This week’s lesson was on journalism ethics. We opened class with an on-theme warm up: a round of “Two Truths and a Lie.” It’s pretty basic - each person says three things about themselves, and the rest of the group has to guess which one is the falsehood.
Some of my favorites from the evening:
J: “I’ve written two sci-fi novels. At Attica they called me ‘Iron Man,’ which really pissed off another guy who had the title before I came. I’m getting married.”
The lie was the marriage - “I got no one.”
B: I’m working on a novel. I hate liver. I have two daughters, Nicole and Emily.”
The lie was the kids. He doesn’t have any.
T: “I lived on a farm. I have a million dollars. I once had 10 girlfriends at the same time.”
Everyone guessed the lie. “If you had a million dollars, man, you wouldn’t be telling us,” C said.
Mine was: I once appeared on Fox & Friends. I am an accomplished equestrian. My mother is turning 100 this week.
The lie: The horseback riding. I’m scared of the beasts.
Once we settled down, I had one of the men read the first few paragraphs of “Jimmy’s World,” a heart-wrenching story of an eight-year-old heroin addict, by Janet Cook. The article was published in the Washington Post in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for its author.
It was also a complete fabrication.
We talked about the aftermath of this major journalistic breach of ethics. As one of my NYT editors put it after the Jason Blair fiasco, “Number one- don’t make sh%^t up.” We explored less egregious violations, like the importance of accuracy, fairness, the concept of false equivalency, impartiality, and independence.
All the men were familiar with the concept of plagiarism, which basically comes down to stealing other people’s stuff. And they completely grasped the idea that most people you interview have an agenda. We had a spirited conversation about whether objectivity was possible. Not one person, including myself, thought it was.
Next, the men took turns reading “Compromising The Compromised” by Brandon J. Baker, published by The Prison Journalism Project. The piece was written in 2021 during the pandemic, and posed the question of whether corrections officers should be mandated to get the Covid vaccine.
We never even got around to discussing the quality of the actual article - what worked and what didn’t - because the men had such visceral reactions to the topic of Covid in prison.
T had been at a different prison during Covid. There they’d enforced the safe distance rule of remaining six feet apart during the day, “but in the dorm there were 50 men and our cots were like two feet apart, and we weren’t allowed to wear masks.”
Prisons varied in their mask policy during Covid. Generally, covering your face is banned because it is considered a security risk. Some prisons prohibited masks, then allowed it, then prohibited it again.
J noted, “First we got yelled at for wearing masks. Then they told us we could make our own, using t-shirts and two rubber bands. I made masks for the older dudes.”
S said that when Covid broke out in his dorm, he tested negative and was sent to “the box” [solitary confinement] for quarantine. “I was in there for two weeks. That’s inhumane. You punished if you didn’t get it. So many people got sick. It was a mess.”
B, who was one of the first people in his prison to get Covid, said, “It was just like the nursing homes. They weren’t telling the truth about how many guys died. We’ll never know.”
D talked about waiting for the virus to hit, knowing many other prisons in the state already had outbreaks. “Programs were shut down, visits were shut down. It had to be coming in through the COs” (Correction officers.)
J said, “This CO came in so sick. He looked disgusting. He told us they forced him to come into work. That day two guys died. Another time one guy just fell out in front of us. We didn’t want to touch him. We didn’t know how dangerous it was.”
As always, we could have spent the rest of this class talking, but we had writing to do. The prompt: Write about a time you faced an ethical dilemma. It could be in prison or not. Was there a clear right or wrong? Be specific and use description. Paint the scene.
One man wrote about whether a revenge shooting was justified, a subject that resonated with the rest of the class.
D’s story opened with, “I was sitting in the Rec Room, eating Ramen noodles and watching TMZ. A guy comes in, carrying all his gear, and goes to the officer, ‘I need to be moved. I’m not safe. You gotta get me out of there.’”
His piece goes on to say that the guard refused, saying that unless someone has attacked him, the prisoner couldn’t be moved. The prisoner pleads, the officer pushes back and D writes that after a few rounds of this, the officer says, “It’s either going to be green or blue, your choice.”
Translation: Either you are going to get beaten by correction officers or fellow inmates.
The guard leaves the recreation area, and three fellow prisoners set upon the guy who had asked for help. “Three sets of feet are kicking him. His head is bouncing on the floor,” D wrote. “Then just whimpering.”
The ethical dilemma: to help the guy or not? “It’s surreal,” writes D. “You just step out of yourself and let it happen. If you speak up, you’ll never be rid of the green.” (Fellow prisoners.)
B raised his hand: “Following up on the question of complicity. You’re supposed to ostracize someone if they aren’t obeying the prison code. Maybe they’re gay, or convicted of a sex crime, or they don’t fight back. Or they have a gambling debt or a drug debt.”
B told the story of a young kid who couldn’t pay a debt. Some of the guys on his dorm, including B himself, bailed the kid out once, but not a second time. “We just threw him to the wolves. On the street we would have protected him. But we can’t do that here.”
J talked about watching an elderly prisoner walking uphill while carrying something heavy, struggling on an icy path. J said he wanted to help the guy, but he could get “a ticket or worse” if he assisted the old man, since
J wasn’t allowed in that area of the prison.
“I just walked by him,” J wrote. “And I was angry because prison had bullied me out of showing my humanity again.”
Class was over at 8 pm. On the drive home I was listening to a book on tape - “The Murder of Mr. Wickham.” I’m not proud - it’s Jane Austen fan fiction, all clipped English accents, good manners and worried glances upon countenances. I poured myself a glass of wine when I got home.
“How was class?” my husband asks.
“You know. Sad.”
I’m a retired public defender. By the end of my career most of my clients were the hardest or most violent men. All of them loved a good story and many of them regaled me with well-paced, intriguing or hilarious anecdotes. I always encouraged them to write. Most of them had no one to write to, or worried that their tales would be viewed as snitching. They wrote to me for years. Finally I quit, so sad and overwhelmed by the absolute waste of their lives and the agony they inflicted on family and strangers. When a brother father sister mother goes to prison, the family goes, too. Many men broke contact with family when they got long sentences, because they did not want their family to have to do time with them. I know for a fact that there are many bad mad and dangerous men who cannot live with us, but they don’t have to live in misery forever.
This was very interesting and brought up some intense memories also.
I have family and several friends in prison. My father-in-law is doing life in Angola. He's been there for over 40 years. Me and my wife took our two teenage boys to visit him last October, and that was the first time he had seen his daughter since she was a newborn. My wife is 48. I'm confident that him getting to know her and then, to finally be able to give her a hug, has been one of the best things that has ever happened in that man's life, and I'm not just saying that because he says it all the time, it's not hard to tell.
She's been visiting with him through phone and video visits for around 10 years now and it was scary when COVID hit. We didn't know what would happen in a prison like that with so many inmates and COs.
I had never heard of the "Jimmy's World" story until now, or at least I didn't notice at the time, I was a slightly older Jimmy in the 80's, but that article image made me think about just how much people and institutions have profited from the war on drugs. The willingness to fabricate a story like that just to ride that wave says a lot about human nature.
I'm glad this showed up in my Substack recommendations, I'm looking forward to reading more. Thank you.