Mackenzie Mays of Bloomberg Law and Jon Schuppe of NBC News have won the 2025 Carolyn C. Mattingly Award for Mental Health Reporting from the National Press Foundation.
Mays and Schuppe’s yearlong investigative series, “Pregnancy Behind Bars,” reveals the systemic failure to provide adequate maternal and mental health care to pregnant women in jails across the United States. Drawing on thousands of pages of legal complaints, depositions, police reports, medical and jail records, and body camera footage, the collaborative series documents how women — many jailed for low-level offenses and unable to afford bail as low as $125 — are ignored as they miscarry, go into labor, and in some cases die.
“This series underscores that dehumanization is a mental health issue,” one judge said. “Human dignity is a critical component of mental health,” another judge added. “The women profiled in this series were not only denied medical care, but they were subject to psychological conditions shocking in their cruelty.”
In a landmark analysis of federal civil rights lawsuits from 2017 to 2024, Mays and Schuppe identified at least 54 cases in which pregnant women or their families alleged severe mistreatment or medical neglect in county jails. Their series includes a companion piece profiling those 54 women and their individual stories.
Mays and Schuppe’s work “exemplifies strong, rigorous, data-driven reporting designed for impact,” the judges said. “Using careful, transparent methodology and deeply human storytelling, the series illuminates the mental health dimensions of a crisis that has remained largely hidden from public view. It showed how inadequate resources and callous decision-making at multiple levels contributed to unnecessary, prolonged suffering for some of the most vulnerable women in America, and it moved legislators to act.”
Since the series’ publication, officials in Congress and in states from Pennsylvania to California said they were alarmed by the investigation and proposed new measures to keep pregnant women out of jail, monitor those who are incarcerated, and ensure they receive proper health care. Some officials are advancing laws offering alternatives to incarceration for pregnant women.
The judging panel also awarded a strong honorable mention to Sarah Stillman for her investigation, “Starved in Jail” and the companion piece “Starved for Care,” a collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, where Stillman is a professor. The pieces trace the mental health histories and crisis situations of more than two dozen people who died from lack of food or water while in U.S. jails.
Judges praised the work for its deep reportage, which revealed the deadly consequences of untreated mental illness in America’s prison system. Judges found “Starved in Jail” well-executed with great depth and strong methodology. The panel was especially moved by the carousel of profiles featured in “Starved for Care.”
The Carolyn C. Mattingly Award was established in 2015 by the National Press Foundation and the Luv u Project in memory of Carolyn C. Mattingly, a Potomac, Maryland, philanthropist and activist, following her tragic death in 2014. It recognizes exemplary journalism that illuminates and advances the understanding of mental health issues and treatments. The award carries a $10,000 prize and is given annually for work published in the previous calendar year.
