon to consider Anthropic's main Claude offering as the primary AI model for the new Alexa, this person said. Reuters previously reported that Amazon was going to mainly power Alexa with Claude.

Amazon's spokesperson said Alexa uses Amazon Web Services's Bedrock, an AI tool that gives access to multiple language models.

"When it comes to machine learning models, we start with those built by Amazon, but we have used, and will continue to use, a variety of different models — including Titan and future Amazon models, as well as those from partners — to build the best experience for customers," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also added a note of caution by highlighting the difficulties of successfully integrating large language models with consumer applications. These models are great for conversational dialogue and content creation, but they can also be "non-deterministic and can hallucinate," the spokesperson added.

Getting these models "to reliably act on requests (rather than simply respond) means it has to be able to call real-world APIs reliably and at scale to meet customer expectations, not just in select instances," the spokesperson explained.

New risks

In late August, Amazon discovered several new risk factors for the AI Alexa service.

Only 308 of more than 100,000 existing Alexa "skills," or voice-controlled applications, were compatible with the new Alexa, presenting a "high risk for customers to be frustrated," one of the documents explained.

Some older Echo devices would not be able to support the AI-powered Alexa, the document also warned. And there were no plans for expanding the new service to dozens of overseas markets where Alexa is currently available, leaving a large user base out of touch, it also noted. Fortune previously reported some of these risk factors.

Integration headaches

As of late August, Amazon had 8 "confirmed" partner companies to handle certain tasks for the new Alexa, as BI previously reported. The company hopes to onboard roughly 200 partners by the third year of the new Alexa's launch, one of the documents said.

Integrating with some of these companies has already created headaches. One document said that Amazon struggled to develop a consistent troubleshooting process across every partner service. Companies including Uber, Ticketmaster, and OpenTable have deprecated their existing Alexa skills, further disconnecting them from the voice assistant.

Amazon's spokesperson said that, as with any product development process, a lot of ideas are discussed and debated, but "they don't necessarily reflect what the experience will be when we roll it out for our customers."

Amazon has also anticipated customer complaints, at least in the early launch phase. One internal document from late August stated that the new Alexa was projected to receive 176,000 customer contacts in the first three months of its release. At one point, Amazon considered launching a new automated troubleshooting service for issues related to its devices and digital services, including Alexa, according to one of the internal documents. That was later shelved.

Do you work at Amazon? Got a tip?

Contact the reporter, Eugene Kim, via the encrypted-messaging apps Signal or Telegram (+1-650-942-3061) or email ([email protected]). Reach out using a nonwork device. Check out Business Insider's source guide for other tips on sharing information securely.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Good morning! Hallam Bullock here, once again writing to you from London. Black Friday is upon us and Business Insider's Reviews team has rounded up the best deals on the products and brands they swear by.

In today's newsletter, we're looking at how Nvidia expanded nearly 20-fold in just over 20 years.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Nvidia's meteoric rise

A few years ago, Nvidia was largely unknown. It's difficult to believe, considering the company can now boast about back-to-back earnings beats, a market capitalization of more than $3 trillion, and a stock price that has climbed nearly 200% over the past 12 months — Citi analysts also recently eyed a catalyst that could push the stock a further 27% by January.

So, how can a company grow so much, so quickly? The data behind the evolution of Nvidia's workforce tells the story, BI's Emma Cosgrove writes.

Nvidia's workforce has grown nearly 20-fold since 2003. Beyond its historic rise in market value, this growth has been aided by a slew of employee incentives, including a futuristic headquarters that reflects the company's "no barriers and no boundaries" philosophy (it's easy to see why they named the building "Voyager").

This workforce growth continued through 2024, a particularly brutal year for the Tech industry, during which time Meta and Google made significant cuts.

It's one of the best-paying firms in Silicon Valley. In 2019, Microsoft's median employee salary was nearly $20,000 higher than a Nvidia worker. As of January 2024, Nvidia's median salary (excluding the CEO) had surpassed Microsoft and reached more than $220,000. As the above chart illustrates, it's also left other tech giants in the dust.

