When Rachel Dissell began to pivot toward juvenile justice reporting, her earlier experience investigating the impact of lead poisoning for the Cleveland Plain Dealer fueled her approach. Cleveland’s children are lead poisoned at four times the rate of kids across the country, according to data released by the Ohio Department of Health.

After documenting all the promises to fix lead-poisoned homes—and the lack of action—Dissell had an epiphany. “We stepped back and we thought that we really need to ask the question differently,” she said. “We need to ask why it is acceptable for the community to be poisoning future generations of children. Why are we accepting that as a thing that we do?”

The same metric applies to her coverage of youth in Ohio’s juvenile justice system, where increasing numbers of teens are being tried and convicted as adults. Dissell realized that her reporting had to do more than just document crimes and trials. Communities need information that might help prevent children from entering the system in the first place.

Dissell, now with Signal Cleveland and The Marshall Project, told NPF Future of the American Child fellows how she adapted her reporting to make an impact. [Transcript | Video]

5 takeaways:

➀ Lead-free homes weren’t publicly traceable, Dissell said.

While at the Plain Dealer, Dissell and co-worker Brie Zeltner knocked on the doors of 100 led-poisoned homes. “Some of whom it was their children who were poisoned, and some of whom they didn’t even know there were lead hazards in the house because they had never been told,” Dissell said. She said that parents told them that even if they wanted to protect their children from lead, there was no way for them to find out if there was a hazard at the address. “There was no list. If you called City Hall, good luck.” This resulted in the journalists creating their own “lead-safe” registry by using public records, creating a searchable list of homes where lead had been cleaned up in homes.

➁ Really listen to what young people are saying.

Dissell recalled a powerful moment during her early reporting on juvenile justice. She was working with a group of high school students on their writing projects when she noticed one young man who didn’t want to participate because he didn’t like to engage with journalists. “He told me that the only way I’m going to get into your paper is if I kill someone, someone kills me, or if I get into Harvard,” Dissell said. “That really stuck with me because he knew as a freshman, these are the buckets you’re putting me in. There’s no other buckets for me.”

➂ Poverty is often the common denominator for youth in the system.  

In the juvenile justice system, the “bindover” process is implemented for children who commit serious crimes can have their cases transferred to adult court. Once enacted, they will be tried as adults, sentenced as adults, and serve their time in adult prisons.

Ohio has the largest number of children serving adult sentences in the country, Dissell said. That’s primarily because of the number of Cleveland youth in the juvenile justice system. “We are sending not only more children to adult prison, but we’re sentencing more children to life sentences,” she said.

During the global disruption of the COVID pandemic, Dissell said she had time to think closely about the issue. “I know that it’s not our job as reporters to just solve every problem. But clearly, we’re doing this for a reason. We’re not doing it because we want the problems to persist.”

➃ Ask the community what they want to know.

With the Marshall Project, Dissell said they met with several community groups who were interested in juvenile justice topics. “… We gathered up all of their questions about juvenile justice and specifically about bindovers,” she said. She took a 12-page process that involves a lot of legal stuff about bindovers, which they got down into two pages. They removed jargon, went through it with residents and highlighted words they didn’t understand and truly made it accessible to them. “We have a community of practice,” which consists of community members doing work regarding juvenile justice and being able to talk about what they’re learning and ask questions.

“Just by looking through all of this with residents instead of just with reporters, they were noting differences that they had questions about why is a prosecutor’s office more likely to send a kid to adult court if they’re robbing someone in this neighborhood but not this neighborhood?”

➄ Focusing on the right target is important. 

Initially, residents wanted to place all the blame for bindovers on judges, Dissell said. “But we were able to work with statistics that we got from the court in groups within our newsrooms and within the community and help figure out that the cases coming in were very disproportionate. However, when judges got to hear evidence about the child and their family and their background, their decision-making was pretty much even, Dissell said — 36% for black children getting the discretionary bind overs and 37% for white children. Once residents saw those facts, their energy shifted. They began to refocus on questions for prosecutors about why certain kids are chosen.

This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.