Peter Sussman Paper

(The following is a talk by Peter Sussman of the San Francisco Chronicle
and author of COMMITTING JOURNALISM)

Reprinted in Censored 1997: The News That Didn't Make the News,
by Peter Phillips & Project Censored (Seven Stories Press)


CRIMES OF SILENCE

(The following talk on crime, prisons and the media has been delivered in
various versions at the California state universities at San Bernardino and
Sonoma, at the Freedom Forum's Pacific Coast Center, and to a World Wide
Web-based class at the University of South Florida.)


By Peter Y. Sussman

I'd like to begin with a point that can't be repeated enough and underlines
the importance of all we talk about today:

In no other area of social policy I can think of is public perception -
shaped by news media coverage - so much a part of the problem itself as in
the area of crime and punishment. Police crackdowns are initiated, judicial
sentences are handed down and laws are passed in an atmosphere of fear -
and even hysteria -occasioned by the most recent [ital]crime of
note[unital], and we journalists are the ones doing the
[ital]noting[unital]. The news media share deep complicity for the
ever-more-apparent failures of our criminal justice system.

So do the prison systems that not only wall off prisoners from the outside
world but wall off the outside world from prisons, so that the public is
unable to shape effective policies to keep people from going to prisons in
the first place.

The other general point I would like to make at the outset concerns our
journalistic priorities in organizing coverage. There are three basic
phases of the criminal justice process - (1) the crime and its immediate
aftermath, (2) the judicial proceedings, and (3) the punishment. News media
have police beats to report the crime and its aftermath; that is, the
initial day or days of the criminal justice process. Then they have court
beats to cover the judicial proceedings; that takes care of the next few
months of the process. But the third part of the process, the punishment,
specifically prison, can take many years, and there are very few news
outlets in this country that cover it at all. With rare exceptions, there
is no prison beat.=20

I stumbled into this prison business in 1986 when I published in the San
Francisco Chronicle a riveting account of AIDS in prison submitted "over
the transom" by a convict.=20

For the purposes of this class, maybe I can best introduce myself and my
interest in the field of Crime and the Media by quoting some introductory
passages from [ital]Committing Journalism: The Prison Writings of Red
Hog[unital], the book I co-authored with former federal prisoner and bank
robber Dannie M. Martin:

[ital]In August 1986, when I published in the Chronicle Dannie Martin's
first commentary on prison life, the 46-year-old convict had a rap sheet
that spanned more than 30 years. He had done about 21 years in reform
schools, prison camps, jails, prisons, penitentiaries, even a workhouse
chain gang, and he was five years into a 33-year sentence for bank robbery
at Lompoc federal penitentiary in central California. He was, as he later
wrote, "a criminal by any definition I know of."

[ital]I had done 22 years as an editor at the Chronicle, and I could not
then imagine a more unlikely writer, let alone colleague, than this burly
convict known to his fellow prisoners as Red Hog.

[ital]Yet our unusual journalistic collaboration - though that would have
seemed far too grandiose a word for what we began doing that summer - has
had a widening national impact. In more than 50 essays, most of them
reprinted in this book, the self-educated bank robber has given a human
face to his fellow convicts, challenging prevailing American attitudes
toward prisons and prisoners during a time when the United States surpassed
the former Soviet Union and South Africa to become the nation with the
highest percentage of its population behind bars. . . .

[ital]Dannie has lived in extreme situations and seen others in extremis.
Perhaps one needs to see people at their worst to recognize also the best
that they are capable of. For whatever reason, Dannie was able to write
with compassion and honesty about a world that contained little of either.
His revealing freelance narratives and engaging writing style soon gained
him a large readership, both in Northern California and - through
wire-service syndication - in newspapers throughout the country.

[ital]The response was also enthusiastic among Dannie's fellow convicts;
like all prisoners, their deadening isolation had been reinforced by the
stereotyped ways they were regarded by the world outside the walls.
Countless correspondents from jails and prisons have told us over the years
that they never expected to see their perspective portrayed in the news
media. In Dannie they found a voice, someone who did much to "help 'jail
people' become 'regular people,'" in the words of one convict letter writer=
=2E

[ital]In the five-plus years over which these prison essays were written,
Dannie and I made few overall assessments of our venture as we shaped each
story for publication in the Chronicle. Indeed, prison life, like
journalism, is notoriously a day-by-day existence, with little room for
sweeping evaluations or projections. But in retrospect, ours appears to
have become the most sustained attempt in memory to tell the inside story
of prison life in a general-circulation newspaper.

