The Crime Report (TCR) is the nation’s only comprehensive news service covering the diverse challenges and issues of 21st century criminal justice in the U.S. and abroad. Staffed by working journalists in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, it is published daily through the year by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. TCR’s prizewinning coverage includes investigative reports by the some of the nation’s most accomplished reporters; analysis, blogs and commentary by leading criminologists, practitioners, law enforcement/corrections professionals, and legal experts; reports on new and cutting-edge research; and daily summaries of the most important news and developments covered by the national and international press.
In an era when newsroom resources for investigative and analytical journalism are increasingly strained, TCR is dedicated to providing an independent, non-partisan marketplace of news and ideas for those who want more than the daily diet of crime headlines and political rhetoric, The site also features a regularly updated calendar of events in the criminal justice field and a wide-ranging database, with downloadable resource material on criminal justice topics, reporter’s handbooks, multimedia reports, contact lists of experts, journalism case studies, and much more.
TCR is a collaborative effort by two national organizations that focus on encouraging quality criminal justice reporting: the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, the nation’s leading practice-oriented think tank on crime and justice reporting; and Criminal Justice Journalists the nation’s only membership organization of crime-beat journalists. [See “OUR PARTNERS” below]
TCR is a member of the Investigative News Network of online investigative journalism sites. Its work is co-published in sites such as Salon.com and The Daily Beast, and it partners with a broad variety of news outlets across the country, such as the Congressional Victims’ Caucus, Women’s Rights, Prison News, The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago News Cooperative, and many others.
Membership in TCR, which includes a subscription to our weekly and daily news alerts, is free. Please sign up here. You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
Stephen Handelman, Executive Editor/Editor-in-Chief
Stephen Handelman, Editor-in-Chief of The Crime Report, is a prizewinning former columnist, foreign correspondent and senior writer for Time Magazine and The Toronto Star, and author of Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafiya (Yale University Press), the first account of the rise of organized crime in post-Soviet Russia. In a follow-up book, he unraveled the Soviet bio-weapons program in Biohazard (Random House). Steve serves as Director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and managing editor of Americas Quarterly. He is a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, How They Got Away With It: Lessons from the Financial Meltdown (Columbia University Press). He lives outside New York City with his wife, a television news producer, and son.
Steve’s articles and op-eds have appeared in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals around the world, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Independent (UK), TRhe (London) Spectator, The Christian Science Monitor, Popular Science, The Toronto Globe and Mail, and Foreign Affairs. He is a frequent commentator and lecturer on criminal justice issues, transnational crime and organized crime; and has trained investigative journalists in eastern Europe, Russia and Latin America. Starting in the fall of 2011, he will be host of John Jay’s monthly program for CUNY TV, “Criminal Justice Matters.” He also serves as consulting managing editor of Americas Quarterly.
Steve earned his Masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University and is a member of the board of communications alumni of the City College of New York. He is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Cara Tabachnick, Managing Editor
Cara Tabachnick is Managing Editor for News and Content of The Crime Report. She has freelanced for Newsday in New York City and Long Island, and has written for Newsweek, the New York Post, UPI, Atlanta Magazine and AM New York, among others. She regularly contributes articles and investigative reports to the “Inside Criminal Justice” section of TCR. Her areas of interest in criminal justice include domestic abuse, legal affairs and juvenile justice. Cara is the Deputy Director of John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband, a filmmaker, and two children.
Lisa Riordan Seville, Deputy Managing Editor
Lisa Riordan Seville, Deputy Managing Editor for News and Content of The Crime Report, oversees daily operations of the site, including our regular bloggers and commentators, New & Notable research service and Calendar of Events; as well as serving as a senior staff reporter.
Lisa writes about criminal justice, the law, urban issues and education. Her articles have appeared in Salon.com, The Daily Beast, Crain's New York Business and the New York Post, among others. Originally from California, she holds a masters in journalism from the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
Ted Gest, Washington Bureau Chief/Contributing Editor
Ted Gest oversees the daily news digest “Crime and Justice News” for The Crime Report, and reports and blogs on criminal justice developments in Washington DC and elsewhere in the country. Ted covered the White House, the Justice Department, the Supreme Court, and legal/justice news during a 23-year career at U.S. News & World Report. He is president of Criminal Justice Journalists, the nation’s only association of criminal justice reporters, which he founded in 1997. In September 2011, he began a part-time stint as public information officer for the Washington, D.C., Attorney General.
A veteran journalist, Ted began his career at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (his native city). A former coordinator of the Council of National Journalism Organizations (2003-2006), Ted has been cited by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, and won an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award. He is the author of Crime and Politics and was named Coordinator of the Council of Presidents of National Journalism Organizations in 2003.
He is a founding partner of John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice. Ted is a graduate of Oberlin College and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He serves as a juror for the annual John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting. He lives in Washington, DC with his wife.
Joe Domanick, West Coast Bureau Chief
Joe Domanick, West Coast Bureau Chief of The Crime Report, is an award-winning investigative journalist and author. He has been an adjunct lecturer in journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, and Senior Fellow of the Institute for Justice and Journalism in Los Angeles. Joe is Associate Director of John Jay’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice, and serves as a juror for the annual John Jay-Harry Frank Guggenheim Awards for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting.
In 2009, Joe coordinated the Pew/CMCJ state seminar program for journalists on sentencing, corrections and re-entry. In 2010-2011, he was coordinator of the special CMCJ workshop on California’s Three Strikes Law. He is the author of several books, including Cruel Justice: Three Strikes and the Politics of Crime in America’s Golden State; To Protect and Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (which won the 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Non- Fiction Book.) Domanick’s feature articles and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He lives in Los Angeles, CA with his wife.
David Krajicek, Contributing Editor
David J. Krajicek is co-editor of Crime & Justice News and a contributing editor of The Crime Report. He writes “The Justice Story,” a weekly true crime feature, for the Sunday New York Daily News, where formerly worked as police bureau chief. Krajicek cofounded Criminal Justice Journalists, a national association of reporters and editors. His books include Murder, American Style: 50 Unforgettable True Stories About Love Gone Wrong (2010, News Ink Books), with content drawn from his work for the Daily News; True Crime: Missouri—The State's Most Notorious Criminal Cases (2011, Stackpole Books), and Scooped! Media Miss Real Story on Crime While Chasing Sex, Sleaze and Celebrities (1999, Columbia University Press). His latest true crime book, Death by Rock 'n' Roll, will be released in 2011 by CrimeScape/Rossetta Books, a new Kindle Singles imprint. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, including the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice and the Manchester (U.K) Guardian. He holds degrees from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Columbia University, where he spent the 1990s as a journalism professor. A native Nebraskan, Krajicek lives in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York and on the Alabama Gulf Coast.
John Sodaro, Spring Intern
john@thecrimereport.org
John Sodaro, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, is the spring 2012 news intern at The Crime Report. He was a New York City police officer for three years before resigning to reenlist in the United States Marine Corps. He served as an infantry squad leader for 1st Battalion 4th Marines and deployed to the Middle East with the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, and also served a tour in Al Qaim, Iraq the following year. John has been published in John Jays Finest literary magazine, and hopes to expand his English and Journalism undergraduate studies and attend the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in the Fall. Building on his experience from worldwide deployments in the Marine Corps, John wants to focus on International Reporting at graduate school. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his wife and son.
The Crime Report is proud to provide internships for up-and-coming journalists, journalism students and aspiring criminal justice professionals. For information about how to apply, please contact Executive Editor Stephen Handelman here.
TCR brings the best and most current usable knowledge available from a variety of criminal justice specialties and preoccupations under one roof as a ‘one-stop shopping’ resource―with the aim of breaking down the traditional “information silos” that characterize the field. The Resource Guide, still under development, organizes into 13 major topic issues and numerous subtopics, a vast amount of research and resources under a single research and information-oriented umbrella. The regularly updated Directory Topics, lists of experts and organizations represent a vital library of information for criminal justice media and scholars.