Nvidia's revenue per employee has recovered after years of investment. The company's revenue-to-headcount ratio showed a downward trend from 2003 until 2014, and then steady upward progress until the AI boom in 2023. During that year, this ratio doubled. This is in part due to early investment in building a programming software layer called CUDA — the main element that keeps AI builders from easily switching to competing hardware.

However, the company isn't as far ahead in other areas. Gender representation in the company's workforce and the semiconductor industry as a whole has remained relatively unchanged in the last decade, Emma writes.

News brief

Top headlines

• China reacts to Donald Trump's tariff announcement, calling the move ineffective and unjustified.
• Canada is Google's latest antitrust legal challenger, and it wants the tech giant to sell two of its adtech products.
• The five biggest swings Netflix took this year, from a massive push into live sports to overhauling its film strategy.
• Baby boomer homeowners got rich from skyrocketing house prices. Now they can't find retirement housing.
• Trump will decide the future of government money for healthcare plans. Letting it expire could save money, but the middle class might pay more.
• FTX scammer Caroline Ellison has already had nearly four months shaved from her scheduled release from prison.
• Turkey angles for Trump to break the deadlock on F-35 purchases, after the US barred the country from acquiring them five years ago.
• Uber and Lyft drivers say Waymo's robotaxis are hurting their earnings in Phoenix and LA.
• Meet the billionaires working with Trump on his second term.

3 things in deals

1. Holiday shopping, meet Black Friday: Our team has scoured the internet to bring you the ultimate roundup of Black Friday deals. From tech gadgets and home essentials to fashion finds and beauty must-haves, this is your go-to guide for scoring major savings across every category.
2. Wardrobe refresh: Our women's style team rounded up the best Black Friday sales from our favorite clothing and shoe brands on the internet. Score major discounts on comfy coats, rarely discounted cashmere, denim, and more.
3. Tech upgrades: Score major Apple Black Friday discounts on the latest iPhones, MacBooks, iPads, AirPods, and more. Whether you're upgrading your tech or getting a head-start on holiday gifts, now's the time to shop Apple at unbeatable prices.

The Insider Today team: Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• A notable portion of Silicon Valley's electorate has steadily shifted toward Donald Trump.
• While the region remains solidly Democrat, the GOP candidate made gains in this election.
• In Santa Clara, San Mateo, and San Francisco counties, Trump's vote share increased by several points.

Silicon Valley, long considered a progressive stronghold, has begun to shift toward Donald Trump, according to new voting data analyzed by Business Insider.

Across the three San Francisco Bay Area counties that constitute the epicenter of America's tech industry, there was a marked bump in support for Donald Trump in the latest presidential election, and a corresponding decrease in support for Kamala Harris and the Democrats, provisional voter data shows.

California can take weeks to tally all its ballots, so the final totals won't be known for some time. But with well over 95% of the votes counted in San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo counties as of this week, a trend has emerged.

Among the voting citizens of Santa Clara county, home of Apple, Google, and Nvidia, 28.1% cast their ballot for Donald Trump this year. That's up from four years ago, and notably higher than in 2016.

Meanwhile, 68.1% voted for Harris. That was down from 72.6% who backed Joe Biden four years ago, and 73.1% who voted for Hilary Clinton in 2016, according to data compiled by the California Secretary of State.

In San Mateo county, where Facebook parent company Meta is headquartered, the vote shifted from 77.9%-20.2% Republican-Democrat to 73.5%-23.2% this cycle.

And San Francisco county's vote for Trump went from 9.3% in 2016 to 15.5% this year.

These numbers show that Trump and Republicans are still a long way off from gaining any real majorities in Silicon Valley. However, even this relatively small shift suggests that the region, and the tech industry, is becoming less firmly Democrat — and comes as some tech leaders grow more pragmatic about politics.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg previously publicly supported Democratic candidates, but didn't this year. Venture capital power players Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz said they were supporting Trump this summer, though Horowitz also provided funding for the Harris campaign.

While Elon Musk is based in Texas these days, many of his companies, including Tesla, are still very active in Silicon Valley. He sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into helping reelect Trump this year, is undoubtedly the president-elect's most high-profile supporter in tech.

Incoming Vice President JD Vance once worked in venture capital and is seen as a protégé of PayPal cofounder and investor Peter Thiel, one of tech's most influential conservative voices.

