Two men. Two murders. One fate.
The inmates on death row at Central Prison in Raleigh will tell you about their families, their histories and their crimes. They will tell you about the education they did not receive, the drug counseling they did not get and the parents who were not around. Some of them will try to excuse their actions with these things, as if it's OK to kill as long as you have sufficient proof that you're underprivileged.
Well, there are no excuses for murder, and it's not OK to kill, no matter what your class. But if there's one thing that I've learned documenting the lives of two death row inmates since September, it's that these men ended up here for a reason. They didn't pop out of their mothers as murderers; they evolved into killers.
I don't know either of their life stories; the juicy tidbits only come out sporadically-one likes NASCAR, the other Duke basketball, both admire Rae Carruth's attorney, David Rudolf, and have choice words to say about our newly elected governor-but I know enough to say for sure that they weren't born to go to jail.
So what happened? What led these two men to kill two others? There's no simple answer, of course, no purely scientific explanation, but the stories these men tell about their lives, about the mistakes they've made, are important.
They are important like Holocaust stories are important-ignoring them or forgetting them won't do any good. Preventing tragedy in the future is hard if you don't understand the tragedies of the past. They are stories that need to be heard. But they are stories that are becoming increasingly difficult for prisoners to tell.
That's because more and more laws are restricting journalists and documentarians from interviewing prisoners. Politicians, trying to look "tough on crime" and fearful that journalists will lionize killers, are passing laws prohibiting the news media from accessing criminals.
California probably has the worst media access policy. In 1996, state politicians passed a law forbidding journalists from interviewing specific inmates face-to-face. The law was almost overturned last October, but California governor Gray Davis vetoed the bill. In addition, journalists may be required to pay the security costs provided for any interview.
Other states are not much kinder to the men and women who cover their prisons. According to the Society of Professional Journalists, Pennsylvania's new prison access policy "amounts to almost a blanket ban on news media contact." In Idaho, journalists are allowed to request interviews, but the corrections director there hasn't approved one since his appointment in 1993.
The restrictions are becoming excessive, and sometimes prison officials can do more than simply not allow an inmate to be interviewed. A recent National Public Radio piece about a messy incident at a Massachusetts prison offers a rather extreme example: After thirty inmates at MCI-Shirley alleged that they were beaten, cut and, according to the Boston Globe, bitten by dogs during a standard three-day contraband search last October, the prison chaplain, Paul Poyser, went to the Massachusetts Department of Corrections, requesting that the DOC investigate.
When the DOC refused, Poyser went to a Boston radio station with the prisoners' charges. The Department subsequently began an investigation, but Poyser has been suspended indefinitely with pay for talking to the press about the incident. Subsequent media requests for interviews with prisoners and guards have been denied. (In this case, of course, it isn't simply an issue of inmates not being allowed to "tell their stories." It is also the much more serious charge of inmates not being allowed to report abuse).
The problem, also, is that journalists are not doing much to make lawmakers believe that they will report responsibly. For every Thin Blue Line (filmmaker Errol Morris' documentary about an innocent man on death row which actually resulted in the man's release), there are three or four airings of When Criminals Attack, Part Nine!
So what can be done? Can a policy be written that both gives prison officials discretion and journalists room to learn about inmates and scrutinize the system?
The answer is yes. And it can be found right here, in North Carolina.
The media access policy here, which the SPJ says "is the exception" to the rule, allows reporters to access prisoners "by every practicable means, including visits." The policy, however, limits access when it might "threaten security, disrupt orderly administration, damage morale, or militate against the effectiveness of correctional treatment." Most importantly, the policy seems to be enforced fairly.
Lawmakers everywhere should take a cue from North Carolina. By restricting media access to prisoners, politicians are doing a tremendous disservice to the public, to the very people they are trying to protect.
Lucas Schaefer is a Trinity freshman and an associate editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
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