Inquest, an online publication of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, at Harvard Law School, was named a finalist for the 60th annual National Magazine Awards by the American Society of Magazine Editors, last month.
With the mission of advancing decarceral ideas, Inquest was launched in 2021, by Harvard Law School Professor Andrew Manuel Crespo ’08 , the executive faculty director of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, and executive director Premal Dharia, both of whom serve as co-editors-in chief. Adam McGee serves as Inquest’s managing editor.
One of the most prestigious journalism-awards programs in the United States, the National Magazine Awards are sponsored by ASME in association with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. The award is judged by a consortium of editors and publishers from the biggest newsrooms and magazines in the country. Originally limited to print magazines, the awards now honor magazine storytelling published in any medium, including online magazines like Inquest.
Every year, more than 250 magazines and websites enter the awards, submitting 1,000-plus entries. Inquest was nominated for General Excellence in the Special Interest category. Inquest is a finalist alongside nationally recognized publications and publishers including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Marshall Project, ProPublica, Mother Jones, the Atlantic, National Geographic, and the Washington Post.
Crespo, the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law, said: “We are so incredibly honored to see Inquest recognized by industry leaders as an indispensable forum for advancing nuanced, thoughtful, powerful ideas to end mass incarceration. In three short years, this magazine has reached an audience of over 400,000 people, has influenced policy changes and organizing campaigns, and has now been recognized for its excellence alongside the leading journalistic outlets in the country. We produce this magazine with very limited resources and a tiny team — I couldn’t be prouder of all their work.”
Premal Dharia, said: “Our small but mighty team at Inquest pours so much into curating, editing and publishing work from writers across fields and experiences. Inquest strives to ensure that silos are broken down and that expertise of various kinds is truly recognized and heard. We are so thrilled to be honored in this way.”
Among Inquest’s work recognized by the National Magazine Awards is a feature presentation, “Freedom Writers: How incarcerated writers are tackling mass incarceration.” Through essays, poems, and art, Freedom Writer authors present unique first-person insights into the issues and harms of mass incarceration.
Crespo is the co-author, with John Rappaport ’06, of “Criminal Law and the American Penal System,” a forthcoming innovative casebook that recasts the traditionally required criminal law course as a class about the role law and lawyers have played in building and sustaining American mass incarceration.
In a recent chair lecture to mark his appointment as the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law, Crespo outlined a path for lawyers and organizers to end mass incarceration.
As part of his talk, he pointed to the central work of the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, explaining that he and Dharia act as something akin to in-house counsel for anti-carceral organizers. “Part of what we try to teach [our students] is that to do this work well, you have to reimagine what it is that lawyers actually do [because] the lawyering in service of organizing models sees law differently, as subordinate to, and supporting of, an organizing-driven theory of change.”
Dharia, who became the Institute’s inaugural executive director in 2021, was recently awarded the 2024 Albert J. Krieger Champion of Liberty Award by the American Bar Association. The award honors lawyers who have devoted a substantial portion of their legal careers to public or private criminal defense practice, whether state or federal, and who have distinguished themselves as criminal trial lawyers, embodied the principles enunciated in the ABA Standards for Criminal Justice, Defense Function, and made substantial contributions to improvement of the criminal justice system through the organized bar or non-governmental entities.
She is the co-editor of a recent anthology, “Dismantling Mass Incarceration: A Handbook for Change,” with James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo. The book features a broad collection of writing and materials that offer various approaches to confronting the carceral state.
In an interview about the book in September 2024, Dharia said, “There can be no question that the amount of harm our carceral system continues to cause is completely untenable. Changes are being made. People are organizing. Policy is changing. Narratives are shifting. This offers hope and it can offer the fuel needed to keep pushing. The type of transformation we need is vast, but it won’t happen in one fell swoop — it is through these changes, this chipping away, that we will achieve it.”
The 2025 ASME award winners will be announced on Thursday, April 10. See all of the finalists here.
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