“Stickup Kid” Wins Online Journalism Award

What happens when a juvenile offender is locked up in an adult prison?

That’s the question filmmaker Caitlin McNally explored in Stickup Kid, a FRONTLINE digital-exclusive project honored at the 2015 Online Journalism Awards (OJAs) this past Saturday.

Published in association with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Stickup Kid tells the story of Alonza Thomas, who at age 16, was sent to a supermax prison after being charged with armed robbery shortly after California enacted a new tough-on-juvenile-crime law. Thomas went on to spend more than a decade behind bars, much of it in solitary confinement.

The OJA panel of judges praised Stickup Kid — which they named best feature on a medium-sized website — as “a powerful, digital-only, multimedia approach” to the issue of youth imprisonment. “Heartbreaking, memorable, honest,” said the OJA panel.

The Online Journalism Awards are administered annually by the Online News Association, a nonprofit membership group dedicated to excellence in digital journalism. Winners in other categories included the Baltimore Sun‘s digital coverage of the Freddie Gray case and The New York Times‘ “web-native” storytelling about the World Cup.

Explore FRONTLINE’s winning Stickup Kid interactive here, and watch the full documentary on YouTube: