Criminal Justice Reporter

If you care passionately about informing readers about how the criminal justice system impacts communities of color, then the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service wants to hear from you. Our award-winning nonprofit newsroom seeks a reporter dedicated to rigorous, evidence-based reporting as we seek to cover the complexities of the criminal justice system and the calls for reform while centering our stories on the people most affected: Those who have been incarcerated, their families and the community as a whole. Milwaukee, in particular, deserves an outlet that comprehensively covers these topics because the city has the third-highest rate of Black incarceration in state prisons among the 50 largest metro areas in the country—a rate that is 10 times the white rate, according to a report by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In another study on “Wisconsin’s Mass Incarceration of African American Males,” another group of University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers found that the state of Wisconsin had incarcerated over half of the young Black men from Milwaukee County in state correctional facilities and that thousands of men from central-city Milwaukee neighborhoods had state prison records.