2023 Harry Frank Guggenheim Prizes for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting @ John Jay College
Awards for the 18th annual John Jay College of Criminal Justice/Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting were given out at the annual symposium on Oct. 4-5, 2023. CICK HERE for recordings of the event. More information on the 2023 symposium can be found HERE.
The prizes, administered by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, recognize the previous year’s best print and online justice reporting by a U.S.-based media outlet. Winners are chosen for the best single story and best series. The 2023 Award winners are below.
ELIGIBILITY: To be eligible for the prizes, work must be published in a newspaper, magazine or online news outlet in the U.S. (broadcast work is eligible if it contains a significant online dimension) between November 1, 2021 and October 31, 2022.
CRITERIA: The awards honor enterprise, analytical and investigative reporting that has had a demonstrated impact on public understanding or public policy (local or national) in any area related to criminal justice. Spot news stories may qualify if they advance the above criteria. Each submission can only be entered in one category, but multiple submissions from the same news outlets are accepted.
2023 WINNERS
SERIES winners:
Jenn Abelson is an investigative reporter for The Washington Post and co-host of the podcast Broken Doors, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in audio journalism for exposing the dangers of no-knock warrants. She was part of the team that was recognized in 2020 as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its investigation into America’s deadly opioid epidemic. She was also part of the team that won a Gerald Loeb Award in 2021 for its pandemic coverage. Before joining the Post, she previously worked as an investigative reporter for the Boston Globe Spotlight Team and co-authored the book, “I Have the Right To: A High School Survivor’s Story of Sexual Assault, Justice, and Hope.”
Nicole Dungca is a reporter in The Washington Post’s investigative unit and the co-host of the podcast Broken Doors, which was recognized in 2023 as a finalist in the audio reporting category of the Pulitzer Prizes. She was also part of a team at The Post that won a Gerald Loeb Award. Previously, she was on The Boston Globe’s Spotlight Team, which produced a series about racism in Boston that was recognized as a finalist in the local reporting category of the Pulitzer Prizes. She is the current president of the Asian American Journalists Association and has also written for The Oregonian, The Times-Picayune and The Providence Journal.
First prize in the series category goes to “Broken Doors,” an insightful podcast created by the Washington Post. The six-part investigative series, hosted by Jenn Abelson and Nicole Dungca, delved into the deployment of no-knock warrants in the American criminal legal system and explored the ramifications of flawed accountability at every level.
The Team: Jenn Abelson; Nicole Dungca; Sabby Robinson; Linah Mohammad; Renita Jablonski; David Fallis; Theo Balcomb; Sarah Childress; Laura Michalski; Courtney Kan; Ted Muldoon; Reena Flores.
SINGLE Story:
Samantha Michaels is an investigative reporter at Mother Jones magazine in California. She primarily writes about policing, prisons, and crime, with an emphasis on exposing racism and sexism in the legal system. She spent more than a year reporting The Mother Trap, which also won a National Magazine Award for best video and was a finalist in the category of best reporting. Beyond Mother Jones, Michaels’ work has been published by The Atlantic and The Best American Magazine Writing 2021, among others. She’s originally from the Chicago area and spent a few years working as a journalist in Myanmar and Indonesia before moving to California
The award for the single-story category goes to “The Mother Trap” and the companion video by Mother Jones magazine, reported and written by Samantha Michaels. The story narrated the journey of Kerry King, a mother sentenced to 30 years in prison in Oklahoma, spotlighting the paradox of a mother serving more time than the actual abuser. In 2015, King’s boyfriend, John Purdy, was charged with physically abusing King’s daughter. Subsequently, King was charged with failing to protect her daughter from Purdy. Purdy pled guilty in return for a 12-year sentence. King went to trial, was convicted and was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Michaels meticulously detailed the implications of failure-to-protect laws, shedding light on how women nationwide are being incarcerated for others’ violence.
The Team: Samantha Michaels; Ryan Little; Mark Helenowski; Ruth Murai; Maddie Oatman; James West; and Sam Van Pykeren.
Runners Up:
Alleen Brown is a New York-based reporter, focused on environmental justice issues. Her work has been published by The Intercept, The Nation, In These Times, YES! Magazine, and various Twin Cities publications.
The Intercept was named runner-up in the series category for “Climate and Punishment.” Reporter Alleen Brown took a deep dive into the climate risks for 6,500 detention facilities. In some already miserable places, the suffering is set to intensify. Her story on Texas, “Boiling Behind Bars,” where dozens of prisons lack air conditioning, detailed how these facilities are getting hotter and hotter. Brown also wrote about the impact of flooding: Many jails and prisons were built as the war on drugs ramped up and have since been seriously neglected. Worsening and more frequent weather disasters will test these deteriorating buildings.
