The
California Legislature should pass Assembly Bill 1270, which will restore full
media access to the prisons, and Governor Brown should sign it into law. It's past time to admit that what goes on
inside these publicly owned places must be subject to public scrutiny.
I've spent the last 32 years imprisoned
in the darkness of the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, all of it
on maximum-security yards. On several
occasions, I've ended up in the hole for daring to speak out against the
rampant abuses of power that characterize this prison system. I'm not speaking on this from the position of
a lawyer or an academic; I've lived it.
When
the doors were barred to the media back in 1996, it was a part of the campaign
of then-Governor Wilson to create a criminal justice system as harsh as he
possibly could short of summary executions in the streets. Those were the years that saw the expansion
of the prison system at an unprecedented rate.
New, tilt-up institutions were plopped down from one end of the state to
the other. Small towns tried to outbid
each other to get their own prison.
To enforce the big crackdown inside, the
Department adopted different use of force standards and recruited a different
kind of guard. It wasn't long before
prisoners were being gunned down for fistfighting as the incidences of
brutality proliferated.
The trouble was, back then, the news
media occasionally came into the prisons and asked questions of people like
me. When I was interviewed in 1994 by a
Los Angeles television station and predicted that the proposed three-strikes
initiative would be used to lock up petty thieves and drug addicts, the powers
that be were none too happy. And numerous
other prisoners interviewed in other places all said the same thing. The proponents vehemently denied this would
happen. Time proved who was lying.
Corruption and incompetence hide behind
chaos. That's the best description of
the past generation of prison policies applied on the ground, inside. Billions of scarce dollars poured into this
sinkhole with none of the normal oversight that would be put on any other
governmental agency, especially any other police department. It's a question of accountability.
The prison bosses will come up with a
slew of reasons why the media shouldn't be allowed back in. They'll claim we'll be sending secret, coded
messages out, as if we can't get on a phone and say out loud what we've got to
say. They'll say our mere presence on a
screen will somehow traumatize society.
They'll huff and puff about safety and security, the all-purpose,
meaningless mantra of prison administrators.
But underneath the bluster, it's their
fear of being exposed that motivates the resistance. To build the most expensive, most expansive
prison system in history required painting us as the most dangerous and
uncontrollable monsters the world had ever seen. In their propaganda, we breathe fire and eat
nails, and we simply must be crushed at all costs.
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