Some of this comes down to self-interest. Trump, with Musk in support, has promised to cut regulations, which could help Silicon Valley startups grow more quickly.

"The most exciting thing of all will be putting Elon in charge of government efficiency," said Ben Narasin, a VC based in Atherton, in San Mateo county. "He's going to take a chainsaw through calcified butter, and it's going to be awesome to attack the bloat and overreach that we've had in the government."

The trend toward Trump in the Silicon Valley electorate mirrors statewide and national trends. Nationwide, the Democrats fell from 51.3% to 48.3%, while the GOP rose from 46.9% to 49.9%.

In California, Democrat voteshare dropped from 63.5% in 2020 to 58.6%, as of the data available on Tuesday.

Editor's note: This story was originally published on November 12. It was updated on November 26 after more ballots were counted. This new data did not materially change the story's findings.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Happy quasi-Friday! If you're bummed about being single during the holidays, maybe look to your friends for help. That's what dating apps are now doing, as new startups look to friends and family members to be matchmakers.

In today's big story, the world reacts to Donald Trump's latest trade plans, which could be a massive negotiation tactic.

What's on deck:

• Markets: Wall Street's love affair with sports investing is just getting started.
• Tech: A promotion for one of Elon Musk's longtime Tesla lieutenants puts him behind the wheel of the EV giant.
• Business: Unpacking Drake's beef with Spotify.

But first, the ball is in your court.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Tough trade

The man who dubbed himself a master negotiator is upending the global trade market with his latest tactic.

The world is reacting to President-elect Donald Trump's new trade proposals targeting China, Mexico, and Canada. There's a lot to unpack, so let's break it down:

So, Trump finally gave us an update on his tariff plans. Wasn't this expected? He's telegraphed his plans for hammering Chinese imports, but a 25% tax on Canadian and Mexican goods was a shock. It's the first time Trump has singled those countries out, although he promised 10-20% tariffs on imports across the board while campaigning. (Another interesting wrinkle: Trump negotiated the current trade deal between Canada, Mexico, and the US.)

Ok, but what does the US even import from our neighbors? Simply put: Oil (Canada) and autos (Mexico). More broadly, Mexico exported $475 billion worth of goods to the US in 2023, and Canada sent us $419 billion in exports.

What's Wall Street got to say about all this? The US stock market didn't really flinch Tuesday. The same couldn't be said for the rest of the world. Mexico and Canada's stock markets declined, their currencies dropped relative to the US dollar, and the fear spread to European and Asian markets.

Wait, why didn't the US market react if this was a surprise? Some investors believe the latest proposal is a negotiation tactic by Trump. His Truth social post positioned these taxes as a punishment for both countries' handling of the borders they share with the US. "This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!" Trump wrote.

Will that work? It definitely got a reaction. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he had a "good" conversation with Trump. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum's response was mixed, as she floated retaliatory tariffs. But there's an incentive for both to find a solution. The US received 83% of Mexico's exports and 75% of Canada's last year.

So there's a chance none of this even happens? Maybe, but it's a high-stakes gamble. Some executives have made clear they'll have to raise prices if the tariffs are enacted. Best Buy's CEO recently said "the customer ends up bearing some of the cost of the tariffs."

Isn't there something they can do in the meantime? Companies could reroute shipments or stock up on supplies ahead of time, but changing your supply chain on the fly (especially during the holiday season) doesn't come cheap or easy. And then there's the risk that none of this comes through, and they wasted those resources for nothing.

News brief

Top headlines

• US says Israel approved a cease-fire deal aimed at ending nearly 14 months of devastating fighting with Hezbollah.
• Musk picked a fight with 'idiots' at Lockheed over the F-35. Going after the $2 trillion program would be an uphill fight.
• Why bitcoin stopped short of the $100,000 milestone — and when it might get there.
• Agility Robotics CEO tells BI how its humanoid robots are getting paid — and warns against empowering them with AI.