Lauren McGaughy is an Austin-based investigative reporter focused on Texas politics and policy. Her expertise areas include courts, criminal justice, government ethics and transparency and LGBTQ issues. McGaughy and co-author Dave Boucher received a Headliners Foundation Showcase Award for Enterprise and Innovation for their 2020 series on how Texas police used hypnosis to investigate crimes. After publication, the state police did away with their hypnosis program and Texas legislators banned the use of hypnotically-induced testimony in criminal trials. She previously covered Texas politics for The Houston Chronicle and Louisiana politics for The New Orleans Times-Picayune.
Arijit (Ari) D. Sen, is a computational journalist at The Dallas Morning News, where he focuses on doing data journalism for newsroom investigations. He has a particular interest in using the tools of data science to investigate technology and the criminal justice system. Sen has a master’s degree in journalism and a certificate in applied data science from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor’s in journalism from UNC Chapel Hill.
The Dallas Morning News was named runner-up for a single story for “Prison Gerrymandering: How Inmates Are Helping the Texas GOP Maintain Its Power.” Reporters Lauren McGaughy and Ari Sen conducted an analysis that focused on how the nearly 250,000 people who were incarcerated in Texas in 2020 were taken into account when lawmakers redrew the state’s voting maps in 2021. Their analysis showed that inmates were counted in the prison towns where they were locked up, rather than where they lived before. It’s a practice known as “prison gerrymandering.” The analysis found that the approach often inflates the political power of the GOP in Texas districts. It also makes conservative, rural areas of the state look larger and more diverse than they are.
2022 WINNERS
SERIES winners:
Jim Mustian and Jake Bleiberg of The Associated Press share the 2022 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award (Series Category) for revealing at least a dozen cases in which Louisiana State Police troopers or their bosses ignored or covered up evidence of physical violence and impeded efforts to root out misconduct. That included the deadly 2019 arrest of Ronald Greene, which troopers blamed on a car crash before the AP published long-withheld body-camera video showing white troopers stunning, punching and dragging the Black motorist by his ankle shackles.
Their series, “Beatings, Buried Videos and Cover-Ups at the Louisiana State Police,” used videos, text messages and interviews with dozens of current and former troopers to document how such violence was fostered by a culture of impunity, nepotism and in some cases outright racism. Mustian and Bleiberg found that by the state police’s own count 67% of its uses of force between 2017 and 2019 were against Black people.
“AP’s scoops reignited a sprawling federal civil rights investigation that has led to the indictment of one trooper so far, with more expected,” said James Martinez, AP’s Breaking News Investigations Editor, in his letter nominating the series for the award.
“And it’s added to calls for a U.S. Justice Department ‘pattern and practice’ probe into possible racial profiling.”
SINGLE Story:
Meribah Knight of Nashville Public Radio (WPLN 90.3) and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica shared the 2022 John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting Award (Single Story Category) for “Black Children Jailed for a Crime that Doesn’t Exist,” a searing behind-the-scenes look at the juvenile justice system in Tennessee’s Rutherford County.
Knight and Armstrong, working as partners in ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, uncovered what they called an “ugly and unsettling culture” that sent children behind bars on often-spurious charges. In one case that triggered their probe they found a group of girls as young as eight who were arrested and handcuffed on school grounds for failing to stop a fight between other kids. Although juvenile justice records are confidential, the reporters used Freedom of Information requests, data searches, and an examination of hundreds of hours of audio and video records to uncover a pattern of official behavior that “flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children,” the report said.
As a direct result of their reporting, 11 members of Congress called on the Department of Justice to open a civil rights investigation, and Tennessee’s governor called for a review of the county juvenile court judge. “To report this story, we had to get inside what is essentially a black box,” wrote Charles Ornstein, Managing Editor, Local for ProPublica. “Rules about confidentiality envelop the juvenile justice system. This secrecy is supposed to protect kids…but the beneficiaries of that secrecy too often become adults who misuse their authority.”
Runners-Up SERIES
KQED, a National Public Radio (NPR) member station in San Francisco was named Runner-Up in the Series category for a series of seven podcast episodes, entitled “On Our Watch,” investigating police misconduct and excessive use of force across the state. Host lead reporter Sukey Lewis and reporter and producer Sandhya Dirks will receive the award on behalf of their team of producers and editorial staff from KQED and NPR.
Using records of internal investigations unsealed by California’s 2019 Transparency Law and obtained by a coalition of more than 40 California news organizations formed under the leadership of KQED called the California Reporting Project, the team found that police were rarely held accountable for allegations of misconduct. “The show fueled new momentum to dismantle some officer protections and exposed how law enforcement violence, corruption and accountability have been handled from the inside, when the investigations were never expected to be public,” said Nicole Beemsterboer, supervising senior editor for NPR.
Runners-Up SINGLE
Simone Weichselbaum and Sachi McClendon of The Marshall Project, and Uriel Garcia of the Arizona Republic share the Runner-Up award in the Single-Story category for their investigation of the U.S. Marshals Service.
