Two OSI grantees have been selected for the 38th Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards. Karen O’Connor and Miri Navasky of FRONTLINE/WGBH on PBS received Grand Prize honors for the program The New Asylums. Steve Liss of Time magazine was Domestic Photo Winner for “No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention.”

The New Asylums goes deep inside Ohio's state prison system to explore the complex and growing issue of mentally ill prisoners. As sheriffs and prison wardens become the unexpected and often ill-equipped caretakers of the nearly 500,000 mentally ill men and women serving time in U.S. jails and prisons, they are faced with a troubling new concern: have America's jails and prisons become its new asylums? The full version of the film, as well as resources and information about incarceration and mental illness, are available on FRONTLINE’s website at www.pbs.org/frontline/shows/asylums/. The film’s website and dissemination strategy were supported by a grant from OSI’s U.S. Justice Fund.

Soros Justice Fellow Steve Liss, whose work appeared in OSI's Moving Walls 8 exhibition, photographed children in the Webb County Juvenile Detention in Laredo, Texas. Of the photographs one RFK judge remarked, “The abuse, addiction and neglect Liss photographed play a large part in the lives of those incarcerated children and cry out for solutions." A slide show featuring images from Liss's project can be viewed at www.soros.org/initiatives/photography/focus_areas/mw/8#liss.

The Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards were founded in 1968 by a group of journalists who covered Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s last campaign. In creating the awards, they sought to encourage outstanding reporting on those issues that were of utmost concern to the senator. Dedicated to Robert and Ethel’s youngest child Rory, the awards are judged each year by over 50 members of the working press. A committee of six journalists oversees the judging process and is responsible for the selection of the grand prize winner. In its 38th year, the RFK journalism awards program is the largest program of its kind and one of the few in which the honorees are judged solely by their peers.