Work by Grant Recipients of the Initiative in Reporting on Race and Criminal Justice
Work from 2023 Grant Recipients
Lauren Gill and Daniel Moritz-Rabson published the first articles in their series on execution practices.
- Alabama Failed to Carry Out Its Last Two Executions. It’s Trying Again This Week.
- Companies Already Ban the Use of Their Drugs for Lethal Injection. Now They’re Blocking IV Equipment
Emily Zentner and Lisa Pickoff-White published their investigation for the California Newsroom into police prone restraint deaths. The story appeared in the Guardian and a number of California public radio stations
Work from 2022 Grant Recipients
Reporters from the New York Amsterdam News explored how bail reform in New York City is changing criminal justice.
Reporters from The Associated Press examined the rash of state police reform laws that followed the death of George Floyd. Some reforms have been diluted, others have slowed, and some gave police greater protections.
- States struggle with pushback after wave of policing reforms
- Lethal Restraint: An investigation documenting police use of force
Work from 2021 Grant Recipients
A January 2022 project from AL.com won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting. Led by John Archibald, 2018 Pulitzer winner for Commentary, and Ashley Remkus, who was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, this series exposed the criminalization of people for profit in a small Alabama town.
- Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
- Pastor, sister say rogue Alabama police force sought revenge
The first story by Margie Mason and Robin McDowell's series for AP examining the prison labor business. It was done as a podcast with Reveal. The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters were able to get US Steel to acknowledge its interests in a forced labor camp in Alabama; the reporters also located a cemetery that contained the bodies of former prisoners that US Steel had long denied owning. Margie Mason was also interviewed about the story by Yamiche Alcindor on Washington Week Recommends.
- Locked Up: The Prison Labor That Built Business Empires
- Special: The forced prison labor that made companies rich
Mother Jones reporter Samantha Michaels looked at Oklahoma's failure-to-protect laws that penalize and imprison mothers with harsher sentences than those given to the men who brutalized their children.
Futuro Media wrote about Tennessee's treatment of juvenile lifers
Houston journalist Brittney Martin produced "Sugar Land," an eight-part investigative podcast series for The Texas Newsroom — a collaboration between NPR and public radio stations across the state — which laid bare the racist roots of Texas' criminal justice system. The series reveals the trials and circumstances of 95 Black and Brown convict laborers who died in Sugar Land, Texas, under the state's convict lease system and whose bodies were unearthed more than 100 years later.