Mark Obbie's Blog, page 24
June 30, 2014
On the nightstand: Monday, 6/30/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Jake Pearson digs up records that show how nine of 11 recent suicides in New York City jails resulted from official negligence: guards’ failure to follow safeguards meant to […]
June 28, 2014
Debate club misses the point
Here’s an example of how the subtlety and art of narrative journalism sometimes gets buried in our cultural affinity for arguing about public policy and politics. The New York Times Magazine this Sunday will publish on its letters page a tally of reader reactions to a recent feature that I blogged about. The magazine’s 6th Floor […]
June 27, 2014
On the nightstand: Friday, 6/27/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Leah McGrath Goodman looks at federal sentencing guidelines, a system meant to steer punishment away from irrational disparities, and accuses it of being built atop its own set of irrational […]
June 26, 2014
Homework assignment for the commentariat
Few deaths evoke sympathy for victims and outrage toward criminal suspects more than when a parent leaves a child in a hot car. The media spectacle of the moment comes to us from Georgia, where Justin Ross Harris faces murder and child cruelty charges in the death of his 22-month-old son, Cooper. The initial charges prompted […]
June 25, 2014
On the nightstand: Wednesday, 6/25/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Jim Dwyer is one of my favorite reporter-columnists because of the emphasis he puts on the first half of that description. His informed, tough questions — in a column […]
June 24, 2014
On the nightstand: Tuesday, 6/24/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Challen Stephens wrote the latest installment in an impressive reporting project I previously included on the nightstand. This one makes effective use of data, again, in explaining why we […]
June 22, 2014
On the nightstand: Sunday, 6/22/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Sarah Stillman paints a damning portrait of the for-profit alternatives-to-incarceration industry of halfway houses and monitoring services. Created to ease government’s corrections spending and bearing the promise of cutting imprisonment, […]
June 20, 2014
From Boom to bust
I’ve gushed before about the work of Tony Horwitz. I’ve also gone on and on about the potentially transformative economic power of the e-single to enable journalists to make a living from reported, long-form narratives. Now those two worlds collide in Horwitz’s New York Times op-ed today, and not in a good way. I’ll let […]
June 19, 2014
On the nightstand: Thursday, 6/19/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Hannah K. Gold reports on what she calls “tightly bundled network of (academic) institutions that work insidiously and in harmony” with the private prison industry. Only one of the […]
June 17, 2014
On the nightstand: Tuesday, 6/17/14
Today’s good reads and reporting coups in criminal-justice journalism, with an emphasis on stories central to my interests in victims and reforms in sentencing and prisons: Pam Belluck’s reporting, and her sources’ candor, provide the insight we need to understand a crime that ordinarily provokes only revulsion and zero empathy: a mother’s desire to harm […]