3 things in markets

1. Wall Street is having a ball investing in sports. Leagues have loosened ownership rules in recent years to allow investment firms a seat at the table. At the same time, sports franchise valuations have outpaced the S&P 500. A JPMorgan report outlined the main themes investors are excited about next year.
2. Deutsche Bank has bad news about rate cuts in 2025. The bank's chief economist said the Fed will pause interest rate cuts throughout next year, predicting a drop in unemployment coupled with an increase in growth and inflation. (For what it's worth, Goldman said earlier this month there would be deep cuts in 2025.)
3. Consider this a no-fly zone for investing. Scott Wren, Wells Fargo's senior global market strategist, sees 2025 being a good year for stocks with one catch. Defensive stocks — think utilities, healthcare, and consumer staples — will have a more muted year as the rest of the market takes off.

3 things in tech

1. Leaked documents reveal Amazon's top cloud growth initiatives. AWS is focusing on at least seven areas for growth next year, according to internal documents obtained by BI. Those include healthcare, business applications, and the Middle East region. (They've also got some fun codenames.)
2. Elon Musk's longtime lieutenant takes the reins at Tesla. Omead Afshar, known for his intense attention to detail, was described as the "final boss" before getting to Musk. As Musk focuses on politics, the 38-year-old Afshar was promoted to vice president of North American and European operations to help lead his car company through the EV market volatility.
3. How companies plan to fix AI's apparent plateau. A fierce debate over whether improvements in AI progress is slowing has brewed between Silicon Valley's tech leaders in recent weeks. BI spoke to 12 leaders in the space to see how companies could overcome AI bottlenecks.

3 things in business

1. Drake's taking his rap beef from mixtapes to the magistrates. The Canadian rapper lost his summer rap battle with Kendrick Lamar. Now he's taking aim at Spotify. In a legal filing, an LLC owned by Drake claims the streamer and Universal Music Group made "Not Like Us" — Kendrick's diss track about Drake — a bigger hit than it would've been naturally.
2. Patagonia's big changes are disappointing some staffers. The beloved brand of mountaineers and Wall Street bros alike has long established itself as a mission-driven workplace nirvana. Now, it's cutting jobs and expediting service to strengthen business — and employees say the new rigidity feels antithetical to the company's ethos.
3. How government workers are feeling about possible DOGE-fueled layoffs. Government employees told BI they're prepping for possible cuts by networking and touching up their resumes. Others said there could be some benefits to DOGE's aims, while HR software business Workday spots an opportunity for its product.

In other news

• Five follow-up questions Nvidia's CEO asks his AI to 'torture' it into teaching him new things.
• Many digital health startups are quietly raising down rounds and closing up shop. Here's why.

What's happening today

• Bureau of Economic Analysis releases revised Q3 GDP growth figures.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Hallam Bullock, senior editor, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Hello there! Running out of space to cook your Thanksgiving dinner? Your slow cooker could actually be an under-the-radar star. Cookbook authors and chefs explain how you can make almost any part of your holiday meal in a Crock-Pot.

Today, we're looking at what Elon Musk's jab at the F-35 says about the debate over using manned fighters or drones in warfare.

What's on deck:

• Markets: Donald Trump announced plans to impose a 25% tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico — and a separate levy on China.
• Tech: Court documents show how Google strategists have been gaming out Apple's ad business.
• Business: Auditing experts weigh in on Macy's $132 million mystery.

But first, we're in a dogfight.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Pilot ejection

F-35s are typically acquiring targets. Now they're finding themselves in the crosshairs.

The fighter jet was the butt of Elon Musk's joke on X about the declining relevancy of manned jets with the rise of drone tech, write Business Insider's Matthew Loh and Mia Jankowicz.

The billionaire criticized the "idiots" still building aircraft like the F-35, and said using crewed jets to extend the range of missiles or drop bombs was "inefficient" compared to "a reusable drone."

In the past, Musk's jabs on X might have ended there. Now, his status as the co-lead of President-elect Donald Trump's new Department of Government Efficiency puts the comment in a different light.

With promises of cutting trillions of dollars in government spending, DOGE will need to swing big. And the F-35 program, which is expected to cost more than $2 trillion over its entire lifespan and has a history of maintenance issues, could be a massive target for Musk.