[ital]Through most of those years, I conferred with Dannie almost daily by
phone, living the prison life vicariously (by far the best way to do time).
In turn, I was his primary link with the readers and their interests and
with the reporters who wanted to tell the world of this compelling writer
and the legal stir he had kicked up. [I'll discuss that legal stir in a
moment.]

[ital]In our collaboration is a useful metaphor. As Dannie gained more of a
stake in the society whose values he had ignored all his life, we forged a
mutual trust. Dannie and I - a junkie who had spent most of his adult life
inside prisons and an editor who had seen prisons only from a car window -
were passing figurative messages back and forth between our respective
worlds. We were opening the way for dialogue about crime and punishment in
this culture that has had too much of each.[unital]

"The legal stir" I referred to in that passage followed a crackdown by
federal prison officials in 1988. After two years of writing for the
Chronicle without official response, Dannie wrote a piece critical of his
warden's policies and ended up in "the hole" two days after I published his
essay. A week after that, he was transferred hastily out of the federal
penitentiary in Lompoc - to get him as far from me as possible - and
charged with violating a never-before-enforced prison regulation
restricting writing by prisoners in the news media.=20

The regulation Dannie was charged with violating outlawed bylines [ital]in
the news media[unital] and compensation for writing [ital]in the news
media[unital]; and it outlawed "acting as a reporter," a provision whose
meaning was never defined. To protect Dannie after an adverse ruling at the
district court level, I was compelled to run his reports from prison under
the byline: "By a Federal Prisoner." I felt like an editor in apartheid-era
South Africa.

The federal prison authorities interpret their regulatory authority so
broadly that they apparently feel they have a right even to tell newspaper
editors on which page of the newspaper they can run stories by federal
prisoners.

This "inmate reporter" regulation was drafted originally in the 1970s to
control the writings of imprisoned antiwar activists and other "extremely
anti-establishment" inmates, to use the words of the man who headed the
Federal Bureau of Prisons at the time. Simply put, it was a politically
motivated regulation designed to control the content of free-world
newspaper articles originating in prisons.

The regulation's intent - its unconstitutional intent - was made explicit
during appeals court arguments when the Justice Department attorney said
that the Bureau of Prisons "had to draw a line somewhere. They chose to
draw it in a way that goes after the news media . . . " which prompted one
newspaper attorney to summarize the hearing by saying, "I have only one
thing written down on my pad: 'They chose to go after the news media.'"=20

That federal prison regulation is still in effect, intimidating other
prisoners who might recklessly consider writing down their views and
submitting them to a newspaper or magazine.

The crackdown on Dannie began a legal battle that generated national
interest and taught me a great deal about the dynamics of prison life. I
have learned subsequently of a number of other First Amendment battles
involving news media access rights to prisoners (I'll get back to one of
those later), and I have come to believe that official intransigence has
done a lot to isolate prisoners unnecessarily. As I indicated earlier, the
result has been that we on the outside do not have the information we need
to evaluate public-policy issues involving crime and punishment.=20

Why should we care what happens in prison? For one thing, a rapidly
increasing proportion of our public resources are going to financing
prisons, often in competition with education and social programs that might
more effectively prevent future criminal behavior.

Furthermore, how people are treated in prison has a lot to do with how they
act when they get out, so that much of our crime problem is really another
facet of our punishment problem. I cite, as just one small example of the
kind of insights we could gain from prisoners, the following words from my
co-author Dannie Martin; he is talking about the decades-long determinate
sentences being meted out to prisoners, especially those convicted of
relatively minor drug offenses:=20

[ital]The public is unable to imagine what the added time does to a convict
and what it does to his family.

[ital]Two years is a lot of time. Twenty or 30 years is a Mount Everest of
time, and very few can climb it. And what happens to them on the way up
makes one not want to be around if and when they return.

