WNYC’s Kai Wright accepts his 2019 duPont-Columbia Award for Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice.
Outrage over the criminal justice system has become a defining civil rights issue...But we have focused largely on the horrific end of the story: when there’s a dead body. In this podcast, we’re going to instead look at the moment when young people first collide with law and order, and the lifelong mark it makes on them...On any given night, roughly 53 thousand young people are in some form of lockup.
- Kai Wright, 2019 du-Pont Columbia Award-winning host of Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice
In this episode of On Assignment, we revisit a conversation between Kai Wright and Kaari Pitkin of WNYC and Sally Herships, head of the Radio Program at Columbia Journalism School. Wright and Pitkin created the 2019 duPont Award-winning podcast Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice. The series showed the human side of the web-like juvenile justice system by giving young people the chance to tell their stories in their own words.
The juvenile justice system disproportionately impacts Black youth. As of 2019, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in the juvenile justice system are Black though only 14% of youth in the United States are Black. Caught focused on the young people behind these numbers, bringing forward stories that might otherwise be obscured by statistics.
Wright and Pitkin discuss with Herships the ethical challenges of working with youth and offer advice for journalists interested in reporting on opaque, bureaucratized systems. They also talk about building trust with the young people who opened up to them.
At the 2019 duPont-Columbia Award ceremony, Kai Wright and the team behind Caught were honored with a coveted Silver Baton, along with two other podcasts. Watch the full 2020 ceremony, here. Check our Facebook page facebook.com/duPontColumbiaAwards for updates. Listen to Caught in its entirety, here. And try Kai’s latest podcast series “United States of Anxiety.”