The market took notice, as shares of Lockheed Martin, the F-35's lead manufacturer, dropped 3.75% yesterday. The S&P 500 Aerospace & Defense index finished Monday down more than 1%. (Reports of a potential Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire deal also pulled down the sector.)

Musk didn't specify plans to go after the F-35 or other crewed aircraft via DOGE, but an op-ed he wrote with co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy mentioned the Defense Department's $841 billion budget.

Ending support for crewed jets in favor of drones won't be easy.

Drone usage in combat is on the rise, as is evident in the Ukraine war, and offers benefits around cost. But in situations where air and sea combat are more prevalent, like the all-important Indo-Pacific theater, the tech isn't as good of a fit, write BI's Ryan Pickrell and Mia.

The jet-drone debate is a microcosm of the type of battles DOGE will likely encounter in its quest to slim down a government that spent $6.75 trillion in fiscal year 2024.

A fresh set of eyes can often find issues overlooked by those in the thick of it. And Musk has a history of doing what others thought was impossible. SpaceX's progress in returning its Super Heavy booster to its launch site is a good example.

The public and private sector are two very different animals, though.

Even with a Republican-controlled Congress, the government's checks and balances might make it harder to make the type of wholesale changes Musk is known for with his companies.

News brief

Top headlines

• Jack Smith moves to dismiss Trump's election interference case.
• Progressive news outlet NowThis made deep cuts to its staff for the second time this year.
• Diddy cites Trump in arguing he has the right to say almost anything while awaiting his sex-trafficking trial.
• Three-time Grammy nominee Raye says she's not making money in music: 'We're breaking even.'
• Elon Musk acknowledges something that was obvious about the new Twitter: It's no longer a good place for links.

3 things in markets

1. Trump announced sweeping tariffs on the US's closest neighbors. The president-elect said he'll impose a 25% tariff on all goods from Canada and Mexico. In a Truth Social post on Monday, he accused the two countries of failing to prevent migrants from entering the US. He wrote that both countries will "pay a very big price," and that the tariffs would remain until they "solve this long simmering problem." In a separate post on Truth Social, Trump said he plans to slap an additional 10% levy on Chinese goods. He had previously announced a 60% import tariff on China, which could hit its fast-fashion brands hard.
2. How the Treasury secretary pick thinks about investing. A 2017 presentation from Key Square Capital, Scott Bessent's macro hedge fund, offers some clues to his approach to finding investment ideas. The seven-year-old presentation said there is no "singular framework" for evaluating potential investments and the "guiding research principle is change."
3. Warren Buffett offered advice about estate planning. The legendary investor sent a letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders about his plans to donate $1.2 billion to family foundations. He also shared updates on how his massive wealth will be distributed after he's gone and why parents should have their kids read their wills before they die.

3 things in tech

1. Google kept tabs on Apple's ad business way before it really got started. A 2022 document unearthed in Google's ongoing antitrust case shows how Google strategists imagined Apple's entry into the industry it's dominated for years. Titled "Operation Black Walnut," it assesses Apple's potential and imagines an ad business its competitor might someday build.
2. Zoom goes camera off. The company best known for its videoconferencing software, had dropped video from its name. Zoom is taking an AI-first approach to corporate communications, CEO Eric Yuan wrote in a company blog post published Monday. In a major rebrand, it will now be known as "Zoom Communications Inc," and it's not the only company adapting its marketing strategy to the industry-wide AI boom.
3. Hybrid cars are so back. As EV sales hit a snag this year, automakers turned toward hybrid models, which are more practical and affordable than charge-only EVs. In the coming years, you can expect a greater menu of green vehicles on dealer lots.

3 things in business

1. Inside America's love affair with Aldi. Grocery prices have jumped by double-digits over the past few years, and Americans are feeling the sting. But the grocery chain Aldi has remained a safe space. Through a number of cost-cutting strategies, it's managed to maintain lower prices than its competitors and built a dedicated fan following.
2. The chatbots aren't alright. By corporate America's telling, AI is the answer to everything. Yet for many consumers, dealing with a robot customer-service agent actually makes the whole experience worse. Why are so many companies relying on inefficient AI — and will they ever improve?
3. Macy's missing millions. The department-store giant delayed its earnings report after discovering a single employee deliberately made an accounting error totaling between $132 million and $154 million. One former KPMG manager told BI that even in a situation where someone intentionally introduces errors, "your system of internal control should have caught it."

