Tuesday, April 19, 2016

Bulletin: More Kudos to the Marshall Project for winning a Pulitzer Prize - from The Charles Smith Blog..."Our congratulations to The Marshall Project - a source of many stories of interest to the readers of this Blog - for winning the Pulizer. (What an incredible acievement. HL) As a release from the Project tells us: "A Pulitzer prize is the highest honor in journalism. And today The Marshall Project won its first Pulitzer, for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” by our staff writer Ken Armstrong and ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller. Their story won in the Explanatory Reporting category. And that’s not all. Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project was also named a Pulitzer finalist, in the Investigative Reporting category, for his series with New York Times writers Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz on the culture of violence in New York prisons."

 PUBLISHER'S NOTE:  Our congratulations to The Marshall Project - a source of many stories of interest to the readers of this Blog -  for winning the Pulizer.  (What an incredible achievement. HL)  As a release from the Project tells us:  "A Pulitzer prize is the highest honor in journalism. And today The Marshall Project won its first Pulitzer, for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” by our staff writer Ken Armstrong and ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller. Their story won in the Explanatory Reporting category. And that’s not all. Tom Robbins of The Marshall Project was also named a Pulitzer finalist, in the Investigative Reporting category, for his series with New York Times writers Michael Winerip and Michael Schwirtz on the culture of violence in New York prisons.........."“An Unbelievable Story of Rape” and Robbins’ articles on prison brutality remind us of the importance of deep, patient reporting and great storytelling. These articles underscore the critical role the media can play in sparking public discourse about our system of crime and punishment. These stories have had real impact. “Unbelievable” has become part of the curriculum at the police training academy in Washington state, where the story unfolded, with police instructors using it to teach young recruits how to treat rape victims in ways that are both sensitive and smart. Hospital trauma units and universities have told us how useful they found the article for the same reasons. From the beginning, this piece generated enormous reader response. It also formed the basis of an hour-long episode on NPR’s “This American Life,” which aired in February. Our series on upstate prisons had impact, too. The three prison guards whose brutality we documented decided to accept a plea bargain immediately after the piece was published. The state of New York moved to change the way it tracks inmate complaints, to enable officials to identify problem officers more easily. Perhaps most important, Attica prison promised to install 500 security cameras to make it harder for guards to abuse inmates in future. You can read more about these powerful stories here."https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#all/1542adbb000d8c98 "
See the kudos we recently  (April 6, 2016) offered to The Marshall Project for it's making available it's fabulous well-organized cache of  criminal justice materials at the link below: "PUBLISHER'S NOTE: It's time to salute the Marshall Project's  superb weekly posting on "Closing Argument: The Week in Justice," edited by Andrew Cohen,  "featuring highlights from the past week in criminal justice." (My only complaint is that there is so much fine reading, reporting and analysis that there is little time left during the weekend for anything else);  Indeed, I  find that much of the content is relevant to the subject matter of this Blog. Each weekly posting contains  "The Story of the Week," "The Best of the Marshall Project," and "The Best of the Rest."  The story of the week in today's weekly posting (Saturday April 8) relates to the launch  what promises to be an invaluable   new source of  criminal justice information called 'The Record." As described by editor Cohen: "You probably know by now that we launched The Record this week.  It's an online compilation of some of the best online written (and audio and video) work about criminal justice we have found since we started The Marshall Project in 2014. There are many reasons why we did this; my favorite is that by making it easier for journalists, lawyers, academics, and others to find criminal justice stories we improve the chances that those engaged in the countless debates to come will be armed with more historical context and perspective, not to mention good, old-fashioned facts. That point was emphatically made on Thursday— the very day we launched, right on cue — by Bill Clinton, whose sharp retort to "Black Lives Matter" protesters begged for a look back at the conditions and consequences of the 1994 Crime Bill (a category included in The Record). The story of that law, like every other contentious criminal justice policy, is complicated, more complicated than either the protestors or the former president have made it out to be. If the stories contained in The Record help illustrate the contours of those complications, the nuances that get lost in the heat of the moment, the background that helps explain why some themes suddenly rush to the foreground, our work will have succeeded." As today's  post indicates, The Record is "an on-line online library TMP staff has curated over the past two years of some of the best criminal justice reporting on the internet. Here is a 14,000-entry collection of reporting about topics, including “sentencing reform” and “death penalty”; events like the “Charleston Church shooting,” and people, including “Kalief Browder” and our namesake, “Thurgood Marshall."  I am really impressed by the ease with which "The Record" can be accessed. Just tap in the topic you are interested in, sit back, and enjoy the trip!
 http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2016/04/the-marshall-project-kudos-to-marshall.ht