Mary Beth Pfeiffer is a Soros Justice Media Fellow who has written articles on prison conditions and the treatment of mentally ill inmates for numerous publications. A journalist for twenty-five years, she has been an investigative writer and editor for the Poughkeepsie Journal for the last decade. Her prison reporting has won her two National Headliners Awards, an Outstanding Achievement Award, a national Council on Crime and Celinquency citation, and six awards from the state Associated Press and state Publishers Association. In 2004 she was awarded a fellowship from the Open Society Institute to research articles on the imprisoned mentally ill.