About the Author

George Pawlaczyk and Beth Hundsdorfer are investigative reporters for the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat in Southern Illinois near St. Louis. They have worked as a team for more than a decade during which they uncovered shoddy investigations by a state agency that led to the death of more than 50 children and exposed the practice of holding mentally ill prisoners in solitary confinement continuously for more than a decade in the state's supermax Tamms Correctional Center. They won the Robert F. Kennedy Award in 2007 for their series "Lethal Lapses" about the faulty child protection system and in 2009 won a prestigious George Polk Award for their series on solitary confinement entitled "Trapped In Tamms."