Their story, “U.S. Marshals Act Like Local Police With More Violence and Less Accountability, published jointly by USA TODAY and the Arizona Republic, provided a rare glimpse of a federal agency that has received little public scrutiny. “Thanks to the attention on the shootings involving marshals and officers assigned to work with them, the looser rules marshals operate under are changing,” wrote Susan Chira, Editor-in-Chief of The Marshall Project, in her nominating letter, citing a June 7 announcement by the Justice Department that it would require federal officers to wear body cameras when executing search warrants.
Jurors for the 2022 awards were:
Alexa Capeloto, Associate Professor, John Jay College; Joe Domanick, Associate Director, Center on Media, Crime and Justice; Ted Gest, President, Criminal Justice Journalists; Ann Charlotte Givens of The Trace; Katti Gray, contributing editor, The Crime Report; Mark Obbie, a freelance journalist focusing on criminal justice narratives and the former executive editor of The American Lawyer; Eric Umansky of ProPublica, leader of the reporting team that won the 2021 John Jay Journalism Prize in the Series category; and Anna Wolfe of Mississippi Today, co-winner of the 2021 John Jay Journalism Prize in the Single Story category. Wren Longno served as Administrator of this year’s awards.
JUSTICE MEDIA TRAILBLAZER 2022
The Justice Media Trailblazer honoree in 2022 was David Inocencio, founder and director of The Beat Within, San Francisco-based prison writers workshop.
DAVID INOCENCIO
David Inocencio is founder and director of The Beat Within, which since 1996 has been conducting weekly writers workshops and publishing the work of incarcerated or formerly incarcerated individuals. The program, first developed in San Francisco’s Juvenile Justice Center (the mother-ship), now has branches in 25 juvenile halls in California, has been replicated in Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, St. Louis, New Mexico, Louisiana, Montana, Texas, Hawaii, Oregon, Florida and Washington DC. David, a San Francisco native, initially worked in the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office Juvenile Division., where he helped launch the Detention Diversion Advocacy Project, David received the 1999 Society of Professional Journalism Award for Distinguished Service and The Pass Award from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in 2004. In 2011 David was honored by the Society of Professional Journalism with a newly created award for an individual in the community that was “Giving Voice To The Voiceless.” Most recently in 2017, David was one of 30 people honored in the United States by Equal Voice News with the 2016 Cesar Chavez Day Hero Award.
The Trailblazer awards have been presented annually since 2013. For a list of previous winners, please see here. Justice Trailblazer Awards
ABOUT JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE
An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York is a Hispanic Serving Institution and Minority Serving Institution offering a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to 15,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. John Jay is home to faculty and research centers at the forefront of advancing criminal and social justice reform. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College engages the theme of justice and explores fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, visit www.jjay.cuny.edu and follow us on Twitter @JohnJayCollege.
THE HARRY FRANK GUGGENHEIM FOUNDATION
The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is a global leader in creating and disseminating knowledge on the nature, consequences, and reduction of violence in its many forms, including war, crime, and human aggression. For more information, visit HFG.org.
PAST PRIZEWINNERS
2022 Winners: Associated Press and Nashville Public Radio/ProPublica
2021 Winners: Mississippi Today and ProPublica/The Marshall Project
2020 Winners: CNN and Anchorage Daily News
2019 Winners: Type Investigations and Pro Publica
2018 Winners: Miami Herald and Chicago Reader
View photos of the 2018 Trailblazer and Prize dinner here
2017 Winners ProPublica and Mother Jones
2016 Winners The Marshall Project and the Belleville News-Democrat
2015 Winners The New Yorker and the Post and Courier (Charleston)
2014 Winners The (Sarasota) Herald Tribune and the South Florida Sun Sentinel
2013 Winners The Times-Picayune and Mother Jones
2012 Winners The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and Mother Jones
2011 Winners New York Magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer
2010 Winners The Belleville News Democrat and the Austin Chronicle
2009 Winners The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Times Herald-Record
2008 Winners The Denver Post and The Wall Street Journal
2007 Winners The San Jose Mercury and The Sacramento Bee
2006 Winners The Rocky Mountain News and the Boston Phoenix
Justice Media Trailblazer
The 2020 prize dinner honored Dallas Morning News reporter Alfredo Corchado as the “Justice Media Trailblazer,” in recognition of his courageous career-long reporting on Mexican drug cartels operating in the U.S., and more recently his trailblazing coverage of how the immigration crisis has impacted people living in the border region of southwestern U.S.
Since 2013, The Crime Report in collaboration with the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College has honored individuals from the media and related fields who have expanded public awareness about the challenges and complexities of criminal justice.
The 2019 Trailblazers were Sarah Koenig and Brittany Packnett.
The 2018 Trailblazer was Bill Moyers.
Past winners have included David Simon, creator of “The Wire” (2013); Piper Kerman, author of Orange is the New Black (2014); Maria Hinojosa, PBS host and founder of Futuro Media (2015); and Jelani Cobb (2016), New Yorker writer and director of the Institute for African American Studies at the University of Connecticut; Van Jones. of CNN (2017).