Susan Ferriss

Susan Ferriss is a prize-winning former foreign correspondent who has been investigating treatment of children by the U.S. justice and immigration system, law enforcement and the school-discipline process. She joined the Center in 2011. She won a first-place investigative prize from the national Education Writers Association for her 2012 series revealing how thousands of Los Angeles school police citations were pushing mostly Latino and black kids, almost half younger than 14, into courts for minor infractions. She is also a two-time Casey journalism award finalist for her police stories and an investigation into excessive expulsions of students in Kern County, California’s “expulsion capital.” In 2014, she won Columbia University’s Tobenkin national journalism award for reporting on discrimination for “Throwaway Kids.” This report documented how Latino farmworker kids were forced to attend alternative schools in California so far away from home they either dropped out, or only attended one day a week while enrolled full time on paper. As a reporter at the Sacramento Bee, Susan produced prize-winning immigration stories and covered state government and politics. And as a Latin America correspondent for nearly a decade with Cox Newspapers, Susan covered everything from indigenous rights movements and death squads in Colombia to transnational migration and drug trafficking. Her series on failed economic reforms in Mexico won top honors from the Overseas Press Club and the Inter-American Press Association and was a Loeb business reporting finalist. Susan is co-author of The Fight in the Fields, a history of Cesar Chavez and the farmworker movement and producer of The Golden Cage, a documentary about farmworkers. She was a Knight fellow at Stanford University and is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and UC Berkeley.