Boston Globe readers were probably jarred when they saw the data revealed in a piece published two years ago: a journalistic investigation had shown that Massachusetts prison officials rarely accepted reports of abuse filed by inmates.
Between 2018 and 2021, reports of staff abuse were partially or fully accepted in only 7% of cases, a number the Department of Correction expects to be closer to 20%. Over 1,500 grievances from six of the largest prisons were filed in those three years — only 9 grievances were fully approved.
Readers may have also been surprised to learn that the hefty investigative piece was the work of student journalists — as part of Boston University’s Justice Media co-Lab, a program that gives students the tools to expose inequity and advance transparency through computational journalism and partners them with professional outlets.
The Boston Globe story necessitated a trip to the Massachusetts Department of Correction to obtain grievance records, after which students on the project digitized the information and arranged the data into a usable format. Students combined analysis of that data with on-the-ground reporting to produce the story, revealing alleged abuse ranging from officers choking inmates to spraying chemical agents on their bodies.
“[Students] basically took all the forms and turned it into a spreadsheet for us that we were then able to work with and figure out which facilities had the worst approval rates, what the overall likelihood of [a grievance] being approved was and which officers were mentioned the most,” said Jake Neenan, one of the student reporters who wrote the story.
The story — written by Melissa Ellin, Neenan and Allison Pirog with other student contributors from the Justice Media co-Lab — featured interviews with incarceration advocates and former correctional commissioners, too. The piece was supported by Boston University faculty and by Scott Allen, assistant managing editor for projects at the Boston Globe, who also works with the paper’s famed Spotlight team.
“[Allen] kept us in the loop of all of the editing process and when [the story] was going to run,” said Neenan, “and he treated us like we were not just students working on a project.”
The Justice Media co-Lab operates as an internship in the summer and as a course in the fall and spring semesters. The course begins with a pitch day, after which students rank their project choices and faculty assign them to teams. Though projects have different requirements based on the skills of the students and the needs of the partner media outlet, all projects focus on computational journalism. Each team is overseen by a student project manager and by faculty who provide valuable guidance.
“The students, most of them get really into it. It's very exciting. They're digging into some sort of problem, some sort of issue, injustice in the world,” said Brooke Williams, one of the faculty instructors. “[The students are] really getting to use their computational skills to actually make a difference in a way that they get to see.”
Two groups help make the computational journalism lab happen: the Boston University College of Communication and BU Spark!, an experiential learning lab that focuses on computing and data science innovation. Williams and BU Spark! director Ziba Cranmer work together to provide a comprehensive co-Lab experience for students.
An important component of the co-Lab is its draw to students in and out of journalism. Neenan was a physics major and had no prior work in journalism but decided to pursue a master’s in data journalism at Columbia University after his work on the Globe story.
“We are like one newsroom that's interdisciplinary, completely interdisciplinary, and I co-teach it with faculty from the computing and data sciences,” said Williams. “Ziba [Cranmer] and Spark! provide a tremendous amount of help and experts in residence.”
Outlets who partner with the program typically publish the work with student names in the byline or listed as contributors. Student work has been featured in area outlets such as the Globe, GBH News and NPR affiliate WBUR, but national outlets such as USA Today and TheGrio have also used the work of co-Lab students. As long as the project pursues justice, the co-Lab is open to taking it on.
“We only do computational investigations that are justice focused. And hat tip to Ziba for thinking of this name, because at first I was like, justice, this feels sort of like opinion-y, even, like ‘justice,’ right?” said Williams. “But the truth is, I tried to think of all the stories I've done in my career and all the stories my students have done that are investigative in nature that are holding the powerful accountable, you know, informing the public about something that needs shedding light on. It's all about injustice in some way.”
In addition to the prison grievances story, co-Lab students have investigated youth voter turnout, racial disparity in arrests, the gender pay gap at University of Massachusetts and the role of falsified warrants in wrongful convictions, stories that all appeared in local or national media outlets. Each of them contains a strong computational component.
“I don't really even see data journalism as being distinct from any other kind of reporting. I think it's just becoming more and more necessary to just let me do journalism until I understand institutions and how they affect people,” said Neenan. “I think to understand the world, you need to have some sort of like literacy in that.”