Who worked on 'Lost in Detention'
Monday, October 17th, 2011
Producing a one-hour documentary is like producing a short movie, but much more intense, involving countless hours of reporting, source relationship-building and fact-checking — things the viewer never sees. For "Lost in Detention," we had a team of dedicated editors and reporters at the Investigative Reporting Workshop, as well at FRONTLINE and the Center for Investigative Reporting, and journalist Maria Hinojosa and her team at the Futuro Media Group. In addition, film and journalism graduate students from American University and New York University also worked on the project. All helped investigate immigration enforcement and detention over more than a year.
Toward the end of the project, we received a cache of government documents that helped put our Willacy Detention Center case study in perspective. The documents, obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Workshop through separate Freedom of Information Act requests, included more than 170 records of sexual abuse claims over the past four years. We built a database to log and categorize the records. It was no small feat. We sifted through more than 800 pages worth of documents to code and categorize a myriad of sexual-abuse complaints.
In the end, we discovered widespread claims of sexual abuse across more than 50 facilities. They produced the best window yet into detainees’ claims of abuse inside these detention centers.
Our team on the documentary included:
"LOST IN DETENTION" Documentary
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY
Rick Young
PRODUCED BY
Rick Young
Margaret Ebrahim
Catherine Rentz
CORRESPONDENT
Maria Hinojosa
REPORTER
Andrew Becker, Center for Investigative Reporting
EDITOR
Leslie Atkins
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER
Fritz Kramer
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
Travis Fox
CAMERA
Craig Cooper
Larry Engel
Tim Grucza
Ben McCoy
Timothy Wheeler
SOUND
Chris Conway
Erika Sampson
ADDITIONAL EDITOR
Steve Audette
ADDITIONAL CAMERA
Leslie Atkins
Tara Kocourek
Fritz Kramer
Peter Pearce
Catherine Rentz
ADDITIONAL REPORTERS
Kari Barber
Meredith Bennett-Smith
Michael Blaine
SOUND MIX
Jim Sullivan
TRANSCRIBERS
Consuelo Martinez-Reyes
Suzanne Pardee
Patti Pancoe
ARCHIVAL RESEARCHER
Sarena Snider
ARCHIVAL MATERIALS
ABCNews VideoSource
AP Images
Corbis
CNN ImageSource
Getty Images
MacNeil/Lehrer Productions
MUSIC
Audio Networks
Special thanks to the Carnegie Corporation of New York for initial funding of this project.
SPECIAL THANKS ALSO TO
Center for Investigative Reporting
For the Futuro Media Group:
Maria Hinojosa & Marty Spanninger, executive producers
Xochitl Dorsey, researcher
Denisse Moreno, intern
Nusha Balyan, production coordinator
Univision
Casa Rama
Lynne and Joe Horning
Our team at the Workshop included:
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING WORKSHOP/"LOST IN DETENTION"
EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Charles Lewis
MANAGING EDITOR
Lynne Perri
SENIOR EDITORS
Wendell Cochran
Margaret Ebrahim
COMPUTER-ASSISTED REPORTING DIRECTOR
Jacob Fenton
REPORTING, VIDEO EDITING, PRODUCTION
Carolyn Brown
Larry Engel
RESEARCHERS
Monica Arpino
Tony Azios
Stokely Baksh
Lydia Beyoud
Rachel Boehm
Jack Weingart
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Lisa Hill
Melanie Taube
SPECIAL THANKS TO
Larry Kirkman, Dean, AU School of Communication