There's new scrutiny this year on a federal program that's supposed to protect juveniles in the criminal justice system. Senate lawmakers want to pass a bill that would ensure young people are not locked up alongside adult offenders ā and they're quietly investigating the use of federal grant money for the program.
Whistleblowers like Jill Semmerling are helping to drive the effort. Semmerling loved her job as a federal agent at the inspector general office's in the Justice Department, where she carried a firearm and a badge to work every day.
"We were there as a watchdog to ensure there was no waste, fraud or abuse," she recalls.
But when Semmerling started digging into allegations that Wisconsin had been cooking the books to get federal grant money, her own troubles began.
"It was pretty awful," she says, "and you know, you didn't know where to turn."
[For more of this story, written by Carrie Johnson, go to http://www.npr.org/2015/01/19/...ds-behind-bars?sc=tw]
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