Five Dubs Podcast
Five Dubs focuses on the who, what, when, where and why of local news media in Maryland, Delaware and D.C. We’ll talk with the journalists about stories behind the news. Five Dubs is a project of the MDDC Press Association and is hosted by Rebecca Snyder and Kevin Berrier.
Five Dubs Podcast
E123: Rewind - Master Class: The First Amendment
Join us for an enlightening session with Xerxes Wilson from The News Journal in Wilmington, Delaware as we dive deep into the intricacies of First Amendment and free speech reporting. Discover the compelling story behind Wilson's award-winning piece on a prison boycott in Delaware, exploring the high costs of prison tablet services and the broader implications for free speech and prisoner rights. Tune in to learn about the balance between security and exploitation in the prison system, and how one man's courageous protest against exorbitant rates sparked a significant story.
Welcome everyone. I am delighted today for our master class, this time focusing on First Amendment and free speech reporting. We have today with us Xerxes Wilson from the News Journal in Wilmington. And Xerxes writes or covers the government and courts, I believe, in northern Delaware and has been at the News Journal for nearly a decade and then And have you always covered the courts and government or? So I started out covering Newcastle County government, which is like the local county council and the county executive's office. And they pretty much do like policing and land use in kind of the most populous county of Delaware, the northern third of Delaware. And then about. It's like four or five years ago, I transitioned to covering courts primarily, but courts. Courts deal with a lot of different things dealing with government and different aspects of society. So, but yeah, so now I'm primarily in the courthouse doing things related to Delaware's courts. Interesting, okay. And just for those listening along, this is the third of our masterclass series where we're examining award -winning work. The Press Association runs an annual contest and we have... feels like a billion categories, but really there's only 80 or so. And one of them is a wild card category where the topic changes each year. this year, or we're looking at work from 2023, the topic was for our wild card category was free speech and First Amendment. And so Xerxes story pulled out ahead of the rest of the competitors. to win best of show, which means that it was the overall winner in that category, regardless of division, which is based on the size of publication. So congratulations on that win. I know that wasn't your only win this year or in years past. So it's always good to have terrific work coming out of the region. tell us a little bit about the story. was a prison boycott and how it related to the First So essentially in my covering courts, I have a lot of contact with people in prison because when you're dealing with courts, when you're writing about courts, you're typically writing about, or in a lot of cases, I'll say typically, in lot of cases, you're writing about people in prison. So in my view, it's important to also get their perspective when you can. And through that, I have built kind of let's say like a group of sources in there. In my articles when I write about something relating to prison specifically, will put at the bottom, can, prisoners specifically, you can contact me with things that you might find that are worth writing about. So about, I guess it would have been like two years ago now, I got a letter from David Holloman who was incarcerated at Delaware's largest prison. in Smyrna and he was complaining about what's called in prison the tablets. The tablets are basically iPads that either are mounted to the wall or circulating the prison that gives prisoners access to the internet to some extent. And I can go into further detail. I'd love to go into further detail about that. And, you know, he was making complaints about this tablet service and sort of the exorbitant costs that go along with it. And he said he was planning a boycott. He sent me the boycott notice and his idea to protest kind of how this whole thing was set up was to just rally people inside of the prison to not use the tablets for, I don't remember, it was like a day or so. to as kind of a very traditional form of protest. We're just not, you we're not gonna use the service. so, you know, I get a ton of these letters from having written about prisons in Delaware for a little bit of time. I get all kinds of letters and honestly, a lot of them go into a massive pile over here. I will read them, but I'm not an attorney and prisons as much as I like writing and reporting on prisons, because I think it's very important. it is not the bulk of my work day. so a lot of things go by the wayside and David's letter went by the wayside for well over a year. You know, I read it, I was interested and I had other things going on. fast forward a year later, I'm digging through federal court filings as part of my beat coverage. I look the headings for every lawsuit that's filed in the district of Delaware's federal court and other courts. But I come across Holloman versus the warden of James T. Vaughan and I open up and he has a pro se lawsuit talking about his boycott and then talking about the prison's response to it. And from there, I was like, okay, it's time to write about this. And