Winners of the annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Journalism were recognized last week. The prizes, administered by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College, are given for the previous year’s best print and online justice reporting by a U.S.-based media outlet. Winners are chosen for the best series and best single story. The 2022 award for the best series went to Jim Mustian and Jake Bleiberg of the Associated Press for their series, “Beatings, Buried Videos and Cover-Ups at the Louisiana State Police,” which reported on a pattern of violence against mostly Black motorists.
The award for best single story was given to Meribah Knight of Nashville Public Radio and Ken Armstrong of ProPublica for “Black Children Jailed for a Crime that Doesn’t Exist,” an examination of a wayward juvenile justice system in Tennessee’s Rutherford County. The runner-up award for a series went to public radio station KQED in San Francisco for “On Our Watch,” a podcast series investigating police misconduct and excessive use of force in California. Simone Weichselbaum and Sachi McClendon of The Marshall Project, and Uriel Garcia of the Arizona Republic were the runners up in the single-story category for their story “U.S. Marshals Act Like Local Police With More Violence and Less Accountability.”