Journalism Behind Bars: How federal law impedes reporting on America’s prisons

Yesterday, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted the webinar “Journalism Behind Bars: How federal law impedes reporting on America’s prisons,” a powerful one-hour conversation with incarcerated journalist Jeremy Busby, joined by Nina Patel and Corene Kendrick, senior attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union.

They discussed discuss how federal law — specifically the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which Busby wrote about previously for Freedom of the Press Foundation — blocks incarcerated journalists from exposing abuses and facilitates retaliation against those who try.

Listen to the recorded webinar below:

Update 8/7: Read our board member Seth Stern’s summary of the webinar, “Federal law closes courthouse doors to incarcerated journalists,” published on freedom.press. Excerpt below:

Lawsuits are also the only recourse available to incarcerated journalists, who often report relentless retaliation when their work upsets prison officials. That’s what happened to Busby when he helped expose deplorable conditions inside the prison where he was housed when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020. Busby said he was transferred to four prisons, each overcrowded with people sick with COVID, before landing in a cell without a mattress or sheets, where he was kept for six weeks. His property was damaged or seized, and he was written bogus disciplinary charges that were later overturned.

He brought a federal lawsuit, but because he was retaliated against in four different prisons, the judge said the PLRA required four separate lawsuits in four different courts. “I wasn’t able to successfully keep up with four active litigations in four different courts in four different counties, from the solitary confinement cell that I was being held in,” Busby explained, resulting in his lawsuits each being dismissed on procedural grounds before the merits of his claims could be adjudicated.

Busby is a college graduate and accomplished writer — if he can’t navigate the PLRA, it is all the more difficult for an average member of the prison population to do so. Even the experienced lawyers on the webinar acknowledged how challenging it can be to comply with the PLRA when representing their incarcerated clients. Incarcerated litigants, Busby noted, must also pay court fees — in his case, a $400 fee became $1,600 when his lawsuit was split into four.

“You don’t get paid for work here in Texas, and so most guys, they don’t even want the $400 thing against their account because their family members can maybe send $20 for toothpaste and deodorant every month or so, or every two or three months, and they don’t want to sacrifice their deodorant and toothpaste money to pursue this lawsuit,” he said.

So what’s the point of the PLRA? As Patel noted, “The courts are well equipped to throw out lawsuits that are frivolous,” and do so every day in cases involving non-incarcerated people. Patel believes the real problem the PLRA is meant to address isn’t that incarcerated people file so many invalid claims — it’s that they file so many valid ones.

With around two million people incarcerated in the United States, “a functional system where someone can go to the courts and have their constitutional violations in prison litigated and then compensated would break most prison systems in this country,” Patel explained. “That is the dirty truth of the PLRA.”