[ital]The first thing a convict feels when he receives an inconceivably
long sentence is shock. The shock usually wears off after about two years,
when all his appeals have been denied. He then enters a period of
self-hatred because of what he's done to himself and his family.

[ital]If he survives that emotion - and some don't - he begins to swim the
rapids of rage, frustration and alienation. When he passes through the
rapids, he finds himself in the calm waters of impotence, futility and
resignation. It's not a life one can look forward to living. The future is
totally devoid of hope, and people without any hope are dangerous - either
to themselves or others.[unital]

The criminal justice process operates in a vacuum of public understanding.
Legislators and penal officials are shaping criminal justice policies based
on stereotypes and half-truths, on anger and fear, on political propaganda
and crackpot theory. Nevertheless, much of the public appears to be
comfortable with its state of ignorance. It is far easier to barricade
one's problems and fears behind walls of concrete, rolls of razor wire and
reams of clich=E9 than to deal with the realities of criminal experience in
our society.=20

But the people we have put out of sight and out of mind continue to exist,
and they are shaped - or warped - by the conditions to which we have
relegated them. Willful public ignorance has never solved any social
problem, and I believe it has seriously distorted and aggravated our recent
crime problems.

Now the people of California have taken to voting directly on criminal
punishments through the initiative process - I'm thinking here of the
three-strikes initiative - with no real information on the effects of their
vote on the people sentenced. Who is going to prison under the law? Are
they the people we intended to put away? And what is the effect of prison
on them and on crime patterns?

The news media cannot answer such critical questions without access to
prisons and prisoners. They also cannot answer them without independent and
clear-eyed scrutiny of the issues. Before returning to the problem of
prison access, I'd like to take note of just a few of the structural
problems in journalism that I think are driving the distorted coverage of
crime and, especially, punishment; they serve to reinforce stereotypical
and false images of crime and criminals in ways that I will be discussing
later.=20

With more than a million and a half people in this country's jail and
prison cells at any one snapshot moment - and millions more on probation
and parole, and still more millions in their families - we can no longer
afford the luxury of inattention or the perils of distortion.

The people who work in the news media generally reflect the concerns and
interests of the population they come from. Many news stories come from
tips; those tips come from the friends, associates and contacts of the
people who work in our newsrooms. They are largely white, middle class or
upper-middle class, often uneasily protective of their position on the
social ladder, and many of them are simply unable to imagine ways of
looking at things that are not of their own class or ethnic experience.
Yet, increasingly, prison is becoming a matter of race and class.

In addition, as the "news business" turns into a branch of just-plain
business - partly through corporate mergers - the news media play to the
marketplace, to the demographics, to disposable income. Too many TV
stations, for instance, have allowed Nielsen ratings to guide their news
judgment. Newspapers, often prompted by hired editorial consultants, run
long service features on how to lose weight and which CDs to buy. In
journalism, these are called "service" stories, but they provide a service
to individual consumers - individual consumers with disposable income - and
not necessarily to society itself. Although I do not share the view of some
critics that most daily coverage decisions in the newsroom are nothing more
than covert business decisions, they are nevertheless influenced heavily by
the corporate cultural soup of which they are an ingredient.

The solutions to these structural problems are obvious: We journalists must
rediscover our traditional responsibility to our community and not just our
demographics or markets. And we must hire for our newsrooms the people who
can give us a broader perspective on this crime beat, as on all others.
Only a diverse news staff can understand and eliminate the
misrepresentation that characterizes much of our coverage of crime and
punishment.=20

Whatever the origins of the news media's blind spots, there will be always
be institutions working overtime to make sure the media's blinders remain
in place. Few institutions are more secretive than the nations' prison
systems. It's disheartening how normally skeptical journalists and citizens
buy into prison officials' censorship at all levels.=20

Here's another case history of prison censorship at work:

Right now in California, state corrections officials have imposed a ban on
face-to-face news media interviews with prisoners. Several other states
have imposed or are considering similar bans. California's new regulations
were in effect for many months before an enterprising journalist disclosed
the restrictions. For those first months, the regulations were not
announced; no hearings were held; there was no public regulatory process;
the rules were not published for either public or prisoners. Attorneys and
journalists tried unsuccessfully to obtain copies of the secret
regulations. Yet we journalists were being kept from interviews - and at
least one convict was being punished - based on those apparently
nonexistent rules. It was an abuse of power, and it was illegal.

