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Prison Access Quill
Prison Access Problems Continue
By Teresa Allen

Accepted for November 2004 publication by Quill magazine.

     Recently, I was denied even a pencil to record an interview with a condemned woman living on California 's Death Row.
    I left the prison wondering what department of corrections officials are trying to hide with rules that stop reporters from doing their jobs.
    Many journalists, including myself, would say a lot.
     In California , and in other prison administrations across the country, shinning a light on inmate abuse, overspending, and over-crowding caused largely by a lack of any meaningful rehabilitation programs, are reasons enough to keep observant journalists at a safe distance.
    It is up to reporters and their news organizations to fiercely question, resist and even take action against these restrictive policies that have eroded First Amendment rights and forced journalists to compromise on various levels their primary mission and ethical standards.
    In California , a proposed bill (SB 1164) to give back to journalists “reasonable” access to inmates and prisons—sponsored by the California Newspaper Publicher's Association, the ACLU and the Society of Professional Journalists—was vetoed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger after it had cleared the Senate and Assembly. Similar legislation has failed three times to win support from former California governors.
    It is a decision that will impact reporters from around the nation.

    When prison officials in California recently dismissed my request for a face-to-face media interview with condemned inmate, Maureen McDermott, citing policies restricting this kind of access, I had only one other option.
    The alternative was to enter the prison as a visitor, designate myself as a “friend” on required prison paperwork—violating my standards as a journalist—and be forced to follow the same restrictive rules and regulations as the public.
    As a crime reporter of many years, (and now a professor of journalism at California Polytechnic State University writing a book on how women live inside prison), I attempted to quiet my professional outrage and make the best of the situation.
    After all, I had already waded through six months of paper work just to be placed on my inmate's visiting list—a luxury barely tolerable to some book journalists but not, of course, to a daily journalist working on a timely news story.
    I was troubled to learn that “visitors” were not allowed to bring in pen or paper, much less the audio or video recording that is important for accuracy for all journalists but essential for radio and television reporters.
    But prior to my arrival, I was assured by corrections officials that a prison-issued pencil would be made available to me. The fact that I had no paper to write on seemed less important than being denied this single basic tool of journalism.
    I could use paper towels from the women's room, I thought to myself, and sneak them out in my underwear.
    In the end, the paper part didn't matter anyway.
    The promised pencil, I later learned, was inside a limited number of board games that could be checked out from the head correctional officer.
    But by the time I arrived, only minutes after the doors officially opened in visiting, all games and pencils had been assigned for the day.
    I left the prison three hours later without writing down a single word.

    The trend to tighten media access gathered steam in California in 1995 and spread eastward to other states also troubled by media scrutiny.
     The movement became so widespread, in fact, that in 1998 the Society of Professional Journalists commissioned a special survey of media access practices in state corrections departments across the country.
     The report concluded that prison systems and journalists were fundamentally at odds when it came to reasonable media access. And if anything, says report writer and journalism professor, Charles Davis, access has only tightened over the subsequent years.
     Today, California is only one of number of states in which media face-to-face interviews have been banned altogether with reporters able to interview only prisoners they “randomly” encounter on prison tours at which they are at the mercy of their official prison guides.
     In addition, all telephone calls and correspondence with inmates is closely monitored by prison officials. Access to spontaneous prison life beyond the well-monitored visiting room is practically nil.
     Why should prisoner access be a compelling issue for journalists?
     Because when members of the media are denied reasonable access to prisoners, or the ability to monitor and investigate any public institution, then all of society is at risk—not just the voices silenced behind the prison walls.
     In my current role as a professor of journalism, I tell my students that their primary mission is to be the “watch dogs” for the community. As reporters, I lecture them, it is their responsibility to be there as proxies for the people: in the war zones, classrooms, ghettos--and yes, even behind prison walls.
     Like their turn-of-the-century predecessor, Nellie Bly, and the other celebrated journalist “muckrakers,” their job is to investigate the secret alleyways of society and, if need be, expose injustice and cruelty.
     Have we learned nothing from the recent abuses at Abu Ghraib prison?
     Let's not forget that the documented torture in this Iraqi prison, now so familiar around the world, only reached public consumption after it was clandestinely leaked to journalists who also discovered that some in charge got their training in American prisons.
     Wouldn't everyone be better off if problems were discovered early and immediately addressed?

