Lecture: The Media’s Role in Mass Incarceration?

How did America become the most country with the most incarcerated individuals in the world, with more than 2 million people behind bars? One factor has been mostly overlooked: media coverage of crime paved the way for the explosive growth in our prison population. 

Carroll Bogert, president of the Pulitzer Prize-winning news outlet, The Marshall Project, will explore the media’s responsibility for mass incarceration on Wednesday, January 22 at 7 p.m. in the Jeanne Y. Curtis Performance Hall on campus, 500 Salisbury Street, Worcester.

A Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow at Assumption College this month, Bogert will discuss how media coverage helped enable harsh sentencing policies, the prosecution of children as adults, and other practices that have filled America’s prisons to overflowing capacities.