After months and months of requests from WBEZ, Illinois Public Radio, and other media outlets, Illinois Governor Pat Quinn is finally allowing reporters into some state prisons.
It’s a step in the right direction but it took the threat of a federal law suit and the Quinn administration continues to throw up roadblocks to meaningful transparency. WBEZ’s Robert Wildeboer reports on the recent legal efforts and the state’s new media policy.
If you’re a regular listener to this station, then you may have heard some of the stories we’ve aired about inmates living in crowded basements that habitually flood, infestations so severe an inmate had to get a cockroach surgically removed from his ear, and a broken jaw going untreated for 8 weeks while the inmate withered away because it was too painful to eat.We thought the public should see and know first-hand exactly what’s going on. But Governor Quinn has consistently refused requests for access.
Public officials and citizens called on the governor to let reporters into prisons but Quinn was unresponsive. So over the past several weeks WBEZ has been working with attorneys Jeffrey Colman and Jason Bradford from the law firm of Jenner and Block. They volunteered their time to represent WBEZ to push for access. Colman says he’s spent a lot of time in prisons and he believe it’s extraordinarily important for the public, the taxpayers, to understand what the conditions are in Illinois state prisons, in our federal prisons, at places like Guantanamo, and He thinks it’s wrong for government to deny the media and through the media the public the ability to see and hear what things are like in the prisons and what the hundreds and hundreds of millions dollars of taxpayer money are being used to do. Colman and Bradford met with attorneys for Governor Quinn and the general counsel for the department of corrections.
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Last Friday the department of corrections released a new media policy though it’s disappointingly similar to the old media policy. Basically – it leaves everything to the discretion of the director of the department of corrections. But here’s the new part: Instead of blocking media visits altogether, the department is now planning to hold a few media tours including visits to Vienna and Vandalia, prisons that had earlier been told could not happen because of blanket concerns about safety and security. But the new policy does not allow reporters to take microphones or cameras on the tours and that is a significant impediment for reporters trying to inform the public about what’s going on inside. It means if there’s mold or flooding, the public won’t be able to see how severe it is or isn’t. The public won’t know what Building 19 at Vienna looks like when all the windows are boarded up like it’s an abandoned building even though it still houses hundreds of inmates. It means the public can’t see first-hand what it looks like when the ceiling on an entire cell block collapses requiring 88 men to be moved to a gym where they’re forced to share only 2 toilets.
In an emailed statement a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections noted that media is permitted to bring a notebook and the department will provide so-called flex pens on tours, which is above and beyond what is permitted on any other tour.
John Maki is with the John Howard Association, a non-partisan prison watchdog group in Illinois.
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Carol Marin is a reporter with NBC 5 and WTTW in Chicago and a columnist for the Chicago Sun Times. She’s reported from dozens of prisons.At her desk at NBC Marin shows me video footage from stories she’s done in prisons. In one from the late 1970s she chats with 6 or 8, maybe more inmates about the importance of gang ties behind bars. Marin says historically, reporters have been able to take their equipment all over prisons. She shows me a story from 2005 where she interviews an inmate on the cell block and others in a work shop where inmates are welding. Marin says it matters to bring in the equipment because you can’t report on prisons if you can’t see them, if you can’t talk to inmates, and if you can’t bring in a camera, and what the administration is counting on is that in a day of reduced news budgets, fewer reporters, and the distance that prisons are that we won’t care or we won’t cover it and as a consequence taxpayers won’t see it. Marin says she thinks that the department of corrections also figures that news organizations are suffering from shrinking budgets and are therefore unlikely to sue for access.
Coleman says opening the Illinois prisons to media review for the first time in several years is a very positive development but He says he continues to believe that the department of corrections policies and practices -- including this new directive -- violate constitutional guarantees and deprive the public of the meaningful ability to see and hear about conditions in the prisons and what taxpayer monies are being funded to do. Three media tours at state prisons are tentatively scheduled – one a month - for each of the next three months.
