Sunshine: the Sequel—Blackout Behind Bars

If there was ever an American institution sorely in need of press scrutiny, it’s the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

California’s prison system is the third largest in the world—and the most troubled in the nation. Riots, brawls and lengthy “lock-downs” take place with regularity in nearly every California facility. Drastic overcrowding forces 16,300 of the system’s 170,000 inmates to bunk permanently in gyms and dayrooms. Huge prison gangs operate with impunity. The CDCR’s health care system is now in federal receivership because of at least 64 “preventable” deaths, and conditions that the judge who ordered the Fed takeover described as “often outright depravity.”

And, with the highest recidivism rate in the U.S., it seems fairly clear that, despite the recent addition of “Rehabilitation” to the department’s name, California prisons don’t rehabilitate anyone. “People are consistently coming out worse than they’re going in,” said Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency.

This year Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to spend approximately $9 billion on his frighteningly broken prison system. With a price tag that amounts to nearly $225 per California resident, it would seem fair that the public has the right to know if its money is being used wisely. But that, of course, would require aggressive media inquiry. Instead, reporters are prevented in nearly every possible legal way from getting access to the prisons and their inmates:

For instance, it takes months for journalists to get permission to enter a prison or to interview an inmate—if they are given access at all. Face-to-face interviews between journalists and specific prisoners are all but forbidden. Those interviews that are (occasionally) approved must be with inmates picked at random—no one specific—and are monitored by prison officials. Reporters are also typically forbidden from taking cameras, video equipment, or tape recorders inside the prison with them. Frequently they are even denied the use of a pen and notebook. The result, said the Society of Professional Journalists, is that many newspapers have mostly given up trying to cover California’s prisons.

Nevertheless, reports of prisoner abuse, neglect and other illegalities leak out with unsettling frequency through phone calls and visits with families, and to a few reporters, like myself, who receive regular collect calls from inmates. But without access, the allegations, if true, are nearly impossible to prove.

It wasn’t always thus. Up until 1995, reporters had reasonable access to prisons and inmates. But after a series of stories about various scandals—among them reports out of Pelican Bay and Corcoran prisons, that guards were staging inmate “gladiator” fights, often betting on the outcome and then, when the fights got out of control, of shooting the inmates involved—former Governor Pete Wilson took a kill-the-messenger approach to media relations and imposed new regulations that effectively shut the press out.

Since then, the state legislature has tried on multiple occasions to institute more moderate access rules—only to face a veto each time at the governor’s desk. The most recent such bill, sponsored by State Senator Gloria Romero, sailed through both houses this past summer—its 78-to-1 vote in the state Assembly, a near miracle of lawmaker cooperation.. But when the bill got to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s desk, he again vetoed it. This time in his veto message, Arnold stated that the press should be barred, because if allowed in they would “glamorize murderers and thereby once again traumatize crime victims and their families.”

I heard the same excuse two years ago, when I was among a group of reporters who interviewed two high ranking prison administrators. “We don’t want you making Charlie Manson any more famous than he is,” they said.

Right. Sure, we replied. That’s what we’re all dying to do.

And now here we are the middle of National Sunshine Week—seven glorious days devoted to discussing the damage wrought by government secrets. With that in mind, I’d suggest we ask ourselves—and California’s governor—if the state’s prisons have gotten better or worse since 1995 when the press was shut out.

It’s an easy question…..and the answer isn’t pretty.