Marshall Project Stakes Out High Ground on Journalism’s Slippery Slope

I felt a sort of idealistic giddiness upon enrolling in “Prisons & Punishment,” a government course introduced during my senior year of college. It was exciting to attach a resonant cause to academic inquiry, and about 95 percent of my classmates—Republican and Democrat—identified as supporters of criminal justice reform. Our professor had a childhood friend who was wrongfully imprisoned for murdering his parents and then exonerated 17 years later. “This will be the most important course you take in college,” the professor said on the first day of class.