SG: The primary challenge of media, whether radio, internet, or network, is ratings. Without positive ratings, popular media can't sell advertisements. Considering that conventional media are already facing budget challenges as a result of new venues, particularly the internet, activist-style programming is not at the top of their agenda. Crime sells, but rehabilitation hardly brings in the ratings.
The goal of all media should be to interweave prison reform into popular crime programs, similar to the way Pat O'Connor does it at www.crimemagazine.com. He understands the public mindset, and entertains his audience with titillating pieces on crime, yet does an amazing job of showing the crimes of the system in making recidivism worse. This should be the first method for all media, whether through traditional network programs or through today's internet blogs.
The second challenge is to put public corrections officials' feet to the fire. The only true national magazine that does this in the U.S. is Prison Legal News. Many times I have personally witnessed mainstream media personnel come into a prison and print almost verbatim the perspective of guards or staff in the public-relations' offices of many DOC central offices. Prison bureaucrats go to great lengths to cover improprieties. They know that if the public gets wind of how abhorrent conditions really are in most U.S. prisons, their jobs would be on the line. Thus, they only let in the media personnel who slavishly reprint their versions of public-interest stories. This is why many citizens share so many misconceptions about prisons, such as the common one that Florida's prisons have air conditioning. It's simply not true.
Media should reject such stifling of free speech by demanding to have less-restricted access to inmates, as they did in the late sixties and early seventies. Those prison officials that consequently restrict media access should then be lambasted with the truth, until they feel the heat, provide media access, and stop the abuses. Prisons are about prisoners, yet other than dramatized versions of prisons in shows like Lock-Up, rarely do people get the prisoners' versions of conditions, until something extreme happens, such as killings of guards during riots. It shouldn't have to reach that point.
There seems to be nothing independent about most mainstream media, at least not in dealing with prison issues, and that's a shame in a country that supposedly prides itself on "free speech.'
A3N: If you were given five minutes on a mainstream news show, and were therefore able to speak directly to the general public, how would you address the commonly held belief that abusive prison conditions serve to reduce "crime' and improve public safety?
SG: I would start with the "three Rs': Retribution, Rehabilitation, and Recidivism.
A3N: Retribution?
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