from there, I kind of built a story out. I contacted him, we had a series of video calls and we discussed it. And that's essentially how I came across it. So actually just, I kind of want to know if your mind is the total steel trap. Did you remember his name from over a year ago from a random letter? No idea. Wow. He had sent me a letter and then he had also like made other efforts to contact me. But and you know whether I'm fairly certain I remembered his name and regardless when I opened the lawsuit and it was a handwritten pro se lawsuit. that he filed himself from prison. I remember the boycott letter. I remember the notice that he sent me well over a year ago. And I went out in the course of reporting, I went in my pile and dug everything out. He actually had, through the course of like the kind of crackdown that came after his attempted boycott, he had actually lost or didn't have the notice that he had posted and printed up and tried to distribute. And he had sent me a copy. So I was able to like, no, I still got to, have a copy still. So, but I fished out that old letter and kind of went with it from there. Wow. I actually, I now kind of really want to see your desk, but that's okay. We're gonna move on because that's, can you tell a little bit more about what the communication is like in Delaware prisons. When I was reading the article, you know, I think the public has a general idea of like, okay, well, there's mail and it's monitored and internet access is certainly limited if there is internet access. But the idea of the tablets that you could sort of check out seems like it could be a really interesting idea, but also kind of ripe almost abuse, you know, the commissary, everything's so like, everything is expensive. And you're dealing with a population that just doesn't have the money. So the primary way that prisoners are able to have contact with the outside world traditionally has been snail mail. You you send a letter out, get a letter back. Postage can take some time over years and more recently. snail mail has gotten even more snail -ish in that the prison requires any letters that are going into the prison be sent to Las Vegas. So if I'm sending a letter to, say, David 30 miles south of here in Smyrna, Delaware, that letter will travel to Las Vegas. It will be scanned, and then a scan of it will be sent back to the prison. So it takes extra time. There's also telephone. And you know, there's a lot of history there with how much telephone service costs. The tablets are tablets are relatively new. In the past 10 years, they've kind of gained prominence in prison systems across the country. And they're really, they're really something that can be very cool, because it opens up the ability to have instant communication with your loved ones to be able to maintain your family ties, like with a video visit, you can have a video visit a couple times, up to a couple times a day if you can afford it. You can essentially text message someone from inside there. It's all monitored and there are restrictions. And they also allow for kind people inside to keep up with culture a little bit and pass time and also educate themselves. Because there's the ability for entertainment, there's ability for education, and there's the ability to maintain those family bonds, which research has shown whenever you're able to maintain those strong family bonds, you're less likely to go back to prison whenever you get out. Now, that's the benefit. And that is the really cool thing it opens up. There's also another side, which is how much it costs. There is, you know, I guess like, there's a long history of like enterprising capitalists kind of finding a way to make a buck off of prisoners. For decades, it was the telephones and charging ridiculous rates, permanent rates to call out and use the telephone and federal regulators. in response to lawsuits over the decades have ultimately like really clamped down on that. But the tablets are kind of a new space there where a private company can come in and essentially how they do it in Delaware is they contract with the department of corrections to install the technology, provide these little tablets, and then they get to decide how much it costs to use them. And the rates can be pretty expensive. I'm gonna refer to my notes here so I don't get it wrong. I'm talking 25 cents per text message. It can be a quarter for a minute of FaceTime, which, you know, doesn't sound like a lot, but it adds up and it is not anything like the rates that we pay out here in the normal world because we have choice and the market would not tolerate that. We would, you Somebody would even do it for cheaper. In prison, you don't have a choice. DOC has their contract with a provider and they are making big money off of it. There's also the education aspect. Well, I say education. Education is typically my understanding. There's a lot of educational material that's provided for free on the tablets. Then there's also entertainment, which charges a per minute rate. We're talking five cents a minute. to play Candy Crush. And through reporting this, did some like back of the napkin calculations. Keep in mind that folks in prison in Delaware, if they have a prison job, are making an average of 28 cents an hour. So if you watch three episodes of Walking Dead or an hour long, three hour long episodes of the television show, you're basically paying the