The Raccoon Press

05/04/2026

Saw this on Tik Tok and had to share! 😎🦝

05/03/2026

Matthew Vogel had one day left. One day.

CoreCivic falsified his cellmate's risk score to save money on staffing. That cellmate had already killed a previous cellmate. Matthew was beaten to death with a drainage cover the night before his release.

CoreCivic settled. Admitted no wrongdoing. They never do.

Three hundred people have died in CoreCivic's Tennessee facilities since 2016. The company has not admitted wrongdoing in a single case. The DOJ investigation that was supposed to change that has been gutted by an administration that took $500,000 from CoreCivic before taking office.
Part Three of In the Shadow of Dead Towers is live. Read it. Share it. One day left.

Link 👇

A True Story About What Tennessee Calls Justice

05/02/2026

CoreCivic is guaranteed $134,937 a day by Tennessee taxpayers whether the prison is full or not.
They made $2.2 billion last year. Their ICE detention revenue jumped 55 percent in one year. Detainees at their California facility are wearing socks on their arms for warmth and suing over sewage in the showers.

They have been fined $45 million in Tennessee for violating their contract. The state's response was to request a $13 million raise for the company.

This is not mismanagement. This is the business model.

Part Two of In the Shadow of Dead Towers is live. Read it. Share it. The machine only keeps running if nobody looks at it. Link 👇

A True Story About What Tennessee Calls Justice

05/01/2026

Kylan Leeper fired a flare gun. Nobody got hurt. Tennessee sent him to a CoreCivic prison where he was stabbed, denied medical care, and found dead in his cell at 25 — less than two weeks after his birthday.

His dad had to send money on Cash App so Kylan could buy soap to treat his own stab wound.
CoreCivic made $580 million last quarter.

Part One of "In the Shadow of Dead Towers" is live. Read it. Share it. These families need people to know.

Link 👇

A True Story About What Tennessee Calls Justice

04/30/2026

The Internet is undefeated.

04/26/2026

At 11:43 p.m. on a Saturday I found myself watching a woman on TikTok with a silver mesh bag over her head to keep the government from stealing her thoughts and dreams. I did not scroll past her. I watched the whole video. Then I went to TikTok Shop.

This is not a confession of mental illness. This is a completely rational response to an environment that has been deliberately engineered to make you doubt your own perception of reality. Huxley called it soma. Bannon called it flooding the zone. I call it a Saturday night.

I wrote about it. Link 👇
https://open.substack.com/pub/justinveals/p/they-tried-to-sell-me-a-faraday-cage?r=74caqb&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

On losing the ability to tell where legitimate concern ends and conspiracy begins, and why that’s not our fault.

04/24/2026

Some of the out of touch comments I have received over the last few days. I can say that they do not represent the majority of the comments on my posts.

04/24/2026

04/24/2026

Putnam County Commissioner Vinnie Faccinto recently posted about a homeless woman being arrested in Cookeville. Several paragraphs about dignity, compassion, and responsible leadership.

He set it to the Cops theme song.

That one detail tells you more than anything he wrote. I dug into the rest of his record. The commission meeting, the grabbed constituent, the dropped charges, the constitutional misinformation and it's a pattern worth knowing about.

Full piece at the link. 👇

Putnam County Commissioner Vinnie Faccinto wants you to think he’s a thoughtful leader. His own posts tell a different story.

04/23/2026

The cognitive dissonance in this one comment could power a small city.

Don't judge her. Arrest her. You can't force help on her. Hide her from view. All in one paragraph.

But let me address this directly: many of us who work with Cookeville's unsheltered community know Shawna. We know her story. We know her mental health barriers firsthand. When advocates and outreach workers talk about her situation, it's not judgment — it's knowledge earned by actually showing up.

That's the difference between a hot take in a comment section and reporting that takes the time to get it right.

For the full piece on Shawna Martin's arrest Link 👇
https://justinveals.substack.com/p/shawna-martin-didnt-block-a-sidewalk?r=74caqb