Point Reyes Light - August 24, 2000
Gov. Davis shields prisons from scrutiny
State legislators are again asking Gov. Gray Davis to open up the state prison system to closer public scrutiny by letting journalists conduct face-to-face interviews with individual prisoners and receive unfiltered mail from them.
The state Department of Corrections effectively banned inmate interviews in 1995 by administrative fiat. Under the current regulations, a journalist can only meet prisoners as a regular visitor, meaning they cannot bring pen, pencil, paper, or camera with them. Any further contact with a specific inmate is limited to receiving collect phone calls and filtered mail.
Three months ago, the state Assembly passed a bill with bipartisan support that would allow journalists to schedule interviews with prisoners and record the conversations by any means necessary. It now awaits a vote on the Senate floor.
Governor's veto However, Gov. Davis vetoed an identical bill last year on grounds that the presence of journalists would disrupt the prisons and glorify the convicts.
"This bill is inconsistent with the national trend to reduce, not expand, prisoners' rights," said Davis in his veto message. "The purpose of incarceration is punishment and deterrence, it is not to provide additional celebrity to convicts..."
Margot Bock, a corrections department spokesman, maintained this week that journalists have a "tremendous amount of access" to the state prison system. They are welcome to visit any facility and can ask questions of any inmate they encounter during their supervised tour, she said.
Journalists contact the corrections department every day to schedule these visits, she said, and the prison system has been well covered in the news by this method without giving reporters special visiting rights.
But there is a vast difference between providing random encounters with inmates and allowing detailed conversations with them, said Terry Francke, a lawyer with the California First Amendment Coalition. Questioning the procedure's legitimacy, he compared it to making journalists cover the state university system without allowing any contact with students. "You're just not going to get the same kind of story," he said.
Prison officials could set the rules Although the current legislation to lift the media ban has been recently amended to let prison officials set their own terms for scheduling interviews at each institution, Francke said it is highly questionable whether the governor will sign the bill this time around.
In related business, a federal judge ruled last month that the media has the right to witness the entire execution process. The decision came in response to a lawsuit filed by the California First Amendment Coalition and Society of Professional Journalists against the corrections department after a convicted killer was prepared for lethal injection behind closed curtains.
Prison officials said the practice was meant to protect the anonymity of the staff on death row, who might face retaliation from other prisoners if their identity were revealed.
However, District Court Judge Vaughn Walker said that danger was overstated compared to the public's right to see how the state goes about putting people to death.