cost for what it will cost us out here to subscribe to Netflix or Hulu. And it's also four days of your labor in prison to pay for those three episodes. So a lot of these costs also end up because people don't make a ton of money in prison. They're not coming in there with, you know, large bank accounts of money and money stuffed away often. It really usually falls on their families to kind help subsidize these things. And this is a, this is part of what David decided that he wanted to protest these exorbitant costs. And, you know, we see that we see that in other areas of incarceration, you know, I mentioned the phones and how the FCC cracked down on that. They're starting to crack down more on the cost of video visits, but you also see things like commissary where, you know, like a television monitor that would cost you know, $50 out here, it cost them over a hundred dollars in there. And it's just kind of it's kind of bizarre and unfair in a lot of ways. It is. And I think, you know, articles like this sort of bringing to light some of those aspects are important. And it's so courageous to think what David, you know, tried to do with the protests because that is a lifeline to the outside world. And it is a, a huge space of connection. And I want to get into in just a little bit about sort of what happened with that and how it worked. Obviously, there was the lawsuit. But when you're reporting a story like this, I mean, it could have been just a profile story, like one man's courageous stand against Delaware prisons for usurious text messaging rates. But it was sort of wider than And so I wanted to ask you more about sort of how you decided to shape the story and what you were trying to achieve with it. And then sort of the pieces that go into that shape, because you had to do FOIA requests, you had to do like, you had to do stuff. wasn't just talking to David. So I know that was a jam packed question, but tell us. So kind of looking at like why. how I decided to set up the story kind of relates to what was interesting to me about it. First of all, the idea of a boycott of the internet in prison is odd and interesting. And, you know, I wanted to dig into that. And I knew because I use the video chat service with people, I know how much the news journal. is expensed for me to have this contact with folks so I knew it was expensive. And then there's another aspect of it which is the idea of protest in prison and also kind of the administrative discretion that the prison has to crack down on individuals doing that kind of stuff that was very interesting to me. And you know, prison stories, the ones that make the most noise are typically about excessive force. and people being hurt in prison. But there are a litany of other, I'll call like indecencies that are imposed upon people in prison that are not helpful and unfair and go beyond the punishment that I think the courts passes down, which is taking away their freedom. And I think those are worth looking at, particularly as a rate relates to like exploitation, financial exploitation and stuff like that. I think that stuff is really interesting and worth focusing on. And, we have a system here in the United States where we incarcerate, guess, say if we incarcerate a lot of people at a per capita rate is among the highest in the world, if not the highest in the world, we also have a high recidivism rate. So people who get out are going back in. And there's no other explanation for that than like the status quo of how things are in prison and with policing and all the way down to how society distributes resources is not working right. So you have to explore all those little things. Now, as it relates to Hamilton's story, he had the lawsuit. I filed a FOIA request for the contract governing the tablet services in Delaware. This company, this private company, billion dollar company, making a ton of money in a lot of prisons off of this. They have a contract with the Department of Correction. I foiled that just to kind of see what the rules were, see what the, you know, how much the state pays, which is nothing, versus how much, which is what are the rules that this private provider can or must abide by when providing the service in prison. So I foiled that. I did a lot of digging in the court to kind of pull out the lawsuit stuff that was relevant. I interviews with DOC to the extent they wanted to talk. And I did a little outside research about kind of the context of tablets and kind of how they proliferated in other prisons across the country and what watchdog groups think of them. And those are the essential pieces that kind of went into reporting this specific thing. I'm sorry, that was a very long. It's helpful because, you know, these stories don't just come, you know, out with a neat bow, you have to sort of figure out like, what angle do you want to take? How do you want to shape that and what information you need? And just, you know, like, I think it's it is interesting. I don't think people necessarily give it a lot of credence to recognize like the timeline that you're like. FOIA, they'll get back to you next day for sure. The original letter that David wrote was a year old before you figured out that the lawsuit was there. In some ways, you're writing about things that happened two, three years ago. Because you filed that FOIA in 2020, right? Well, David's thing is kind of interesting. Now, I filed