ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, August 30, 1996 TAG: 9608300045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURA LAFAY STAFF WRITER
NOTE: Below
Billy Coleburn, reporter and news editor for The Courier Record in rural Blackstone, heard on his car scanner Aug. 9 that two guards had been stabbed at the nearby Nottoway Correctional Center. Coleburn sped to the prison just in time to see one of the wounded carried out on a stretcher. He grabbed his camera and began shooting pictures.
Within seconds, he found himself surrounded by four prison employees. "They were all yelling at me, saying I was violating state law and demanding my camera and film," Coleburn recalled recently.
"They were lunging for my camera. One woman kept yelling, `You done caused trouble now. You done caused trouble now. You shouldn't have even come up here.' And then this other woman was saying, `Hand me the camera or else give me the film or we're going to place you under arrest.'''
After refusing to give up his camera, Coleburn was escorted into the prison and put, at his insistence, on the phone with Nottoway Warden David Robinson.
``Billy,'' Coleburn remembers the warden saying, "How'd you find out about this?"
As the Virginia inmate population grows and the state sinks more money into prison operation and construction, there is some evidence that attacks on guards have grown more serious and inmate uprisings have become more frequent.
But detailed information about what goes on behind prison walls grows increasingly hard to come by as reporters - barred from Virginia's prisons since the summer of 1995 - are forced to rely on the official versions of events supplied by the Department of Corrections.
While he concedes that Coleburn's experience was "an overreaction" for which prison officials have apologized, department spokesman David Botkins insists that reporters do not belong in prisons, and that "security" concerns dictate keeping them out.
"Prison is not the place for media productions," he said this week. "We are under no obligation to provide a platform for inmates to profess their innocence or make allegations against the prison system."
The Department of Corrections also is under no obligation to inform the public of assaults on staff or inmates, deaths by violence or other causes, attempted or actual escapes, riots, or anything else that goes on in Virginia's prisons.
"We don't have the staff or the resources to do that," Botkins said.
"Nor are we required to do so. Plus, it's not prudent security policy to be releasing ongoing details of pending investigations. That's ludicrous to do that. And we're not going to endanger the security of our prisons just because [a reporter] wants to do a story on a stabbing."
The Aug. 9 stabbings were one of several serious incidents at Nottoway this summer.
On July 6, there was a melee between inmates and staff at the prison's segregation unit recreation yard during which several guards suffered superficial wounds and a number of inmates say they were cornered and beaten.
Hours after the Aug. 9 stabbings, roughly 125 Nottoway inmates rioted, distracting prison staff while three prisoners with a homemade knife took four employees hostage. A DOC strike force freed the hostages the next morning, but one day later, inmates set fire to a building, forcing the evacuation of 56.
Only one of those Aug. 9 incidents - the hostage stand off - was reported to the public. At a news conference, Director Ron Angelone praised his staff for freeing the hostages. The stabbings, the riot and the fire went unmentioned - until reporters asked about them later.
Problems have arisen at other Virginia prisons as well.
In February, a man serving eight life sentences for killing a woman and a girl in Norfolk escaped from the maximum-security Powhatan Correctional Center by climbing up a ventilator shaft to a roof door that fell off as soon as he touched it.
On May 4, a Mecklenburg inmate stabbed a guard in apparent retaliation for the stun-gunning, days earlier, of an inmate in the yard.
In July, two more guards were stabbed - one nine times - at the Greensville Correctional Center.
Advocates for both prisoners and guards say inmates are resorting to violence in part because the abolition of parole last year has left them with no hope and no incentive to stay out of trouble. In addition, they say, prisoners are angry and frustrated by frequent lockdowns, restrictive new policies and laws that allow the state to take money from their prison accounts for court costs and medical care.
"Because of this abolishment of parole, you've got inmates who really don't care," said Lillian Abrams of the Virginia Association of State Employees, which counts 2,000 Virginia correctional officers among its membership.
"I think they're trying things now that they wouldn't have dared try before."
Even prisoners are afraid.
"In the past, they held out that carrot - that possibility of parole - to you," said Jesse James Pritchard, who is serving his 16th year for robbery at the Mecklenburg Correctional Center. He spoke to a reporter by telephone.
"The guys coming in now, they know they won't get parole. Their only way out is over the fence or in a wheelchair. So why go along with the program? Incidents like what happened at Nottoway are going to be on the rise because people are realizing that their only hope of ever seeing the sun again is by hopping the fence, taking hostages, getting a gun."
DOC officials dismiss such predictions. Assaults inside the state's prisons have actually decreased in recent years, Botkins said. In fiscal year 1995, he said, inmates assaulted staff 17 times with weapons and 74 times without weapons. In fiscal year 1996, he said, there were three assaults with weapons and seven without.
"What you have to look at is the big picture," he said. "Virginia has one of the lowest escape rates in the nation, the Department has become more efficiently run since Ron Angelone's tenure, and we also have some of the most efficiently run institutions in the country. The staff run our prisons, not the inmates. That's what taxpapers expect."
But can taxpayers expect to get the truth about prisons from the Department of Corrections alone? Absolutely not, according to Margaret Winter, a lawyer for the ACLU's National Prison Project in Washington, D.C.
"This is not a security concern," Winter said. "It's a way of preventing the public from knowing what's going on. In Virginia, the promoters of these regulations are politicians who want credit for passing tougher and tougher laws but don't want the public to see the results."
The results, she said, are increasingly brutal conditions as prisons fill up and inmates serve longer and longer sentences.
"I don't think it's any accident that they're cracking down now. They don't want anyone telling the truth about the social cost of what they're doing."
Restrictions on media access to prisons are also occurring in other states. Illinois and California have instituted complete bans on all face-to-face interviews with inmates, while in Indiana, organizations regarded by prison officials as "infotainment" mediums are not allowed inside prisons.
In Rhode Island, access is arbitrary, based on the whims of prison officials. As a result, said Warwick Beacon editor Marcia Grann O'Brien, reporters are allowed access for stories deemed favorable to the prison system and are kept out when officials decide a story will make them look bad.
"If they want you to cover something, they'll let you in," O'Brien said. "They even have something in their guidelines about how the story topic has to enhance corrections and cannot harm victims' families."
The same thing has happened in Virginia, with the added possibility that the press here is being punished for publicizing a story that embarrassed the Department of Corrections last year - the discovery of a loaded gun in the typewriter of a death row inmate.
Richard Real, a former reporter for Roanoke's WDBJ who now works for WRIC-TV in Richmond, notes that he hasn't been able to get a camera into a Virginia prison since.
"After that, we were totally shut off," he said. "Unless it's something they want us to do a story on. When they want us to come and tour a new prison or go to their college graduation program or film it when they parade inmates in front of us for work detail, it's fine. Because it's a positive story for them.
"It seems patently unfair. What goes on behind closed doors, in a place that is publicly financed, should be open to the public."
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