When the regulations were finally announced formally, at 4 p.m. on a Friday
afternoon, they were put into effect within days under emergency procedures
that were not occasioned by any emergency. The five-day public comment
period began on a Saturday morning, so the comment period was half over
before even the most dedicated observer of the corrections archipelago knew
it had begun. The way those regulations were announced was designed to keep
them secret for as long as possible and to deter public comment until they
were in effect.

The prison system in this state has been found by federal judges to be
engaging in unconstitutionally cruel treatment of high-security and
mentally ill convicts. But prison officials have cut off direct,
face-to-face media access to the people who brought those court suits. In
other words, public officials have effectively muzzled their accusers.

More recent revelations detail - in the words of a Los Angeles Times news
story - "torture, killing and cover-up" committed by guards at Corcoran
State Prison. The unimaginable atrocities at Corcoran included staged
"cockfights" between prisoners known to be antagonistic. Guards and other
officials are said to have invited guests to these so-called "gladiator
days." Bets were placed on the combatants. And when on occasion prisoners
didn't stop fighting on command, they were shot. In the eight years of the
prison's existence, seven inmates have been shot dead by guards and more
than 50 others wounded by gunfire.=20

Especially troubling is that the highest-level officials at Corcoran
condoned the brutality, and appeals for relief to department brass in
Sacramento were routinely rejected. Representatives of the department even
tried to stop whistle-blowing guards at Corcoran from taking their
information to the FBI, which is now, finally, investigating the savagery
committed there.

But, again, the very bureaucracy that is accused of wrongdoing is
restricting media access to the people who are suffering from inhuman
abuses at its hands.

One California prisoner is being punished for suggesting in a letter to a
freelance journalist ways of trying to set up an interview to comply with
the Department of Corrections' then-secret, unpublished regulations. Boston
Woodard is a trusty who has used his long prison sentence to initiate and
further a number of important social projects like literacy training,
racial cooperation through integration of prison rock bands, and
fund-raising for local agencies that deal with abused children. (The group
Prisoners Against Child Abuse has raised more than $80,000 for the agencies
over the past five years. Many of its members, of course, were themselves
abused children.)=20

The harmless information Boston Woodard passed along to a journalist in a
letter had come from a prison official, but Woodard was punished
nonetheless. He was removed from his treasured job as editor of the last
remaining prisoner newspaper in California (where he had recently published
an editorial critical of the media interview restrictions), he was confined
to quarters, and he lost valuable "good time" toward his release. His
prison record has been permanently sullied for a made-up offense called
"circumventing policies" - policies that didn't exist in any rule book, and
even if they had, his actions would not have been in violation of them. It
was Woodard's first serious infraction in the 15 years he has been
incarcerated.=20

Can you imagine the outcry in the press and among the public if comparable
abuses were discovered in another government agency and the news media were
forbidden [ital]by the accused agency[unital] to investigate them
effectively?=20

The California regulation appears to be directed less at managing the
prisons than managing what we on the outside can read, see, and hear from
inside the joint. It is a classic violation of the First Amendment, a
principle that was devised to assure our ability to learn about and talk
freely about public officials and institutions. The Department of
Corrections chooses instead to characterize news media interviews as "a
public forum in which [prisoners] can espouse their often sociopathic
philosophies." Do they really not understand our constitutional right to
hear and evaluate for ourselves even what they choose to characterize as
sociopathic philosophies?

Prison officials also cite in defense of the new interview ban that
citizens are running around in Charles Manson T-shirts, giving young people
a bad example and encouraging them to engage in a life of crime. Blame for
those dangerous T-shirts is laid at the feet of the news media that have
interviewed Manson. The department tells us, too, that the prisons have
responsibility for public safety, that that includes not just physical
safety as generally assumed but [ital]emotional[unital] safety, and that
therefore the prisons may control what you and I see on television to
protect our emotional safety.

As Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in an unrelated case
recently:

[ital]The First Amendment directs us to be especially skeptical of
regulations that seek to keep people in the dark for what the government
perceives to be their own good.[unital]

Not only have many journalists passively accepted institutional
restrictions, but they have compromised crime-and-punishment coverage by
capitulating to public, political and commercial demands.=20

Crime sells. Or more precisely, the fear of crime sells. And because crime
sells, certain high-profile crimes are used like sex to promote all kinds
of unrelated products that some ad firm associates with them. A slinky
woman sprawled languorously across the hood of an automobile is used to
sell the car whose hood she caresses lovingly. Similarly, the ominously
cadenced recitation of some criminal act is employed to sell everything
from California Governor Pete Wilson's personal political fortunes to
legislation, such as the three-strikes law, that will determine the shape
of our society for generations to come.=20

What we journalists say about prisons also tends to reflect what the public
wants to hear about prisoners and other criminals. Without knowledge or
understanding of the people involved, the public does what it always does:
substitutes generally accepted stereotypes for unavailable factual
information. Journalists uncritically accept distorted public attitudes and
self-serving political agendas, and in the process they further distort
public perceptions. It's an endless loop of misinformation and
misunderstanding.

Accurate coverage is impeded, too, by the portrayal of prisons and crime
for the purposes of entertainment. With the corporate and programming
convergence of entertainment media and news media into one amorphous thing
called "the media," entertainment values are supplanting news values in
many newspapers and on the airwaves.

It has been widely observed over the years how times of social or economic
change or uncertainty increase a sense of generalized unease and promote
simplistic solutions. Mass entertainment is a covert way of simultaneously
expressing and sublimating our social fears through stereotypes.=20

In print and on the airwaves, entertainment is currently blending with and
subsuming the news. We have even invented ugly new hybrid words for the
hybrid phenomenon, words like infotainment and docudrama, advertorial and
infomercial, which are nothing more than ways of describing the dilution of
news and opinion with entertainment, which is in turn often commercially
motivated. Fictional TV cop shows merge into fact-based stories like
"America's Most Wanted." Tabloid magazine shows blur the lines of
conventional genres. Ideologues like Rush Limbaugh entertain with fanciful
social notions while purporting to convey factual information. So-called
news shows feature embarrassingly silly banter and shock photos and many
other such non-informational entertainment devices.=20

And presiding over the entire process are news corporations that are
increasingly the subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates.

Entertainment values are inherently non-journalistic. In entertainment,
what we read or hear or see becomes important for the
[ital]feelings[unital] with which it leaves us and not for its accuracy or
importance. And nothing satisfies more readily than the easily
understandable, the simple emotional reaction based on familiarity. In
other words, stereotyping - that convenient shorthand by which we falsify
experience - substitutes for news judgment.=20

Crime reporting is overwhelmingly stereotype-based. It is our new
mythology, and we journalists become unwitting mythologists, telling the
stories that people choose to guide their lives by rather than the stories
of more representative miscreants.=20

It's the Christians and the lions, the good guys and the bad guys, the
white hats and the black hats, the 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys, and, of
course, those celluloid cowboys and Indians. It's Polly and Richard Allen
Davis. Stories. Myths.

A girl with the all-American name of Polly is murdered after being abducted
from her own home during a slumber party in a white, middle-class suburb of
San Francisco. It was an all too typical setting but a most
[ital]atypical[unital] crime. Nevertheless, that crime was transmuted into
a mythological event with the connivance of the news media and at the
specific instigation of politicians, several of whom dominated the girl's
funeral with their showy presence. The case became a gargantuan media
feeding frenzy, with no sense of balance or proportion.

In effect, Polly Klaas's murder became a modern morality play. The trouble
with morality plays is that they are based on simplistic allegories that by
definition purport to stand for something other than what they actually
represent. They are inherently non-journalistic. They are used for
entertainment and moral guidance, not factual enlightenment.

Journalism works by anecdote. It is the reporting of matters of social
import through specific examples, or anecdotes. We journalists tell
stories. How representative our stories are is a critical issue; indeed, it
is a more important element in achieving objectivity than the conventional,
artificial balancing of two contrasting views.=20

California journalists chose to tell - to [ital]overtell[unital] - the
story of Polly Klaas with the implication that it was somehow a
representative crime. But it was not a representative crime at all.
Coverage that was factual on its face became a serious form of media
distortion because the emphasis itself was misplaced.