the FOIA, that letter came. And he had not, he had not, the boycott had not happened yet. And then the crackdown, which we haven't really talked about yet, had not happened yet. So this was like, he was giving me warning that was going to happen or like, you know, he wanted some coverage or I don't remember his exact purpose for writing the original letter. So he does it. And then the crackdown comes and then a year later, he's filing a lawsuit essentially over the crackdown. That's when I kind of like it really caught my attention because like the boycott was interesting and then like, but the crackdown that came after kind of added a little extra layer of intrigue. Like I'd always meant to kind of write about the tablets and stuff for that. However, it really kind of my kind of interest in it really took off whenever I learned about the crackdown from his lawsuit. And that kind of that prompted the FOIA. Honestly, I might have the tablet contract before that. But I definitely got an updated one or kind of like went in to figure out like, okay, is this still the situation, et cetera. And then in that contract, once you got the FOIA contract, know, certainly, and every state is different for people following along at home in terms of what they can exclude or redact within documents. But were you able to see, you know, does the state gain anything from, I know that they don't pay anything, but do they share in the profits of those fees from the tablet company? That was a good question that I wanted to answer. And the answer is actually no in Delaware. There's a lot of states that have, that do receive a financial benefit as part of these contracts. Delaware does not. And Delaware essentially, they see it as a way for prisoners to stay connected. as a way to like get educational things to them as a way of taking care of some administrative tasks that would normally be on paper. You can file grievances and stuff from the tablets is my understanding. And they also, they see it as a security benefit because people are distracted from causing problems. And also they have wide ability to monitor every word that is sent on those things, every minute that is spent on those things, the video calls, there's ability for them to like have different technologies that allow them to like search for particular words that are being said and things like that. So they gain a security capacity also through this. And that seems to be the benefit. yeah, I believe that they also see it as a good thing in terms having people be connected. Now, one thing I wanted to get from the contract was how much does this private company make every year off of this? And since it's like on a, know, rate per service or fee for service kind of way, the contract, which was signed, you know, before they installed the tablets and everything. doesn't really have like a guesstimate or an estimate. And the Department of Corrections, they're like, well, they're a private company. They pull in the money. don't get any information about that. Although the contract says they're supposed to receive some sort of, or they have the ability to receive reports about how much money is made. But they did tell me as kind of a way about bragging about the usefulness of the service, how many text messages and video calls had taken place with the tablets in a year's time. And I was able to do some back of the napkin extrapolation to say, all right, if text message, they sent X number of text messages and text messages cost this much, then the company is making this much. And the profit, well, I say the profit, the revenue potential was in the millions just for Delaware. Delaware is a small state. mean, just if you think about, know, writing that, extrapolating that out across the nation, that's a huge amount of money. So tell us a little bit about the crackdown. There was the boycott, which maybe didn't go anywhere, but what happened to David in his quest? So kind of the timeline of how this worked out, he had these notices printed out and he was with a couple other people beginning the process of distributing them, saying, all right, on June 1st, nobody used the tablets. obviously came to the attention of corrections officials and David was considered, I guess is considered per his disciplinary record and his status in prison as a model prisoner. He was in what's called the merit building, which is where you have a private cell. Well, private ish. You don't have a cellmate and you have the ability to kind of come and go from the cell. into the common areas of the tier with regularity. is for prisoners that have jobs and that have a history of good discipline. so he enjoyed like one of the nicest spots in prison, if you can call it nice. Then he plans his boycott and that saw relegated to what's called the shoe, which is the secure housing unit where you have a cellmate, your time outside of the cell is highly restricted to a couple hours a day. ability to participate in programming is gone for a, for it to a large extent or restricted, I should say. Your ability to have a job is gone. You don't have a job anymore. you lose your good time, which is all the years that you spent behaving the way they want you to behave, you get a little time off your sentence, that is forfeit. You are unable to do video visits or regular in -person visits as frequently as you would in the other part of the prison. It's... And this was