Let Light Into the Prisons

Gov. Gray Davis is about to get the opportunity to undo an unwise decision he made last year that blocked the flow of information about the state’s vast prison system.

Last September, Davis vetoed a bill that would have restored reporters’ rights to conduct face-to-face interviews with specific prisoners. A new version of the bill, AB 2101, has passed the Assembly and is now before the Senate.

The ban on prison interviews was imposed in late 1995 by the state Department of Corrections under Gov. Pete Wilson, as part of a broader campaign to make prison sentences longer and harder. Allowing interviews with inmates, the thinking went, inevitably glorified criminals. But here’s the real consequence of the rule: The interview ban makes it very hard for the public to monitor how money is spent or how inmates are treated in California’s 33 prisons, which will eat up more than $3 billion in this year’s state budget.

The media blackout is extreme. Reporters may arrange to visit prisons and while inside can interview prisoners they happen to encounter; they can record those interviews through notes, audio or video. But if they want to see a specific prisoner, they are subject to the same rules as any other visitor and therefore are barred from taking with them a pen, paper, a tape recorder or camera.

Lawmakers last year asked Davis to reinstate the old rules, letting reporters interview specific prisoners and take with them the tools of their trade. But the governor vetoed the bill, saying it would “disrupt the orderly administration of prisons” and give journalists “preferential treatment” over prisoners’ families.

Neither Davis nor prison officials can muster evidence of abuses by reporters prior to this crackdown. Nor is cost a factor. In fact, the bill now moving toward the governor’s desk would cost state taxpayers nothing and conceivably could save public money by shining light on the California institutions that currently house 161,000 inmates, after Texas the nation’s second-largest prison population.