In February 2014, Bill Keller shocked the media world when he left the New York Times after 30 years to start a national conversation about the U.S. criminal justice system.
As editor-in-chief of the nonprofit online news organization The Marshall Project, Keller – a former reporter for The Oregonian – aims to use the power of the Fourth Estate “to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.”
“This felt like an area where there might actually be a chance to make a difference. We’re not an advocacy group, so we’re not prescribing specific solutions. Our job as journalists is to hold the system accountable for doing its job,” he said.
Since its launch in November 2014, The Marshall Project has published more than 400 stories in partnership with around 60 news organizations.
It has brought readers inside New York’s Rikers Island prison, confronted President Barack Obama about his record on pardons and commutations, and shed light on how “implicit bias” affects the amount of time public defenders spend with their black clients.
In April, The Marshall Project won its first Pulitzer Prize for “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” a harrowing account of the hunt for a serial rapist. It was produced in partnership with ProPublica, another nonprofit, independent newsroom based in New York.
“I thought it would take a couple of years before we would be as well-known as we are. You don’t do this work for the prizes, but it’s a nice sign that we’ve got the credibility with our peers and that we’re off to a good start,” Keller said.
Keller doesn’t measure the impact of The Marshall Project on specific laws or reforms that are passed, but instead believes that “sometimes making a difference is more subtle than changing a law, or getting somebody punished.”
A perfect example of this, Keller said, is “An Unbelievable Story of Rape.” It recounts the story of a woman who reported being raped, only to recant after police questioned her about inconsistencies in her report. She was charged and publicly shamed for lying to police. It wasn’t until years later that authorities learned she had been the victim of a serial rapist and was telling the truth.
“We’ve heard since then that some police training academies are using that article to teach police on how to be sensitive in handling rape victims,” Keller said.
“And the same thing is true of a couple of trauma departments of big hospitals. They’re training people in their emergency room how to be sensitive to rape victims when they show up at the emergency ward. That’s really rewarding when you get that kind of response.”
Keller, who previously won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the fall of the Soviet Union in 1988, has had plenty of experience helping a news organization develop credibility. Named executive editor of The New York Times in 2003, he was tasked with repairing the paper’s tarnished reputation in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Blair, a young reporter at the Times, resigned in 2003 following allegations of ongoing plagiarism. The Times investigated Blair’s work and released its findings in a “Correcting the Record” piece. However, his actions had gone unchecked for years.
The Times was awarded 18 Pulitzers during Keller’s eight-year tenure as executive editor. He stepped down from the position in 2011 to return to writing.
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It was January 2014 when Keller first made his interest in criminal justice reform known. His column “America on Probation” criticized the country’s “overstuffed” prisons as a “shameful waste of lives and money.”
Shortly after the column was published, Keller was approached by former hedge fund manager and journalist Neil Barsky about heading up The Marshall Project. The opportunity to reprise the role of editor was a big temptation, Keller said.
“I found I sort of missed working with reporters and sitting around a table with a bunch of smart people trying to figure out how you’re going to cover an important story. So, in some ways, it was going back to something that I really loved,” he said.
A month later, Keller announced he was leaving the Times to take over The Marshall Project.
“It was mostly exciting. I mean, I guess a little scary because you don’t really know until the donations start to flow whether you can sustain it, and still, we have to paddle hard to keep our heads above water,” he said.
But Keller harbored no such concerns when it came to sourcing stories.
“Even if nothing much happens at the federal level, a lot of the states are experimenting with reforms,” he said. “So there was clearly going to be a lot to write about, and a chance that by writing about it we might actually have some impact.”
In October, Keller met with President Barack Obama to ask him about his record on presidential pardons, forgiveness for people who have already served time and have been released, and commutations, which shorten the sentences of people who are currently serving time.
As of May 5, Obama has issued a total of 306 clemencies, according to ABC News.
“I think there’s some expectation that there’ll be more commutations before his term is up,” Keller said.
“He’s done a lot less in the area of pardons. He’s done on the whole a better job than most of his predecessors on commutations, not so much on pardons. But he’s not done yet. And it’s one area where the Constitution gives the executive branch almost complete authority to decide on clemency,” Keller said.
Keller has also been following the impact the presidential campaign season has had on candidates’ views on criminal justice reform.
With the national spotlight on them, some candidates have not wanted to be viewed as soft on crime, Keller said.
“The single most obvious example of that is Ted Cruz, who a year or so ago was a supporter of sentencing reform, and as candidate Cruz turned against it and warned that anybody who supported shorter sentences would be held to account by the voters,” he said.
“I don’t think it’s stopped reform in its tracks. There’s still some sign of life. It’s a very faint pulse, but there’s still a bit of life in the sentencing reform bill, although it’s watered down considerably the one at the federal level.”
Keller also voiced his disappointment that the criminal justice system hasn’t been a more prominent issue on the campaign trail this election season.
“I wish candidates were talking about it more,” he said. “They are talking about it some. I mean, Hillary Clinton has begun talking a fair amount about mass incarceration, and the school-to-prison pipeline and things like that. So it hasn’t been invisible, and I like to think we maybe helped put it on the agenda a bit.”
When it comes to the media coverage of the criminal justice system, Keller said there is room for improvement.
“For the most part, I would say that the mainstream media is better at covering crime than covering criminal justice. This is especially true of TV, and especially true of local TV,” he said.
“I guess I would fault the mainstream media in general on two counts. One of them is not doing enough to cover corrections departments, prison system, police departments as institutions. And the other one is, by writing so much about crime, and especially lurid crimes, they have kind of contributed to a sense that the crime rate is worse than it is.”
Keller said this type of sensational coverage has also affected potential reforms.
“I think it’s slowed things down. The things that are driving the reform efforts are real. You have a generation of Americans who have grown up with relatively low crime rates and, therefore, tend to be more sympathetic to reform,” he said.
“You’ve got, as I said, conservatives who’ve wised up to the fact that we spend something like $80 billon a year on criminal justice, but we still have this enormous recidivism rate. So locking people up for 10 or 15 years for relatively minor crimes is not solving the problem.”
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Keller said that serving as editor of The Marshall Project has been an eye-opening experience.
“I get a surprise every week pretty much,” he said.
One thing that has stood out to him is a process known as double celling, in which two inmates are put in solitary confinement together in a cell the size of a parking space.
“As you might imagine, that doesn’t turn out too well. They end up sometimes killing one another. I had never heard of that,” Keller said.
He was also surprised to learn how much of the criminal justice system has been privatized.
“Not just private prisons. But private medical care for inmates, private food services, private transportation systems, private telecommunication systems, all of that kind of stuff, and the profit motive is not always a healthy thing to have in the justice system.”
While Keller has learned a lot over the past two years, he admitted it’s difficult to place one story the project has published above all others. He points to “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” but then quickly concedes: “It’s like trying to pick your favorite kid.”
“How about my favorite story this week?” he asked with a laugh.
Courtesy of INSP.ngo / Spare Change News