Freedom of the Press Foundation is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural Penlight Prize for public records reporting:
- First place: Austin Fast, USA Today, “Sepsis Is ‘Very Treatable.’ For Inmates, It’s Often a Death Sentence.”
- Second place: Robert J. Lopez, Capital & Main, “California’s Child Farmworkers: Exhausted, Underpaid, and Toiling in Toxic Fields”
- Third place: Brittany Hailer, Ilica Mahajan, and Michelle Billman, The Marshall Project, “Behind Locked Doors”
Our first-place winner will receive $25,000, and second- and third-place winners will receive $1,000 — all funded by an anonymous donor whose generous support made this award possible.
Fast, our first-place winner, recounts in USA Today how sepsis, a treatable, survivable health condition, has become a death sentence for hundreds of incarcerated people every year in jails and prisons across the United States. He told us it took years of fighting in court to force the Department of Justice to release unredacted records that revealed a largely hidden public health crisis, and allowed Fast to not only write the story, but also build a searchable public database of inmate sepsis deaths.
Lopez’s two-part investigation for Capital & Main exposed the horrifying, illegal conditions facing thousands of children and teenagers working in the fields of California, ignored by the state agency responsible for protecting underage workers. Lopez told us he filed more than two dozen California Public Records Act requests with multiple state and local agencies, and analyzed more than 10,000 state enforcement records as part of his investigation, fighting stonewalling by the state agency in charge of regulating child labor and workplace safety laws. After the series was published, he said, California officials announced procedural changes, including more data transparency, to protect underage farmworkers.
The Marshall Project series by Hailer, Mahajan, and Billman used hundreds of public records to investigate two of Ohio’s largest youth residential treatment centers, uncovering rampant abuse by both participants and staff members and significant gaps in state oversight systems. In addition to the series, the journalists produced a public records tool kit for former residents of such facilities and their families to request facility records. After publication, they told us, multiple pieces of legislation were introduced by state lawmakers to increase transparency around these facilities and accountability for serious violations, and the state began the process of revoking the license of one of the facilities they’d investigated.
The judges also applauded the public records reporting work of outlets Scot Scoop, ProPublica, and Centro de Periodismo Investigativo, whose multiple submissions showed a thorough commitment to records-based investigations.
We were honored to receive more than 120 submissions to our first annual Penlight Prize, and truly impressed by the expertise and perseverance of the journalists who submitted, and the real-world impact their work has had. Thank you to all who submitted, and we look forward to reading your submissions next year!
