Cerise Castle is a Los Angeles-based journalist specializing in culture, civil rights, criminal justice, and human interest stories. She wrote the first history of deputy gangs inside the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. She also created, produced and hosted A Tradition of Violence, a podcast detailing the history and criminal activity of deputy gangs. That reporting earned her the 2022 International Women in Media Foundation’s Courage Award, the American Journalism Online Award for the Best Use of Public Records, and the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. Castle has been a Poynter Fellow at Yale University, and led research at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy. She is currently a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Chicago, and working on her forthcoming book on deputy gangs.

Castle has also produced and hosted segments for the Emmy-award winning nightly news program, VICE News Tonight, NPR and nationally syndicated radio program Marketplace. Castle has also produced podcast series for Audible, iHeartMedia, and Wondery. Her reporting and commentary have been featured in ABC, Autre, Capital & Main, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times, The LAnd, Los Angeles Magazine, MTV, NPR, Salon and Vanity Fair.