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I never expected to be a real reporter. While the other students in my first journalism class could go out into the community to interview sources, my options were limited. As an inmate, the only people I could interview were other inmates and the guards.
It was 2010, and I was a 28-year-old alcoholic with a crack habit serving a year sentence in a Wisconsin county jail. I had been convicted of burglary after breaking into a bar and walking out with a bottle of booze. It was a felony, and it was on time—the culmination of wrecked cars, lost jobs, and alcohol-fueled arrests. When the judge sentenced me, he said I was an example of “wasted human life”. He wasn’t wrong.
During the first months behind bars, there was no sun, no night sky. I timed the opening and closing of the steel doors. But midway through my sentence, as is typical in many cases, the judge gave me the option of working or taking classes during the day at a nearby university.
I took a job as a janitor in the community, excited to be out of my cell. One morning as I was vacuuming, I grabbed a Rolling Stone magazine from a coffee table. He slipped a flyer for a college journalism contest. winning entries would appear in the magazine. Only students could enter.
I knew nothing about journalism, but I had a strange feeling—an intuition—that I had finally found something I didn’t even know I needed. That day, I enrolled in the university closest to the prison.
So I found myself, weeks later, interviewing my correctional officer for a story in the student newspaper. We had never spoken to each other so carefully or precisely. This was someone who, at any other time, had absolute power over me. However, in that moment, while interviewing him, I felt a subtle and palpable shift in power.
I could feel him calculating what he wanted to say, leaving out words that might get him in trouble. I felt empowered to chase those pregnant pauses, to seek the truth and bring order to the world around me. The experience was liberating. It showed that even a prisoner’s voice could resonate if facts and rigorous research supported what he had to say.
After my release, I stayed in school, eventually earning a master’s degree in journalism. And I kept writing. Story by story, and with the help of patient editors, I learned how to report and write better, faster. I got sober. Eventually, I landed a reporting internship, and then a full-time job.
In the intervening years, I was a reporter in California and returned home to take a reporting job with Wisconsin Watch — the place that offered me my first internship.
And then, last June, 13 years after I wrote my first article from a Wisconsin prison, I began covering the state prison system as a New York Times local investigative contributor. The fellowship program is designed to strengthen the power and reach of local journalism.
By then, I had a growing pile of letters from men housed at the Waupun Correctional Facility who had been confined to their cells for months without regular access to showers, fresh air, family visits and timely medical care. In August, led by an editorial team that included Dean Baquet, former executive editor of The Times, I broke the story that the state was closing prisons due to staff shortages.
In February, we revealed that the state had known for years that it was losing guards faster than it could replace them. Then, in June, I reported on the emergency arrests of nine prison officers, including a former warden, in connection with a series of inmate deaths.
Our latest article brought to light another fact: Nearly a third of the 60 staff physicians employed by the corrections system in the past decade have been disciplined by a state medical board for misconduct or ethics violations.
My past has put me in a unique position. As a reporter, I deliberately remove myself from my investigations to follow the truth wherever it leads. I value independence. But, like anyone else, I have been shaped by my experiences. I know the smell of penitentiary shops and the ubiquitous anxious hunger that prisoners feel. I know what it’s like to be denied fresh air for months. I’ve also seen the unexpected acts of kindness that happen behind bars.
My experiences inform who I talk to — and who talks to me — and how I approach my reporting. For better or worse, I am forever part of this community. And that is the very spirit of local journalism.
