The Marshall Project

About The Marshall Project

The Marshall Project is an American nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system. Launched in November 2014 and named after the lawyer and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, it was founded on the belief that American society had grown dangerously complacent about mass incarceration — and that high-impact journalism could jolt the public and policymakers into urgency. Led at its founding by former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller, The Marshall Project has become one of the most decorated nonprofit newsrooms in the country, winning two Pulitzer Prizes for its reporting on the failures and inequities of the justice system.

Neil Barsky's idea and the 2013 announcement

The Marshall Project was the brainchild of Neil Barsky, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who had left journalism in the late 1980s for a career in finance. Barsky worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, co-founded the hedge fund Midtown Research in 1998, and then opened his own fund, Alson Capital Partners, which at its peak managed $3.5 billion in assets. When the 2008 financial crisis battered the fund, Barsky closed it in 2009 and returned to journalism and media activism, chairing the board of overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review and pushing nonprofit media organizations to think seriously about sustainable business models.

Barsky has said the seeds of The Marshall Project were planted after he read two books about the criminal justice system. What struck him, he later wrote, was not only how expensive, ineffective, and racially biased the system is, but how difficult it was to find anyone — liberal or conservative — who defended the status quo. Yet mass incarceration, unlike other American crises, seemed to produce complacency rather than debate: the public had become inured to the overuse of solitary confinement, the widespread incidence of prison rape, and the mixing of teenagers and adults in maximum-security prisons.

In November 2013, Barsky announced the project in the byline of a New York Times op-ed, including a link to a preliminary website. The announcement drew national attention to an idea that was still more aspiration than newsroom.

Launch and Bill Keller

The project became real in February 2014, when former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced he was leaving the paper to lead The Marshall Project's editorial team as founding editor. Keller's arrival gave the startup instant credibility: he compared its approach to that of ProPublica, the pioneering nonprofit investigative newsroom, and framed its mission in striking terms. "Our aim is to move public opinion," Keller said, "not towards a particular agenda, but towards a state of urgency."

Before its official launch, the project published two investigative pieces through established outlets — one in Slate and one in the Washington Post — demonstrating the partnership model that would become central to its strategy. The Marshall Project formally launched in November 2014, backed by funding from Barsky himself and other sources including the Ford Foundation, with a first-year budget of just under $5 million.

Named for Thurgood Marshall

The organization takes its name from Thurgood Marshall, the civil rights lawyer who argued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court and went on to become the first Black justice on the Court. The choice of namesake was deliberate: Marshall's career embodied the idea that the law could be an instrument of justice — and that exposing injustice was the first step toward correcting it. The name signals the organization's orientation: journalism in service of a more just legal system.

Mission and coverage areas

The Marshall Project's mission is to cover the US criminal justice system with an aim to spread awareness of its inequities and failures. Its coverage spans the full arc of the system: policing, arrest and pretrial detention, prosecution, courts and sentencing, prisons and jails, parole and reentry. Keller described the editorial approach as focusing not necessarily on breaking news but on pushing at and informing the framing of the news — examining how people enter the system (juvenile justice, the criminalization of mental illness, the drug war), what happens to them inside it, and what happens when the 95 percent of incarcerated people who eventually get out return to their communities.

The organization's reporting consistently connects individual stories to systemic questions: how well and effectively public resources are used, how accessible justice is for the poor, how race and class shape outcomes at every stage. Its journalism is explicitly aimed at moving the public conversation — creating, in Keller's phrase, a state of urgency about problems the country has learned to ignore.

Editorial leadership over the years

Bill Keller served as editor-in-chief from the founding in 2014 until 2019, establishing the organization's editorial standards and its partnership-driven publishing model. He was succeeded by Susan Chira, a former New York Times editor, who led the newsroom from 2019 to 2025. In 2025, Jennifer Peter took over as editor. The organization's president is Katrice Hardy. Founder Neil Barsky served as chairman until stepping down in late 2021, by which point the organization had won two Pulitzer Prizes under his tenure.

The leadership transitions reflect the organization's maturation from a founder-driven startup to an established institution. Each editor has maintained the core mission while adapting the newsroom to a changing media landscape and an evolving criminal justice reform movement.

Nonprofit funding model

The Marshall Project is a registered nonprofit funded by philanthropic foundations and individual donors. Its launch funding came from Barsky and foundations including the Ford Foundation, and it has since been supported by a broad base of institutional and individual philanthropy. Like its peers in the nonprofit news sector, the organization publishes information about its major funders and maintains editorial independence from them.

Barsky articulated the model's logic early on: "A nonprofit organization has to sustain itself by being excellent and having an impact. So does for-profit, frankly. But the difference is there are people of good will out there who are willing to support us if we do great work." The organization's subsequent record — including its Pulitzers — has been cited as validation of that wager.

Pulitzer Prizes and major investigations

The Marshall Project received two Pulitzer Prizes while Barsky was chairman, a remarkable achievement for a newsroom barely a decade old. Its Pulitzer-winning work exemplified its method: deep, document-driven investigations into abuses that the system had normalized. The organization's investigations have exposed misconduct and neglect across the justice system — from the treatment of incarcerated people to the failures of oversight institutions — and have frequently been published in partnership with major national outlets, amplifying their impact.

Beyond the Pulitzers, The Marshall Project's journalism has won numerous other national awards and has repeatedly driven policy responses: investigations prompting official inquiries, legislative proposals, and changes in institutional practice. The organization's impact record is central to its case for continued philanthropic support.

Audience, newsletters, and "Life Inside"

The Marshall Project reaches its audience through its website, themarshallproject.org, email newsletters, and its publishing partnerships with newspapers, magazines, and broadcast outlets across the country. Its stories are free to read and frequently republished, extending the newsroom's reach far beyond its direct readership.

One of the organization's signature features is "Life Inside," a series of first-person essays written by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. The series gives direct voice to those experiencing the system the newsroom covers — a deliberate editorial choice to center the perspectives of people who are usually spoken about rather than heard from. The essays have become one of the organization's most distinctive and widely read products, embodying its commitment to treating incarcerated people as sources of knowledge about the system rather than merely its subjects.

Criticism and controversies

The Marshall Project's explicit reform orientation has drawn scrutiny from those who question whether journalism with a stated point of view can remain fair. Critics from the law-enforcement community and from conservative commentators have argued that the organization's framing — which emphasizes systemic inequity and the harms of incarceration — amounts to advocacy. The organization's answer, consistent since Keller's founding statement, is that its aim is urgency rather than a particular agenda: to report facts about the system accurately while refusing to treat its dysfunctions as normal or acceptable.

Like all nonprofit newsrooms, The Marshall Project has also faced questions about the influence of its funders. Its response has been transparency about its funding sources and a record of reporting that has challenged powerful interests regardless of their relationship to the philanthropic world.

Outlook

More than a decade after its launch, The Marshall Project stands as one of the defining successes of the nonprofit journalism movement — proof that a small, mission-driven newsroom can produce journalism of the highest caliber and win the profession's top honors. Its two Pulitzer Prizes, its partnership model, and its "Life Inside" series have all been widely imitated.

The organization's future will be shaped by the broader fate of criminal justice reform in America — a movement that has seen both remarkable progress and fierce backlash — and by the sustainability of the nonprofit news model itself. But its founding insight remains as relevant as ever: that the country's complacency about its justice system is itself a story, and that journalism capable of breaking through that complacency is a public good worth sustaining.