What's happening today

• Court hearing in the Justice Department's antitrust suit against Google, which it accuses of illegally maintaining a monopoly on search.
• Federal Open Market Committee meeting minutes are published.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Jack Sommers, deputy editor, in London.Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Welcome back! As Black Friday deals start rolling in, you might be looking to update your wardrobe. Before you buy any shoes, check out what trends stylists say are in (and out) this season.

In today's big story, Trump's trade plans could spell trouble for prices, and preparing for it isn't so easy.

What's on deck:

• Markets: Everything you need to know about Scott Bessent, Trump's pick for Treasury secretary.
• Tech: Amazon is coming for Nvidia's chip dominance with its latest Anthropic investment.
• Business: D.C. lobbyists are preparing to set up shop in the Sunshine State.

But first, get it while the gettin's good.

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

A Trump bump on prices

It's beginning to look a lot like tariffs.

With less than two months until the presidential inauguration, the potential impact of one of President-elect Donald Trump's key proposed policies is getting increased attention.

Businesses are starting to telegraph what wide-ranging tariffs — 60% on goods from China and as much as 20% on imports from everywhere else — will mean for their customers. (Hint: They're going to raise prices.)

Business Insider's Emily Stewart dove into Trump's crackdown on imports and how consumers can prepare.

The prevailing theory among many economists is Trump's plan will increase prices and inflation as companies pass the cost of the taxes down to their customers.

We're already starting to see that play out. AutoZone CEO Philip Daniele didn't sugarcoat it on a September earnings call: "We will pass those tariff costs back to the consumer."

Walmart wasn't as direct, but CFO John David Rainey said last week that the retail giant, which imports a third of its products, would "probably" raise prices in some cases.

There's also a chance prices could increase for stuff not even impacted by the new taxes. As was the case with inflation a few years ago, tariffs are a convenient cover for companies to raise their prices and enjoy a boost to their profits.

With so much uncertainty, consumers don't have a ton of options to prepare for tariffs.

Some economists told Emily that buying big-ticket items sooner rather than later could be beneficial. Electronics, furniture, and cars are among the items expected to be impacted.

But it's a tricky balance considering nothing is official. Trump hasn't wavered from his trade plans, but some still question how realistic they are.

Nobel laureate Simon Johnson said the tariffs won't be as extreme as initially advertised. He told BI he views them more as a negotiation tactic with China and American companies with operations there.

And trying to get ahead of supply-chain issues can sometimes put you in an even bigger hole.

As the threat of port strikes loomed earlier this year, Target rerouted shipments to ensure it wouldn't run out of products. The strike ended after only a few days, leaving the retail giant with a surplus of inventory that proved difficult to move.

While he didn't regret doing it, Target CEO Brian Cornell partially blamed the entire episode on helping to drag down its third-quarter earnings result.

News brief

Top headlines

• Does basic income work? We spoke to eight families who got it.
• Meet 21 DC power players who shape federal policy for chip companies like Intel, Nvidia, and TSMC.
• Trump has been tough on EVs. Nobody knows how it'll play out with Elon Musk in the picture.
• More PwC partners are taking early retirement amid a consulting slowdown.
• Exclusive: Forward's leaders are already recruiting for a new startup, just a week after the healthcare company shut down.
• Leaked memo: Amazon says staff in Germany can apply to work from home two days a week amid RTO push.
• The French are selling their châteaus for cheap. Americans are discovering why.

3 things in markets

1. Baby boomers' retirement regrets. Nearly 1,200 older Americans shared with BI their regrets when it came to saving and investing for retirement. From taking Social Security too early to not being prepared for unexpected setbacks, like divorce or a cancer diagnosis, here's what boomers wish they'd done differently.
2. The Treasury pick is in. Scott Bessent is a billionaire investor who spent years working for George Soros before starting his own hedge fund. The 62-year-old has shown support for Trump's proposals around tariffs and deregulation.
3. Dreaming of a bitcoin-backed US. Crypto bulls are eager to see Trump establish a "bitcoin strategic reserve," which enthusiasts believe could help manage the country's debt. Still, some experts told BI they foresee obstacles to making it a reality.

