“Banished,” The Marshall Project’s immersive multimedia story on the lives of sex offenders living in Miami-Dade County, Florida, who abide by some of the most restrictive housing policies in the country, has been awarded the national Edward R. Murrow Award for “Excellence in Video.” The organization was also awarded a regional Edward R. Murrow prize in the “News Documentary” category earlier in the year for “Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice, Episode 9,” produced in collaboration with WNYC.
Deftly integrating text and video, “Banished” revealed the day-to-day realities of 500 homeless men who play an exhausting cat-and-mouse game with police every night, as they search for shelter in a society that considers them irredeemable and undeserving of second chances. Three short documentary episodes—which include a ride-along with the police, a look inside the tents of offenders and interviews with policymakers—are woven through the deeply reported narrative. By blending film vignettes, interactive data visualization and haunting photographs, the story’s innovative design immerses the viewer in these men’s lives as they rise at the end of their curfew at dawn to pack up their tents and return to families, go to work or try to charge their GPS monitors and ankle bracelets.
Awesome. This is very good news. The reality of the situation and who we are is getting out, and the community is beginning to understand what is happening. Bless these producers.