Pell v. Procunier, which upheld the constitutionality of the California Department of Corrections’ decision to forbid press interviews with specific inmates, was decided 40 years ago this summer. Looking back on that ruling and on Angela Davis’ famous 1972 prison interview (above), Adrian Shirk traces the ruling’s ramifications through the decades and explains why the rarity of such interviews today is a bad thing:
Since Pell v. Procunier, access to inmates has diminished steadily from coast to coast.
In 2013, media-access scholar Jessica Pupovac noted in The Crime Report that today, “at least five states (Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Michigan) make any access the exception to the rule” and that Kansas and Michigan flat out refuse to arrange interviews with specific inmates. In Florida, Kansas, Michigan, New York, and New Hampshire, inmates must “put reporters on their visitation or phone call list if they wish to speak to them, thus forfeiting a visit or call with family or friends.” In Wyoming, officials can screen all questions ahead of time, and if an interview veers from the approved list, a minder can end it. Even state correctional departments that don’t explicitly deny media access to specific inmates still have sanction under Pell to make ad-hoc restrictions and deny access on a case-by-case basis. Meanwhile, the California State Correctional Manual remains unchanged.
The fact that journalists are still allowed direct contact through mail protects a decent portion of testimonial integrity. But what if the inmate is illiterate? Or dyslexic? Or simply can’t communicate well on the page? The ruling also assumes that visual and sonic information is not integral to reporting and does not carry its own unique body of information. In Freedom of the Press: A Reference Guide to the United States Constitution, Lyrissa Barnett Lidsky and R. George Wright propose that while a document like Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” may have had deeper and broader effects than any number of broadcast interviews, a “televised interview may convey a sense of visual immediacy and dynamism far beyond the capacity of typical letter writing or letter reading.”
The Dish 