3 things in tech

1. Bluesky's COO talks crazy growth — and growing pains. Rose Wang, the platform's chief operating officer, told BI that the network's 20-person team is in "firefighting mode" as it races to accommodate the sudden influx of new users. Bluesky blew past user growth projections so much that it's racing to get new servers to keep it up and running.
2. TSMC's Phoenix chip factories aren't a silver bullet. The move will boost chip production in the US, but not enough to end its reliance on Taiwan. Sector experts told BI the massive chipmaker will continue to make its most advanced tech in Taiwan.
3. Amazon makes a massive downpayment to dethrone Nvidia. The cloud giant announced it was investing another $4 billion into AI startup Anthropic. It's an all-out assault on Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip market, as Amazon aims to get developers to move away from using Nvidia GPUs.

3 things in business

1. Concert math = big shows or bust. Stadium tours for mega stars like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift sell out within minutes. But thanks to a slowdown in post-pandemic revenge spending, tickets for smaller artists are going unclaimed as fans opt to save their money for once-in-a-lifetime shows. The result? R.I.P. mid-tier concerts.
2. The new K street. Ahead of Trump's return to the White House in January, a dozen leading lobbyists told BI that having a significant presence in Florida is now an essential part of doing business in Washington. The consensus among lobbyists is that they'll also have to ditch their cookie-cutter tactics if they hope to influence Trump this time around.
3. Could these federal workers be caught in DOGE's crosshairs? Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy's government-efficiency commission wants to cut the headcount at several federal agencies. See the 20 federal jobs that make the most money — all of which have average salaries of more than $160,000.

What's happening today

• President Biden pardons the National Thanksgiving Turkeys.
• Federal bankruptcy judge holds hearing on the sale of Alex Jones' Infowars to The Onion.
• Court hearing for the Menendez brothers after the Los Angeles district attorney recommended reduced prison time.

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Jack Sommers, deputy editor, in London. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Happy Friday! If you're doing food shopping for Thanksgiving this weekend, you might notice prices feel better … sort of. The cost of Thanksgiving dinner has fallen for the second year in a row. But it's still 19% more expensive than it was in 2019, according to one survey of grocery store prices.

In today's big story, billionaire Ken Griffin has some advice for President-elect Donald Trump, including a suggestion for his Treasury pick.

What's on deck:

• Markets: A $60 billion hedge fund cut 10% of its staff as its new co-CEOs make their mark.
• Tech: Elon Musk's brain-computer startup is hiring for multiple manufacturing roles.
• Business: Why major automakers are making deep cuts to their workforce.

But first, can I give you a tip?

If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.

The big story

Advice for Trump

One of Wall Street's most powerful people offered advice to the president-elect.

Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the $65 billion hedge fund Citadel, called for some restraint from Donald Trump regarding policies implemented around immigration and inflation, write Business Insider's Bradley Saacks and Michelle Abrego.

While speaking Thursday at the Economic Club of New York, Griffin said he appreciates the importance of those issues to Americans but said aggressive tactics to address them could make things work.

Griffin is one of the biggest donors to the Republican Party, but declined to publicly endorse either presidential candidate this year.

Moderation hasn't been the name of the game for Trump with some of his proposed policies. The president-elect promised mass deportations of immigrants in the US illegally and wide-ranging tariffs of at least 10-20% on all imported goods.

Griffin said the US should remain a place for ambitious immigrants to find work and warned cutting taxes poses a risk for a government holding so much debt.

At a conference just a few blocks away, Pimco CEO Manny Roman also raised the issue of taking a tough stance on immigration amid a tight labor market.

Griffin's advice for Trump didn't stop at his policies. He also made a suggestion for the future president's all-important Treasury secretary pick: Apollo CEO Marc Rowan.

"Please take the job," Griffin said of Rowan.

Griffin also might be looking for some advice.

He said he'd be open to selling a minority stake in his hedge fund to the right partner.

While Citadel still operates as a private partnership, Griffin sold a stake worth more than $1 billion in sister company Citadel Securities in 2022 to VC firms Sequoia and Paradigm.

