In Jackson, Mississippi, and other cities, detainees can go years without seeing the sun. The jails in all three cities have requirements to provide sunlight and fresh air, either mandated by jail policy or by the state or federal governments. Yet reports have revealed that jails have consistently fallen short.
Brittany Hailer
I report on facilities where young people are placed, jail deaths and other parts of the criminal justice system in Cleveland.
My Background
I joined The Marshall Project - Cleveland after serving as the director of the Pittsburgh Institute of Nonprofit Journalism, a news outlet I co-founded in 2021.
I won the best investigative journalism award in the 2022 Nonprofit News Awards for my reporting on jail deaths. I helped build Pennsylvania’s first-ever jail death database as a reporting fellow for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
The case of Hailer v. Allegheny County, a lawsuit that I filed with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, challenged the Pittsburgh jail’s “gag rules,” leading to a settlement where the jail adopted new policies affirming employees’ rights to speak and disclose wrongdoing. My public records request for an incarcerated person’s autopsy made its way to Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court, which ruled that the public should have access to autopsy records.
For The Marshall Project, I helped create an Investigate This! toolkit for reporting on deaths in jails and prisons.
Contact Me About...
l am looking for information on jail and prison conditions in Cuyahoga County and Ohio, as well as residential treatment facility conditions for youths in the state.