John Jay College Of Criminal Justice | The City University of New York

 

By Stephen Handelman

Not long ago, a Chicago inner-city elementary school teacher noticed that one of her students had been missing for a couple of days in her daily attendance count. She asked her class if anyone knew where he was. The answer came back from a small voice at the back of the room: “he’s dead.”

The missing child, in fact, was one of 34 Chicago school kids who had fallen victim to gun violence — either accidental or targeted— during the 2006–2007 school year. Similar stories could have been found in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Los Angeles or any of a dozen U.S. cities where guns and youth crime have made a combustible mix.

Most ordinary Americans, however, are unaware that this is going on in their backyards. The reason is not hard to find: the media have not focused on the problem. At a time when national homicide figures are steadily declining, the pattern of murder of young black and brown Americans simply hasn’t been a “story.”

What does it take to change thisstate of affairs?
Bob Herbert, the New York Times columnist who told the story of the Chicago schoolteacher at a recent luncheon for program officers and journalists sponsored by John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice (CMCJ), believes it requires a profound transformation of the media’s approach to what is “news” in traditional criminal justice reporting.

The media, he said, need to get beyond stereotypical views of crime that relegate every-day violence against poor people or victims of color to the back pages. Reporters need to report on the multi-dimensional roots of crime and in justice in U.S. society. “This,”he argued, “is one of those times when the press should be sounding the alarm.”

The Center on Media, Crime and Justice was established to help the press do exactly that. Since 2007, led by working journalists, it has been connecting reporters with the tools, skills and background knowledge crucial to generating the kind of public debate that drives change in a democracy.

With funding support from sponsors that include the Open Society Institute, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts and the New York TimesCompany Foundation, the Center has brought together hundreds of working journalists from around the country with criminal justice professionals, students, scholars (including from John Jay) and policy makers for conferences, fellowship programs and workshops.

It organizes the annual John Jay Prize for Excellence in Criminal Justice Journalism,which recognizes the best journalists in the country whose stories advance a deeper understanding of key criminal justice issues and lead to change  — a prize now regarded as the “Pulitzer” of crime reporting.

It is developing new curricula, workshops and course materials aimed at helping both journalists and criminal justice students understand the crucial intersection between communications, practice and research.

And in February, it launched the country’s first comprehensive website on criminal justice, incollaboration with one of its partners, Criminal Justice Journalists. The Crime Report(http://www.thecrimereport.org/ ) features daily news, reports of new research and aunique Criminal Justice Resource Directory for journalists and criminal justice professionals.

Journalists across the country already know John Jay as a premier source of information and knowledge on criminal justice. Now, thanks to the Center, John Jay has become one of the nation’s key sounding boards for the challenges facing criminal justice journalism.

But the question you might ask is: why bother?
The media industry is going through a crisis— perhaps the worst in living memory. Newspaper and broadcast jobs are dwindling away. Even major newspapers themselves are on the chopping block.

The turmoil in the industry predates the current economic crisis, but it certainly hasn’t been helped by it. The most recent annual American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) job survey, published in April, 2008, found that newsrooms around the country lost an estimated 2,400 journalists in 2007 alone. That may not sound like much,compared to job losses, say, in automanufacturing. But that represents a 4.4percent decline — the largest decrease in 30years. And things have gotten even worse this year. So why spend time and resources improving a “failing” industry?

You could ask Melissa Grima. Melissa, 33, works for the Coos CountyDemocrat, a small weekly in northern NewHampshire. Far from her counter parts in the New York Times and the Washington Post, Melissa covers the daily stories that are important to her neighbors, from school board meetings to fires. But America’s small towns aren’t immune from the criminal justice problems of the big city, and in her regular rounds with local police, Melissa gradually became aware of a dramatic rise inprescription drug abuse in her area.

She decided to investigate further.“One of the big questions is…why now?” she wondered. “What has made the factors right for this rise in prescription drug abuse?” Her editor, Eileen Alexander, gave Melissa carte blanche to investigate the story. But what this enterprising journalist needed first  was the kind of background knowledge and national perspective that could help informher reporting — resources that weren’t easily available or affordable nearby.

This year, Melissa was selected by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice as one of 15 Journalism Fellows to attend the fourth annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America at John Jay on February 2 and February 3. The symposium is the CMCJ’s signature event,  now a landmark on the calendar of criminal justice conferences around the country — and the only national gathering that brings together journalists with criminal justice professionals and scholars for candid discussions on criminal justice topics.

Along with the other 2009 Fellows, Melissa participated in two days of  intense seminars and workshops on subjects ranging from the impact of the economic crisis on crime issues to the future of forensics. The conference theme — “A New Beginning: Exploring the Criminal Justice Challenges Over the Next Four Years” — fit well with her need for practical research. As a result, she has returned home with a notebook full of ideas and resources — and contacts — that will help her complete her reporting. At the final closing session for Fellows, her colleagues peppered her with so many suggestions and leads for more reporting that she couldn’t resist a smile. “There are ideas here I never thought of before,”she said.

Melissa and her colleagues were well aware that their industry is in danger. At least one ofthe Fellows lost his job in the interval between his acceptance of the Fellowship and his arrival at John Jay. But try to tell them —or their readers and viewers —- that what they do doesn’t count.

As it happens, some of the most successful and thriving news outlets today are small weeklies like the Coos County Democrat, along with community and independent newspapers (and ethnic press) in urban neighborhoods and rural territories, whose readers are often neglected by their big-citycounterparts. Add to that the growing number of online news outlets and bloggers, and the picture of American journalism looks a little more encouraging than the headlines portray.

What these new media outlets and smaller publications often lack, however, is the access to information and knowledge, along with the mentoring experience and background, enjoyed by their counterparts in larger newspapers. Of course, even those larger outlets are now suffering, as buyouts take away the veterans who could steer younger reporters through the court system or local police; and the strain on resources reduces training opportunities.

Last June, the CMCJ brought 24 Fellows fromU.S. ethnic and community media together for two days of intense briefings and field reporting with experts and policymakers on the “criminalization of immigration.” Some of the stories that emerged from the conference have shed new light on dark corners: a groundbreaking examination of immigration marriage fraud by City Limits weeklymagazine; an exposé of backroom immigration lawyers who prey on undocumented immigrants by Nowy Dziennik,a Polish community weekly in New York; and a chilling look by The Indian Express at how Sikh youth, many of them first-generation immigrants, are victimized in New York schools. The CMCJ, in partnership with the New York Community Media Alliance (with over 200 members in the New York region) is sponsoring a new Community and Justice Reporting Award to encourage journalists to do more of this kind of work.

The 2009 John Jay journalism awards, announced at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Conference, were further proof of the potential of criminal justice journalism to change lives. This year’s two winners were Eric Nalder and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer team for a multi-part series that exposed racial bias by Seattle police in obstruction arrests and the handling of complaints against police. And, Christine Young, a reporter for the Times Herald-Recordof Middletown, New York, for her investigation into what she considered the wrongful 1989conviction of Lebrew Jones, who spent 20 years in prison on charges of murdering a Manhattan prostitute. As a result of Christine’s article, the Manhattan District Attorney opened a new investigation into the case. Losing the opportunity to do such stories would be a tragedy for our communities and the nation as a whole. In this time of turmoil, the CMCJ and John Jay are now at the forefront of helping journalists find the resources and the tools they need to fulfill journalism’s highest mission — in Bob Herbert’s words, of “sounding the alarm.”

Stephen Handelman is director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay. He has been a prize-winning journalist, author and journalism educator over the past 25 years.