Let the media back into jails and prisons

Few of us are experts on incarceration. But we are the ones who pay for it. Who, nominally, at least, have hopes for it. That it keeps us safer. That it treats with some kind of dignity those who through either deep faults of their own or, as they say, ex

Shouldn’t we, the citizens and taxpayers, have the maximum opportunities to know how our jails and prisons are working?

For those of us who don’t spend a lot of time ourselves under the roof of The Big House, excellent journalism surely offers us the best way to get a good picture of life for prisoners.

As NPR host Ailsa Chang remarked the other day in a radio story about American prisons: “Something the lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson said really stuck with me. He was talking about how if a society is going to incarcerate children, it should believe in their ability to change.”

And how can we hope to understand what, for instance, life is like for incarcerated children unless we allow reporters into our penal system to find out?

That’s why we stand in support of the California News Publishers Association and the California Broadcasters Association for Senate Bill 254, which would reopen access to the state’s prisons to the media.

We say “reopen” because the concept of allowing reporters more access to prisons and the imprisoned is not new — all this bill would do is bring us back the abilities we in the media had in our state until the mid-1990s.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, who introduced the bill, also touts it as a move that would “open access to prisons for state legislators and other state officials in order to provide policymakers with the information they need for effective oversight.”

SB 254, which also would apply to local jails, “would also bring California back up to par with other states that provide both the media and public officials with greater access to their prisons, including Maine, Florida and Rhode Island,” according to Skinner.

Access for reporters and lawmakers seems like a nobrainer to those who believe in the free flow of information. But to the governor and others during the “tough-on-crime” era of the mid-1990s, knowledge was not power. They saw the media telling what life was really like for prisoners as encouraging do-gooders to make life more cush for everyone from hardened convicts to short-timer jailbirds.

And they didn’t think that living the lush life was what doing time was meant to be.

So for almost 30 years state correctional authorities have had the ability to keep reporters out of prisons almost entirely through some of the strictest regulations in the country. We just don’t know what life is like inside without being able to talk to those who are there, and see for ourselves.

And it’s not as if the media associations with the help of legislators haven’t tried to get the onerous restrictions lifted.

“Since 1998, there have been nine attempts by the Legislature to roll back CDCR’s 1996 regulations and restore media access to prisons. The Legislature passed all nine bills between 1998 and 2012, and each time the then-governors vetoed the legislation,” Skinners office reported. “SB 254 would be the Legislature’s 10th attempt at restoring media access to prisons. SB 254 would also apply to city and county jails because state realignment of prisons allowed for tens of thousands of incarcerated people to serve their sentences in local jails.”

The bill would allow reporters to tour prisons and jails and interview incarcerated people during prearranged interviews. It would allow the use video cameras and other recording devices, which are now mostly prohibited. It would prohibit prison and jail officials from monitoring interviews, which obviously could make prisoners reluctant to talk freely. It would protect jailbirds from being punished for participating in a news media interview. And, for the prisoners’ own protection, it would require officials to inform their attorney of record before a prearranged interview.

Pass and sign SB 254 for a more informed, more humane California.

During President Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech, he got booed after accusing “some” Republicans of seeking to “sunset” some of the so-called entitlements.

Biden said: “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans ... want Medicare and Social Security to sunset. ... Anybody who doubts it, contact my office. I’ll give you a copy. I’ll give you a copy of the proposal.”

It is certainly true that President George W. Bush set up a bipartisan commission to address the long-term problem with Social Security solvency.

Their 2002 report proposed allowing workers to devote a portion of their Social Security contribution to a private account to invest, for example, in the stock market for a better rate of return.

The report concluded: “Social Security will be strengthened if modernized to include a system of voluntary personal accounts. Personal accounts improve retirement security by facilitating wealth creation and providing participants with assets that they own and that can be inherited, rather than providing only claims to benefits that remain subject to political negotiation.” It is also true that Bush abandoned the plan after Democrats denounced it as a “risky” scheme to “privatize Social Security.”

But it is equally true that both Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton called Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — without reforms — “unsustainable.” As for Biden, as a senator in 1975, he proposed reexamining every federal program.

In a floor speech, he said, “One thing that we must do is to begin reviewing existing programs to determine whether they are still effective and whether they are worth the money that we are putting in them. We must eliminate the wasteful ones.” Awkward.

Obama set up a bipartisan “federal deficit commission” that made several recommendations. About its final report,

ABC News wrote: “The president had tasked commission co-chairmen Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson with devising a plan to reduce the deficits and redirect the country from its ‘unsustainable’ fiscal path ... To dig the country out of debt, the plan put forth by the panel today calls for drastic changes such as raising the Social Security retirement age, making cuts to Medicare and doubling the federal gas tax. It made only minor changes to the earlier draft released by Bowles and Simpson last month.”

As for Clinton, he too set a bipartisan commission to tackle the entitlements problem. The federal government’s Social Security website says: “On November 5th 1993 President Bill Clinton — by Executive Order #12878 — created the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement Reform. The Commission — which began work in February 1994 — was co-chaired by Senators Robert Kerrey, D-Nebraska, and John Danforth, R-Missouri. The commission was comprised of 10 U.S. senators, 10 members of Congress and 12 members of the public, along with a professional staff of 27.

“In their approach, the Commission went well beyond the topics of Social Security and Medicare and lumped together everything that might be considered an ‘entitlement’ — from welfare programs to the home mortgage interest tax deduction to the cost of federal civilian and military retirement. Its goal was to devise a package of proposals which would reduce the overall cost of all of these programs . ...

“The two co-chairs of the commission developed their own Social Security proposal, which featured raising the retirement age to 70, a cut in the Social Security payroll tax, with the money redirected into mandatory private accounts, and adopting price-indexing (among other changes). This was perhaps the first advocacy of ‘carve-out’ private accounts, and of price indexing, by a prominent mainstream group.”

Were those Democratic presidents, both of whom established commissions on entitlements, seeking — to use Biden’s characterization — to “sunset” these programs?

The federal budget devotes about half of its spending to the “entitlement” programs: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare.

Then there is income security, which includes general retirement and disability insurance; federal employee retirement, disability and military retirement; unemployment compensation; housing assistance; nutrition assistance; foster care; Supplemental Security Income; and the earned income and child tax credits.

Throw in national security and interest on the debt and there’s almost nothing left.

Both Republican and Democratic presidents concede that without reforms these programs are “unsustainable,” yet members of both parties attack reform as “risky” and “irresponsible.”

Meanwhile, the clock keeps ticking.