    It hasn't always been so difficult to talk to prisoners or cover the prison system.
    When I was a newspaper reporter in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1980s, I routinely, and with little administrative fanfare, entered the inner world of infamous San Quentin Prison, as well as other maximum-security male and female institutions around the state. I was able to conduct, record and photograph face-to-face interviews with even the most high-risk inmates, and most importantly, go beyond the sanitized “visiting room” area to see the workings of the prison for myself.
    During those days, I reported on such diverse topics as gang problems inside prison, convict culture, drugs and other contraband inside the walls, life on death row and such controversial subjects as the hard fought mainstreaming of women correctional officers into male institutions.
     I don't recall that any story proposal was denied me at that time-even those that reflected negatively on the administration.
     This is as it should be. So why has it changed?
     In the mid-1990s, in order to shut out the press, prison officials claimed that having reporters on the scene endangered the public and prison security. Furthermore, the media was making celebrities out of high profile criminals like Charles Manson and turning prison officials into their PR agents.
     But that argument, says media access advocate Peter Sussman, is based on two faulty assumptions: first, that people like Charles Manson weren't celebrities before they ever arrived in prison and, second, that the purpose of journalism is to act as a mouthpiece for interviewees.
     In fact, says Sussman, of the Society of Professional Journalists, the journalist's job is to be skeptical, to question interviewees, to hold their feet to the fire, make them defend their statements -- and to let the “story” fall where it may. Indeed, he maintains, effective access for journalists, on behalf of the public, is the best antidote to the prisoner-generated rumors, misinformation and myths that truly ARE a danger to prison security.

    Certainly no working journalist has the time to navigate--or in some cases circumvent, as I attempted--new access rules that have been set up in many prisons around the country.
     Faced with delays that sometimes constitute months of lead time, important investigative stories are routinely abandoned for other projects. And even if I were lucky enough to scrounge up a “pencil” during a future visiting opportunity, this bowing to the current rules does not help broadcast and radio journalists who won't go where they are forbidden to use the basic tools of their trade.
     And deadline is not the only issue. Being forced to visit a source as a “friend,” as I did in California , injures the professional relationship between a reporter and a source because newsgathering should be based on fairness and accuracy and not a personal relationship-or even the appearance of one.
     The lack of scrutiny over a government agency, and especially prison systems predicated on dominance and control, not only denies the public its right to document the spending of its tax dollars, but also is an open invitation to abuse and neglect-especially in the case of female offenders.
     We need only look to the inhumanity of the unsupervised women's prisons in the early nineteenth century. Or, in a more contemporary light, a 1996 published report by the Human Rights Watch Women's Rights Project that carefully documents and details the rampant sexual abuse taking place today in women's prisons across the country.

    My interview with California condemned inmate, Maureen McDermott, came at the very end of my book research. I'm thankful I'm finishing and not beginning my work on how women live behind bars. I'm not sure the project, because of current restrictions on access, could be done today.
     Our long awaited meeting took place inside a room about the size of a prison cell, and once we were seated, a guard locked us in together from the outside.
     To leave the room, to use the lavoratory or buy snacks in the concession area, a visitor, through the glass window, must catch the attention of a guard sitting at the reception area across the room.
     The first thing I did was share a personal story with McDermott.
     During my “negotiations” with prison officials to interview McDermott, I also requested a tour of death row for women. The number of condemned women in California had gone from zero--when I was a crime reporter in the 1980s--to 15 today, nearing cell capacity of the current row.
     There were photographs of death row on the department's web page. But I wanted to see this relatively new addition to the prison for myself and not view the photographs that prison PR officials served up for public consumption.
     My request was denied based on prison “security issues,” and when I pressed, I was told the policy also was for my own protection considering the high-risk inmates living on the row.
     The point was not lost on McDermott as she offered me first dibs on an array of fast food I was allowed to purchase for us at the visiting room concession stand.
    “And here you are, locked up inside a room and eating fried chicken with one of the killers they're suppose to be protecting you from,” she said.
     We shared an ironic laugh.
     I don't believe the prison thought I was in any danger.
     But I can't help wondering who will protect the inmates—and ultimately the public when they are released without needed tools—from the effects of a system that strives to conduct its business in secret and gives control to the very people whose actions should be routinely scrutinized.
     Is there any other branch of government where we allow basic journalistic rights to go unheeded?

Teresa Allen is an associate professor of journalism at Cal Poly State University where she teaches media ethics, as well as reporting and writing classes. Her book, “ Honey, This Ain't No Country Club:” Women Doing Hard Time , is under contract with Columbia University Press.