| Chapter 13
Covering Prisons and Jails
By Jenifer Warren
Introduction
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons."
-Fyodor Dostoevsky
A century and a half has passed since Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky was arrested by the Tsarist police and locked away with other political activists in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. His confinement there, and in a Siberian labor camp, gave his later fiction a decidedly darker feel, complete with tormented characters and existentialist themes.
Today’s American prisons, with their electrified fences, “super-max” cells and racially segregated yards, bear little physical resemblance to the lock-ups of Dostoevsky’s time. But his famous observation remains a compelling invitation for journalists. The prison beat is incomparably rich turf, a hair-raising intersection of human drama, politics, money, conflict, and power that promises good tales aplenty.
Prying those stories loose from a subculture that remains quasi-militaristic, despite a wave of new correctional thinking and leadership, is only one challenge posed by the beat. Reporters covering corrections also may face apathy or outright hostility from readers, a lack of support and interest from editors, difficulty gaining the trust of sources and depression spawned by immersion in so much human misery.
Overlaying it all is the sometimes tricky task of gaining access to prisoners and their jailers. As former California Corrections Secretary Roderick Q. Hickman once told the Los Angeles Times, “We become very good at keeping inmates from getting out of prison, but we’re not very good at letting the rest of the world in.”
For the most part, that’s just fine with the rest of the world. By definition, prisoners have been convicted of a crime, and for many people, that’s enough information, regardless of whether the crime was a nonviolent drug offense or a brutal assault, or whether they contend that their conviction was wrongful.
When I first began covering corrections for the Los Angeles Times in the mid-1990s, the public response to many of my stories—arriving in angry letters asserting that all inmates were incorrigible animals who should rot in hell—caught me off guard. Even some friends, when they learned about my new beat, would raise an eyebrow, or suggest that writing about “thugs” was an unworthy investment of my time. I’ll never forget the words of one former acquaintance who was pleased by the local prison’s role in sorting her community’s recyclables: “I love the idea of prisoners picking through my trash,” she said.
Other critics complain that prison reporters make celebrities out of infamous criminals. Crime-victim advocates, in particular, say that stories detailing the fate of incarcerated convicts glorify the guilty while further traumatizing those upon whom they have preyed.
In some states, such sentiments have led to laws restricting media access to inmates, making it increasingly difficult for reporters to obtain one-on-one interviews. In the mid-1990s, California adopted such a policy, ending the ability of journalists to contact a specific inmate and arrange an in-prison interview. Instead, reporters were told they could schedule a general tour and interview only those prisoners they happened to encounter. Obviously, the odds of running into the lone inmate whose story you want to tell are very low, so reporters are now forced to use more cumbersome and time-consuming means to arrange contact. Typically, this means obtaining permission to join an inmate’s official visitors’ list and arranging a meeting through extended postal mail exchanges.
While such logistical hassles are frustrating, and are often designed to restrict the flow of information out of prisons, journalists should be ever mindful of the impact their reporting may have on survivors of crime. Helpful tips are available from the National Organization for Victim Assistance (www.trynova.org) the National Center for Victims of Crime (www.ncvc.org), and other groups.
The truth is, however, that the corrections beat today is about far more than celebrity bad guys—or about riots, abuse of force and overcrowding, three other staples of the past.
Over the last 30 years, America’s incarceration boom has produced a complex, far-flung and increasingly expensive correctional system wracked with problems, and brimming with potential for the enterprising journalist. In 2008, the Pew Center on the States reported that 1 in 100 American adults was behind bars, and federal and state spending on prisons topped $49 billion—four times the amount spent 20 years earlier. Amazingly, 13 states now spend more than $1 billion annually on their correctional systems, led by the granddaddy of them all, California, where annual spending exceeds $10 billion.
Clearly, the numbers alone make the correctional system a topic that demands serious attention by the media—especially after the 2008 national economic crisis, when states are coping with extraordinary budget deficits compelling cuts to all manner of vital public programs.
The fiscal impact of prisons is only one piece of the evolving story. Other elements ripe for exploration include an inmate population that is aging and increasingly sick; private prisons that are multiplying and adding a new dimension to the industry; prison gangs that continue to defy containment efforts; discouraging recidivism rates that are raising fresh questions about the nation’s fundamental correctional approach; and the increasing use of electronic monitoring and other technological tools to supervise offenders in the community.
Capital punishment, too, remains an ever controversial topic, especially given the rising number of wrongful convictions exposed through DNA testing. The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic, reports that since 1989, there have been 232 post-conviction DNA exonerations, says the New York-based Innocence Project. The average time served by the exonerees was 12 years. Of the 232 people freed, 17 had served time on death row.
Perhaps most fundamentally, strong coverage of corrections is important because prisons represent the power of the state over the individual. Journalists have an obligation to act as a check against that power, while making sure they don’t get taken in by the cons.
It all adds up to an irresistible, combustible mix—and, as Dostoevsky suggested so long ago, a beat that can beam back an important reflection of the society we have become.
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