My colleagues @businessinsider.com and I spent months mapping 1,240 data centers (!!) nationwide and investigating data centers' impact on water, power, pollution, and local economies. The series is rolling out this week.

The most frequent repeat defendants in BI’s sample were for-profit companies. These contractors almost never lost.

The low risk of liability, one law review article argued, "leads to dangerous, ineffective healthcare that is shielded from constitutional challenge."

Hundreds of prisoners in BI's sample complained of inadequately treated illnesses, injuries, and pain. Dozens more said their mental-health crises were met with violence.

Together, the claims describe a US prison medical culture defined by a gross disregard for human life.

"We are to accord prison officials 'wide-ranging deference,'" Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a 5th Circuit judge wrote in a majority opinion, quoting case precedent.

"The Supreme Court has told judges not to micro-manage the force necessary to quell such volatile situations."

In BI’s sample, 1,361 cases were argued under the deliberate-indifference standard. Only 10 prevailed in court; another 164 cases settled without the prison admitting liability.

All 10 of the successful plaintiffs were among the minority in our sample who had a lawyer.

The PLRA requires prisoners to exhaust their prison’s internal grievance system before filing suit. Legal scholars have described prison grievance procedures as something out of Kafka.

We found dozens of cases alleging serious harm thrown out over small administrative lapses.

Our team read tens of thousands of pages of court documents and found that federal judges have sanctioned egregious prisoner maltreatment.

Prisoners lost most cases that claimed even extreme suffering.