According to The Inquirer, Mensah M. Dean, a reporter for The Inquirer and the Daily News, has been named as the recipient of the 2017 Vernon Jarrett Medal for Journalistic Excellence.

The medal is awarded to a journalist that has written a piece "of significant importance or had a significant impact on some aspect of black life in America,” and comes with a $10,000 prize. It is given every year by the School of Global Journalism and Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore.

“In his career and lifetime, Vernon Jarrett used journalism to examine race relations and to uplift African Americans, which are goals that I share,” Dean said as he accepted the award.

Jarrett became the U.S.' first black syndicated columnist in 1970.

Dean was recognized for a series of heart-wrenching articles on Arthur Johnson, a Pennsylvania state prison inmate who spent 37 years in solitary confinement. Johnson was sentenced to such a cruel fate after two prison break attempts. He was originally put in jail for a 1970 gang-related murder.

"I done forgot how it feels to touch another person or to talk to another person without a [glass] screen or phone … it's terrible," Johnson said in an interview with Dean.

In September 2016, after Dean's articles were published, Johnson was ruled to be an "institutional exile" by a federal judge for being forced to live in “area smaller than the average horse stall”.

The same judge ordered that Johnson be returned to the prison's general population. Since then, Johnson, now 64, has filed a lawsuit against the prison system on claims of them violating the 8th and 14th Amendments.

The legal director of the Abolitionist Law Center, Brete Grote, nominated Dean for the award.

According to Grote, Dean's stories “provided a haunting glimpse of how the state buries people inside the prison system without the regard to the immense psychological toll it takes on them and their families.”