When Polly Klaas was murdered, the attention we journalists gave to this
one murder out of many was based on more than stereotyping and myth-making.
It was also based on the personal agendas of politicians who were running
for office and needed a myth to synthesize and exploit public fears. The
attention focused on Polly Klaas's accused killer, Richard Allen Davis, was
used to win passage of California's harsh new three-strikes legislation and
to assure the re-election of Governor Wilson. But, again, the Richard Allen
Davis to whom we have been exposed on the airwaves and in print is a media
anecdote. In some senses, he is not as representative of the prison
population as, say, Duane Silva.=20

Who is Duane Silva, and why do we know nothing about him? We know nothing
about him partly because he is so [ital]typical[unital], so
[ital]ordinary[unital], so boring. His is not a story that plays to
subterranean fears; it is not a story of use to politicians; it is not a
story with an easy solution. In short, it lacks entertainment value.

Duane is a 23-year-old who has been mentally ill all his life with
something the doctors call schizo-affective disorder. He has an IQ of 70,
which is characterized as borderline retarded. As a result of his problems,
this gentle young man spent most of his school years in special-ed classes.
Duane had two felonies on his record when the three-strikes legislation was
enacted in 1994. His felony convictions were the result of a plea bargain
intended by judge and attorneys to keep the mentally ill man out of prison,
where they agreed he didn't belong. The offenses were arson, but what he
actually had done was set fires in trash cans . . . in the delusional
belief that he was helping local police by burning illegal drugs.=20

Duane's third strike was the theft of some coins and a VCR from a longtime
friend's house, just days after the three-strikes law went into effect. He
sold the VCR for pinball money and then dialed 911 and told police where he
had seen a VCR just like the one taken from his friend's house. Of course,
the VCR was immediately traced back to Duane, and this vulnerable, mentally
ill man is now doing [ital]30 years to life[unital] on the mainline of
Folsom prison, where he is in great risk of rape and death because of his
confusion and his meek and credulous personality.

Sometimes, entertaining stereotypes derive from the very attempt to write
well, to tug at the readers' emotions with vivid imagery. Take, for
example, the story of a girl's disappearance that ran on March 4, 1996, in
the San Francisco Chronicle, datelined Hanford, Kings County. The story beg=
an:

"This is one of those small towns where nothing really bad is ever supposed
to happen."

=09Remember that. That's the beginning of the story on a girl who
disappeared. So far, nothing about the missing girl. The story continues:

"Shady parks and playgrounds are easy to find. Schools and churches stand
quietly around every other corner. Lemoore Naval Air Station, where pilots
fly F-18 jet fighters a few miles west of here, seems to provide a sense of
security and order."

OK, we're two paragraphs into it, and still no mention of that missing
girl. It's all atmospherics so far - a rural, safe world, protected from
the dangers posed by unstable outsiders. Then, in the third paragraph, the
reporter writes:

"So when another girl disappears off the face of the earth - the third in
the last two years from this area ..."

Finally, the specific occasion for this rural portrait is revealed. Later
in the story, the reporter writes:

[ital]This community in the central San Joaquin Valley between Highways 5
and 99 is a prosperous town, surrounded by endless farms where cotton,
alfalfa, grapes and dairy cows are raised. The snow-capped Sierra is
clearly visible 50 miles to the east after the morning fog burns off.

[ital]Residents clearly are aware that it is also surrounded by a world
where life is sometimes cheap. There are four prisons nearby, including
Corcoran State Prison 17 miles south, where Charles Manson, mass murderer
Juan Corona and Bobby Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, are housed.[unital=
]

You see how the entertainment values, the mythological subtext, dominate
this story of a girl's disappearance? The Chronicle chose to travel to a
distant "rural paradise" to report this presumed crime, though murders
occur regularly within easy walking distance of the Chronicle's offices in
downtown San Francisco. Why did they choose to emphasize this particular
case? Because the girl's disappearance gave itself so easily to myth, to
stereotype, to entertainment. Its mythological subtext - evocative, even if
unrepresentative - is the stated reason for the coverage. It starts right
there in the first paragraph. "This is one of those small towns where
nothing really bad is ever supposed to happen."

