Scope:
Editorial illustration & series art direction
Lead artwork for four-part investigative series
Supporting graphics & data visualization
Motion reel for social (Instagram)
Jailed in Crisis is a four-part investigative series produced by the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale in collaboration with the Arkansas Advocate. Published in March 2026, the series exposes the systemic failures in mental health care across Arkansas' county jails, examining deaths in custody, the dominance of a single private healthcare provider across more than 60% of jails, the financial conflicts of interest embedded in the Arkansas Sheriffs' Association, and the institutional opacity that allows these conditions to persist.
My role was to develop all visual assets for the series: a lead graphic for each of the four stories, supporting graphics throughout the articles, and a short-form video reel for the Lab's Instagram.
CHALLENGE: The subject matter demanded restraint. These are real people, some of them no longer alive, and real documents obtained through months of FOIA requests. The design couldn't aestheticize suffering or turn legal evidence into decoration. At the same time, the articles needed visuals strong enough to stop a scroll and communicate the weight of the investigation before a reader had read a single word.
The asset library was minimal: limited personal photographs of the first subject; a collection of legal documents and contracts; inspection reports; expenditure records; and watch logs. No photography budget. No illustration library. Everything had to be built from what the reporting itself had uncovered.
SOLUTION: Working within the visual identity I previously developed for the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale, I built a collage-based editorial system that uses the evidence itself as raw material. Redacted documents, highlighted contracts, watch logs with timestamps, and handwritten field notes become compositional elements, not just references.
For the series logo, the state of Arkansas is embedded in the letterforms of "in," a visual metaphor for the fact that this crisis is happening within the state, within its institutions. Orange human silhouettes stand in contrast to the archival materials, keeping the people, not the paperwork, at the center.
The Instagram reel extends the visual language into motion: barbed wire, audio waveforms from actual recorded calls with jail administrators, and the dissonance of hold music playing while someone tries to find out if a person in a county jail is receiving medical care.
