#IRE12: Sidney Winner Cindy Chang | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

#IRE12: Sidney Winner Cindy Chang

Cindy Chang, winner of the June Sidney Award for “Louisiana INCarcerated,” speaking on a panel about covering abuse in prisons at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Boston. Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation. Chang and her colleagues at the Times-Picayune set out to understand why.

They found that Louisiana’s unique system of private prisons run by local sheriffs creates systemic pressures to keep incarceration rates sky-high. The sheriffs depend on the profits to finance law enforcement in their parishes and provide jobs for their constituents, but the prisons must be kept near 100% occupancy in order to make a profit. So, the sheriffs team up with “law and order” prosecutors to lobby for harsh sentencing guidlines and against prison reforms.

Investigative Reporters and Editors is the premiere professional conference for investigative journalists. We at Hillman were delighted to see so many Sidney winners speaking on panels.