BROOKE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. This weekend marks the official launch of the The Marshall Project, a quote "not-for-profit, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering America’s criminal justice system." That’s way things are going, right? Increasingly, in-depth public service journalism has to be paid for, at least initially, by a few, or even one, deep pocket donor. The poster child for this kind of news outlet is ProPublica. The philanthropic Sandler family launched it, and bought big-time credibility when it hired former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger to run it. For The Marshall Project, the pockets belong to former Journal reporter turned hedge fund manager Neil Barsky, and that blue-chip cred belongs to former New York Times Executive editor Bill Keller. Welcome back to the show.

KELLER: Thank you Brooke.

BROOKE: So give me your three big reasons for jumping on the Marshall Project.

KELLER: It's what the Pentagon refers to as a target-rich environment. I mean you had not just the police, the court, the prisons - but you have immigration you have drug policy. You have juveniles. Reason number 2 is the system is appallingly screwed-up. And the third reason. There actually is some potential for progress on criminal justice. Partly because there's a bit of an overlap between left and right on at least some issues of criminal justice. And partly because you have a generation that's grown up without the high crime rate that gave us a policy based on fear. 

BROOKE: So you're saying that this is not strictly speaking, a partisan issue. Where are those areas of overlap?

KELLER: There's a lot of agreement between right and left on reducing sentencing for low level drug offenders for example. Non-violent offenders. There is sentencing legislation that's co-sponsored by Corey Booker and Rand Paul. Two people who probably don't agree on very much of anything. I don't want to pretend that left and right are lying down like the lion and lamb. But there is common ground in the belief that we incarcerate way too many people. Keep them too long. And put them in prison too young. And we do way too little to help them re-enter society when they're done.

BROOKE: So what's Neil Barsky's interest in this? 

KELLER: He comes for a civil rights family -- his parents were members of the Congress on Racial Equality. And along with being a jouranlist, documentary filmmaker -- and importantly for our purposes - a successful hedgefund operator -- he's got a long history of philanthropy.

BROOKE: Is there like, a book, that changed his life?

KELLER: There were two, actually. Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, which talks about the mass incarceration as the latest iteration of slavery and Jim Crow. And The Devil in the Grove -- Gilbert King's account of a 1940's rape case in Florida in which a number of young black men were wrongfully convicted of the rape of a white woman.

BROOKE: Why would that have such an impact on Barsky now?

KELLER: There's an interesting kind of afterword. King interviewed a number of people who lived through that Jim Crow era, and were sort of aware of the lynching, the Ku Klux Klan behavior, the corruption of the Sheriff's office. They all sort of knew that but they sort of didn't want to know that. And there was a kind of willful ignorance and I think Neil's epiphany was that this is where journalism could actually confront people with problems that they would prefer not to see.

BROOKE: So, tell me what your lens will be trained on. At least in the beginning. What are your initial targets.

KELLER: Just by the nature of the beast a lot of what we right is going to be about things that are working badly. The first project that we're publishing with the new website has to do with a quirk in the law that means people who are condemned are cut off from their last avenue of appeal.

BROOKE: That's the piece that's coming out this weekend in the Washington Post. This is a 1996 law that's supposed to give you a speedy trial, but instead it ends up depriving people of the opportunity to get real justice.

KELLER: That's exactly right. And it's two parts. They're complicated pieces. I mean there were two things that made us settle on this particular project as our launch. One was that we wanted to send the message that we will do complicated stories. We think people will read complicated pieces if they're well done. And the other you know it's very easy to generate sympathy for people who are innocent. But the real test of a democratic criminal justice system is how it treats the guilty. Or the people who may well be guilty.

BROOKE: You've been very clear that this is not an advocacy group. But you do want to spark a reaction. Or to be more specific, action. Don't you?

KELLER: Absolutely. We wanna spark a sense of indignation. A sense of urgency.

BROOKE: You don't think there's enough of that?

KELLER: On this issue? No. I mean what really drives me nuts is the whole vicious cycle of it. Writ large, the criminal justice system is this institution that sucks up mostly black and Hispanic, mostly young men from their neighborhoods. Puts them in a place where they learn no skills except maybe some survival skills. And then dumps them back in those communities. Leaving aside whether it's humane, it's just not good for public safety. It's stupid.

BROOKE: What about the timing of the Marshall Project. We have a 2016 presidential campaign coming up. Do you want in on that?

KELLER: Yeah. Neil Barsky from the outset when he was asked 'what would you regard as a success?' - number one on his list is that in 2016 candidates who are routinely expected to have a position on Iran's nuclear weapons and immigration and taxes should be expected to have a position on criminal justice. It should be a natural thing that it comes up in the presidential debates.

BROOKE: Well Bill, thank you very much and good luck.

KELLER: Thank you.

BROOKE: Bill Keller is the editor of the new journalism non-profit that debuts this weekend devoted to the coverage of criminal justice called The Marshall Project.