all for the potential of a boycott because you said it Actually, it didn't get off. No, they stomped it out before it actually ever occurred. And he went through disciplinary proceedings and. Essentially was housed in this disciplinary housing and prison officials in the disciplinary documents, if I remember this correctly, or in some form or fashion, likened what he did to trying to organize a riot. In 2017, there was a riot in Delaware prisons where there was this coordination where prisoners took over a building and held counselors and prison officers hostage for 18 hours and an officer died. This was a protest, too. But, you know, it ended with a murder or I guess a murder occurred in the process. But they liken what he did to that now. So He's relegated to this harsh part of the prison and he has this on his record where prison officials are likening what he did to a prison riot and that will follow him and all of his efforts to get out of prison because you have your mandatory prison time on your sentence and then after that you have more time but you have the ability to petition for early release based on your good behavior and based on the fact that you're now an adult and a different person than you were whenever you went into prison. And he was worried about the idea of this, them likening him to a rioter would haunt him and his abilities get out. So this is why he filed the lawsuit. And the other added aspect of this and kind of what happened to him is there's a system in prison for determining whether or not you're supposed to be in the shoe. versus like medium security versus like the merit building. And it's based on like your participation in programming, your behavior, whether you have a job. And so according to that rubric, he Once you're in the shoe, it sounds like you can't really get out if you can't have a job and you can't participate in programs. You're supposed to be reclassified every year. And if you've If you've gone, you know, so much time without disciplinary issues, you can get out of there and you'll be reclassified out of there based on this rubric. And by the time that I ended up really talking to him, he, according to his lawsuit, had enough what the system is based on points. He had enough points to have been flowed out of that disciplinary harsh housing area, but he was being held there on what was basically like administrative discretion. Gordon, somebody higher wanted him to continue to be there for what he did. Whether or not, know, he, think some point his lawsuit or in his conversations with me said that he was told or either he had a strong belief that they were making an example out of him. Now, that was like, that was really interesting to me because not only like that, as far as the story goes, you have really interesting thing with the tablets and how they're both good and exploitative. And then you also have the situation where it explores what I called, you know, earlier, what I referred to as some of those other like indecent seas inflicted upon people in prison and, and kind of the administrative discretion that you might have a system and a rubric for determining where you're going to be housed in the prison or determining where you deserve to be in the prison, but that can be overrode. on the discretion of an official and for something as simple as, you know, organizing a boycott. Right. But yeah, so that was what his lawsuit was over that, you know, we wrote a story about it and then I can talk to you about what came after. if you will. And we will just for those in our audience, we will have time for questions. So start thinking what you'd like to ask Xerxes. I wanted to ask a little bit, you you are, in listening to the story unfold, it's so Byzantine working within the prison system. And so as a reporter, I know you, of course, built up a network of sources through the years, but how do you kind of penetrate those veils? Because it's always difficult to get information when people don't really want to talk to And I feel like once a story like this kind of gets out into the open world, it doesn't make the prison system look particularly rehabilitative or, you know, it doesn't, it's not a great story for them. So how do you kind of get the information and how do you work within that network just sort of as you're applying your craft? Well, it's tough to talk to the Department of Corrections, probably because I don't write enough nice stories. and I recognize that, they, you know, I think as the, the administration here understand that they have an obligation to explain what they're doing in a lot of cases. think they understand that, but they, you know, in my view, at least the way they treat me is they say as little as they can. now I'm typically writing about litigation most lawyers are like, don't comment, don't comment, we're going to, you know, we're going to litigate this. So I understand that. But I have found it difficult to, you know, make administrative sources and things like that. There are individuals that do work in these places that want to talk because they see things going on that bother them from time to time. When it comes to understanding what's going on in prison, it's not hard to get prison sources. If you write about the prison, prisoners will read it and they will contact you. Now that is a, that's kind of a double -edged sword because the tablets also allow for that extra level