Our searchable Library is an archive of more than 20,000 news and resource articles and reports. Our Conferences section is a portal to a rich collection of material from CMCJ conferences and workshops on emerging criminal justice topics around the country. Journalists and criminal justice professionals will particularly benefit from the collection of articles by CMCJ Reporting Fellows, conference podcasts and videos, transcripts of talks by participants, commissioned research and statistical reports; and from our Resources For Journalists section which contains case studies and guides for reporting the courts, sentencing, gun violence and many other criminal justice areas.
The Calendar of Events lists key upcoming conferences, workshops and other events, on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. Readers can also follow “trending searches” and “most e-mailed” items to track the most current issues. Our Interactive Community forums and Legislative Tracker, both also still under development, aim to provide moderated and unmoderated discussion areas on current issues of interest.
The Center on Media, Crime and Justice (CMCJ), at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, trains senior, mid-career and entry-level reporters, editors and student journalists, in the research and writing skills needed to sustain journalism’s critical watchdog role over a criminal justice system that affects the daily lives of millions of Americans. It has served since 2006 as the nation’s leading resource for journalists on the criminal justice system, bringing working reporters together with scholars, researchers, policymakers, legislators, judges, law enforcement authorities, NGO advocates, and other practitioners for workshops, conferences and backgrounders on emerging justice issues. Its annual Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, held at John Jay College is now among the most significant events in the national criminal justice calendar.
Since 2008, over 400 journalists have participated in CMCJ programs across the country, and their work has produced significant reporting in areas such as prison reform, immigration, financial crime, tribal justice, racial inequities in law enforcement and sentencing, the courts, domestic abuse, drug policy and gun violence. The CMCJ also sponsors the nation’s only annual prize for criminal justice reporting, regarded as the “Pulitzer” of crime journalism. For more information on the CMCJ’s programs, please click here.
Criminal Justice Journalists, (CJJ) a non-profit, member-supported organization, was founded in 1997. Its goal is to improve the quality and accuracy of news reporting on crime, law enforcement and the judicial system. It has organized training sessions in media-related aspects of criminal justice for major national journalism institutions and organizations, including Poynter, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Society for Professional Journalists; as well as sessions at major conferences of professional criminal justice organizations, such as the American Society of Criminology and the International Association of Chiefs of Police.
CJJ operates a daily listserv for criminal justice journalists, develops special guides and case studies for reporters on coverage of criminal justice topics, and produces the country’s only daily digest and summary of criminal justice news, culled from hundreds of news outlets and organizations around the country. In January 2001, CJJ affiliated with the Jerry Lee Center of Criminology of the University of Pennsylvania. For more information about CJJ activities, please click here.
TCR gratefully acknowledges the support of John Jay College, its president, Jeremy Travis, and faculty; as well as generous contributions from leading foundations across the country whose support of CMCJ activities have helped to sustain the resources available on this site. Since 2006, major supporters have included: the David Bohnett Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Joyce Foundation, the McCormick Foundation, the New York Times Foundation, The Open Society Institute, the Pew Center on the States Public Safety Performance Project, and the Public Welfare Foundation.
John Jay College of Criminal Justice
An international leader in educating for justice, John Jay College of Criminal Justice of The City University of New York offers a rich liberal arts and professional studies curriculum to upwards of 14,000 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 135 nations. In teaching, scholarship and research, the College approaches justice as
an applied art and science in service to society and as an ongoing conversation about fundamental human desires for fairness, equality and the rule of law. For more information, please click here.
The Ford Foundation
The Ford Foundation provides core funding to the work of CMCJ through its criminal justice and media units. It works with visionary leaders and organizations around the world. The Foundation was founded to advance social justice, and all of its work flows from this fundamental commitment. For more information, please click here.
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