The relationship has been a massive success, according to Griffin, with the two firms helping Citadel Securities with "real insights" into managing its rapid growth. Almost a quarter of all US equity market volume is handled by Citadel Securities.

Hedge funds selling off stakes of their firm are having a bit of a moment these days. Millennium Management, another multistrategy giant in the hedge fund world, is reportedly in early talks to get an investment from BlackRock.

News brief

Top headlines

• Trump tapped Pam Bondi for attorney general after Matt Gaetz withdrew from consideration.
• DOGE wants to trim a $500 billion list of federal 'zombie' programs that includes veterans' healthcare, Pell grants, and NASA.
• Google's search business is all about distribution. The DOJ wants to take this away, and it's freaking investors out.
• CNBC's new boss reassures staffers jittery over their network getting spun off. He said he wants the company to be 'predator, not prey.'
• Oops! OpenAI just deleted important legal data in a lawsuit from The New York Times.
• This chart shows how crazy-fast the value of Elon Musk's xAI has risen in 16 months.
• Marjorie Taylor Greene was picked to lead a new DOGE House panel to slash government funding.
• National Geographic unveiled its Pictures of the Year. Here are 7 of the most stunning wildlife photos.

3 things in markets

1. What Wall Street's saying about Nvidia's earnings. One analyst said some investors were concerned about a possible slowdown in future growth, but a fund manager said he wishes he could invest more in Nvidia. A lot hinges on the performance of the AI giant's newest chip, Blackwell.
2. Two Sigma's new co-CEOs are already reshaping the $60 billion hedge fund in their vision. The firm cut 10% of its workforce as part of a strategic review. The layoffs come after the firm's feuding billionaire cofounders stepped down in September and Carter Lyons and Scott Hoffman took over as co-CEOs.
3. The self-appointed 'crypto president' keeps stoking the bitcoin rally. The digital currency continued its climb toward $100,000 after reports that Trump might add a crypto chief to his administration. It's not all good news, though, as the $100K milestone could lead to a sell-off and 20% drop, according to crypto billionaire Mike Novogratz.

3 things in tech

1. Neuralink is hiring. The Elon Musk-founded company, which is developing a device Musk has compared to a "FitBit in your skull," posted multiple manufacturing job listings on its website this week. A professor of operations management told BI it's a sign Neuralink is working toward ramping up production of its brain chip.
2. Netflix is the real winner of the Paul-Tyson match-up. The streamer's stock could soar 13% thanks to the "knockout opportunity" in live events the fight showcased, Bank of America analysts said. Despite the lackluster performances and technical issues, the fight was the most-streamed sporting event of all time, a net positive for Netflix's livestreaming ambitions.
3. Trump's tariff plans have some startup founders quaking. Hardware startups that rely on Chinese manufacturers are bracing for Trump's trade impact, which could make it harder for them to reach profit goals. Investors fear many of them may have to throw in the towel.

3 things in business

1. Meet the man making money for Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, and Bari Weiss. Once upon a time, leaving a big network like Fox News spelled the end of a career for commentators. Not so much anymore. BI's Peter Kafka interviewed Chris Balfe, the man who helped TV news stars find audiences online, about the TV-to-internet transition.
2. Auto workers face a wipeout. Major automakers around the world have recently announced layoffs and factory closures, including Ford, GM, Stellantis, and Volkswagen. They're struggling to turn a profit on EVs and facing a potential onslaught of cheaper competition.
3. TGI Failure. It was once a singles bar and then a family-friendly restaurant. Now TGI Fridays is a place that nobody really wants to go. The company closed 36 restaurants at the start of the year and recently filed for bankruptcy. But TGI Fridays' fall from grace is a familiar story for many restaurant chains.

What's happening today

• NATO's Parliamentary Assembly Annual Session begins in Montreal.
• Ridley Scott's "Gladiator II" and the film adaptation of the musical "Wicked" both open in theaters. (You've heard of Barbenheimer. Now get ready for Glicked.)

The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Jack Sommers, deputy editor, in London. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Ella Hopkins, associate editor, in London. Amanda Yen, fellow, in New York. Milan Sehmbi, fellow, in London.