Chicago’s legal and consulting bill for the Department of Justice investigation of city police practices already has hit $760,000, according to city records.

Two-thirds of the money, or $494,000, is owed to lawyers at the Chicago office of Taft, Stettinius & Hollister who are doing the grunt work of producing documents and interviewing witnesses for the investigation. Another quarter of the funds, $186,000, will go to Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr, a top-flight, top-billing Washington D.C. firm that Chicago hired to direct the response to the feds’ examination of the Chicago Police Department.

The risky underpinnings of Chicago’s efforts to solve its $20 billion pension mess take center stage this week.

The Illinois Supreme Court on Thursday will release its opinion deciding the fate of the city’s overhaul of its laborers’ and municipal employees’ pension funds.

Word came of the impending ruling Monday, shortly after the city said it had made a $220 million draw from its $900 million short-term borrowing program to meet an obligation to its police and firefighter funds.

Layoffs of nearly 300 people at the Nabisco bakery on Chicago’s Southwest Side take effect today. The smell of Oreos wafting through the air in Marquette Park was once something neighbors could simply enjoy. Now, those Oreos – and the jobs that go along with them – have become a call to action.

Nabisco looms large over Kedzie Avenue, south of 73rd Street. For Tony Briseño, who was born and raised in Chicago, the bakery represented opportunity.

“We want our jobs. We want them to stay here. And we want to be able to provide for our families,” Briseño said.

Researchers, policymakers, and the public rely on a variety of statistics to measure how society punishes crime. Among the most common is the imprisonment rate—the number of people in prison per 100,000 residents. This metric allows for comparisons of prison use over time and across jurisdictions and is widely seen as a proxy for punishment. States with high imprisonment rates, for example, are considered more punitive than those with low rates.

A more nuanced assessment of punishment than the ratio of inmates to residents is that of inmates to crime— what The Pew Charitable Trusts calls the “punishment rate.” This new metric gauges the size of the prison population relative to the frequency and severity of crime reported in each jurisdiction, putting the imprisonment rate in a broader context.

Using the punishment rate to examine the U.S. criminal justice system, Pew found that all states became more punitive from 1983 to 2013, even though they varied widely in the amount of punishment they imposed. The analysis also shows that the nation as a whole has become more punitive than the imprisonment rate alone indicates. (See Figure 1.)

The Chicago Teachers Union voted Wednesday evening to approve a one-day “showdown” strike on April 1 — which will include a massive downtown rally — to bring attention to ongoing contract negotiations and the state’s education funding crisis.

“I think it’ll be a clear message. Based on the current organizing, we’ll shut this city down,” Tammie Vinson, a special education teacher at Oscar DePriest Elementary School said after the vote at the International Operating Engineers Hall.

But the vote — 486 in favor, 124 opposed — was hardly unanimous, and some teachers expressed doubts about the amorphous action after seeing the motive change over the past few weeks.

After gaining residents each year since 2007, Cook County lost population during the 12 months ended last June. And Illinois is forfeiting more people than any other state, according to Census Bureau estimates.

Previously, metro Chicago countered population losses elsewhere in the state. That is no longer the case amid the state’s economic and political challenges.

Census Bureau figures released today show the five collar counties gaining 5,180 residents, not enough to offset the 10,488 decline in Cook County during the period. The population of DuPage and Lake counties decreased slightly. That left Cook County with 5.2 million residents and the six-county region with 8.4 million.

Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner says private donors could help pay for repairs to the state’s fairgrounds.

A bipartisan measure sponsored by Republican state Rep. Tim Butler would allow private donors to fund repair projects at the Springfield and DuQuoin fairgrounds. Roofing, electrical and other upgrades at the two locations could cost more than $180 million. Meanwhile the state is amid a budget impasse.