Needless to say, Charles Manson, Juan Corona and Sirhan Sirhan remain
safely incarcerated and had nothing whatever to do with the girl's
disappearance. Nor did the prison itself, which is [ital]17
In some circles, it is as well known for its rural methamphetamine
factories as for its cotton, alfalfa, grapes and cows. But that fact might
have ruined a good yarn.

The suspect finally arrested in the case was a resident of this pure town -
the father of the victim's 12- year-old playmate - and not an evil outsider
preying on all-American rural innocents.

Still another dangerous practice distorting our news coverage is news by
icon. Since news is increasingly a subset of entertainment, graphics play a
bigger role in news presentation, both in newspapers and on the airwaves.
Graphics and graphic design are the pretty packages in which news stories
are served up. Graphic elements rely for their impact on immediately
identifiable, common and accessible features. Nothing is more immediately
identifiable, more common or more accessible than a stereotype. Examples
are the logos that loom from the screen over a television newscaster's
shoulders, summarizing a complex story with a simplistic icon like a gun or
a hypodermic needle or the profile of a menacing black face or a single
male alcoholic slumped by a shopping cart. Those images often carry more
weight than the words read by the newscaster.

We're all familiar with the prison stereotypes: prisons as dens of angry,
violent, brutish subhumans. But the bulk of the prisoners are more like
Duane Silva. More than three-quarters of the people imprisoned in
California for three-strike offenses are nonviolent. Many of them were put
away for life for trivial crimes and addictions, and many of them are
mentally ill and/or retarded. We journalists are not telling that story
effectively, and prison officials are conspiring to keep us from telling it=
=2E

It is well past time for journalists to correct the distortions they have
brought to public perception of crime and prisons. We journalists must
begin by covering prisons and the people in them, as real people and not
ciphers. We cannot allow our coverage to be dominated by simplistic
morality, by entertainment values and devices, or by self-promoting
politicians. And we must, as a matter of professional imperative,
aggressively challenge the many regulations and other barriers erected by
authoritarian public officials between us and these important news stories.

If we were talking about the real people who largely inhabit our prisons,
we would be conveying a very different story, and one that might help us to
overcome our crime problems rather than wallow in them.=20

We would be learning, for example, that enforced [ital]dependence[unital]
may not be the best way to teach [ital]drug-dependent[unital] people to
function [ital]independently[unital] in society. In general, dependence
does nothing to foster self-reliance and other social survival skills. We
would also be learning that telling people daily in a hundred different
ways that they are scum may not be the best way to teach them self-esteem,
which is another critical social survival skill. And we would be learning
that disposing of the handicapped behind electrified wire does nothing to
wipe out either disability or crime.

I'd like to close with quotes from a current and a former prisoner. First,
from Boston Woodard, who is at this writing languishing in the hole at the
California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, in central California; the
quote is from a letter to me soon after he was fired from his prison
editor's job and punished for reaching out to the news media despite secret
state prison interview restrictions:

[ital]This is the first time in my prison life I haven't felt like there
was no hope regarding something these [Department of Corrections] bastards
have fabricated. What you folks [several journalists calling attention to
his plight] are doing means more than you know. . . . There's no doubt that
the attention I've been receiving regarding my being canned helped quash
the many reprisals I would have received from prison officials. If they
weren't censoring this letter I would give you specifics.

[ital]I have heard it through the prison grapevine that other news folk
have been inquiring about my situation because of an article that was
picked up by the Associated Press. I don't know what the hell we're going
to do when people like you are completely blocked out from us.[unital]=20

And finally, a letter my co-author Dannie Martin wrote me in connection
with a forum on his own punishment for writing openly in the news media:

[ital]The real issues, I believe, are: (1) Does a convict have a First
Amendment right to publicly define himself and his surroundings? And (2)
does the public have a First Amendment right to hear a prisoner's
viewpoint. ...

Any permanent harm that comes to us all won't be because of what we talk
about. It will come from what was passed over in silence.[unital]

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Peter Y. Sussman spent 29 years as an editor at the San Francisco
Chronicle. Today he is an independent author and editor and the president
of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalis=
ts.

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