of communication. A video call with people inside fairly regularly. the text messages thing is much easier for me to receive messages and send messages to individuals than waiting on the snail mail. That said, there's a lot of desperation in prison. There's a lot of people who need help and they need help in a sense that they need an attorney, not necessarily a reporter. So that is a difficult balance to try to make it clear folks, like, you know, my job is very limited and I can't necessarily help you. I'll hear you out in most cases. You have to like manage expectations. And it's also just like, it becomes kind of a flood. Like the more you get, the more you write people back, the more messages you're getting and the harder it becomes to handle. And I should note also the tablet. You know, the browser application that I use on my end is also, you know, designed for folks that don't really have a lot of choice in the market because it's very user unfriendly. But that's an aside. I, as far as building sources in prison, I would tell people when you have it, when you write a story, write a prison related story and at the bottom, go figure out what kind of system they use for tablets. go sign up for it and put it in tagline in your story that prisoners who want to contact ex -reporter can do so on ours is called the Getting Out app on getting out, type in this email address and you'll find me and you'll get messages. Okay. And actually now that we're coming up to near the end of our time, probably have about 10 minutes left. I have, and we'll turn to our, I want to find, I'm sorry, take two, it's still early in the morning. Tell us what David's doing now, how the lawsuit finished out and where he is, and then we'll open up for questions. So after we wrote about it, the local ACLU got interested in it and he was representing himself in this lawsuit and they decided to represent or intern appearance on his behalf and essentially their attorney for the local chapter here negotiated a settlement with the department. The settlement got him out of disciplinary housing and set a clear path for him to be transitioned out of that disciplinary housing. It had provisions in there about how the department would not hold this situation against him in further housing classification decisions. And it had another provision in there about them making a good faith effort to get him some sort of educational things that he wanted. And then on his side, he had to agree never to organize another protest or boycott again and abide by certain rules. And ultimately it seems like it was, you know, it was an outcome that he wanted. He's now. been transferred to a different prison down in Sussex and is working on his effort to apply for early release. basically it got litigated to a settlement that he was pleased with after he was able to get some attorney to come in and help him. And now he's trying to move on with a getting out. Well, with never the ability to organize another protest again, which is really, it's kind of, that's chilling for the first amendment for sure. It's interesting because the department would argue we cannot have people organizing in this kind of way because sometimes there's violence involved potentially. the system is really traumatized. Our local system is really traumatized by 2017. what happened here. And, you know, I can see them being very wary about that kind of thing. now this was something where, you know, I have the boycott notices in my story, you know, they're not calling for violence, they're calling for a boycott. But the prison is very wary of organization. And I can see where they're coming from in that area. I don't think what happened to David was fair. And I do think the tablets are the cost of them. They're exploitative compared to what we pay out here. So it's an interesting spot he was in for sure. Yeah, absolutely. All right, do we have any questions from people listening while people are thinking, when you were talking about sort of the flood of requests or letters and things that you get from prisoners, it's hard not to empathize with some of the situations that you're seeing. do you shut that off? Like, I feel like there's an element of self -care here, because you could like tear yourself apart thinking, how can I, know, should I be connecting people with resources? How do I, you know, You're a good person. How do you, how do you contend with all that need? I'm still figuring, still figuring that out. There have been people that have written to me asking for help that have later killed themselves. There have been people that are still just like begging for help. There have been people that, you know, asked for my help with something. I wasn't able to help them, but they eventually, you know, maybe they eventually got out. So I've learned a lot over the past couple years and trying to maintain these communications with folks because like I said, it's not something I can do for eight hours a day. Just like my job, I don't have time for that. I try to tell everyone that I contact, if they want to talk to me about a situation, I'll talk to them, but chances are I'm not going to be able to help them. I will send basic information about how to contact attorneys and stuff like that when I can. I'll send them like, if they're asking how to contact the ACLU, because they want to send them an intake form about their situation, I'll send them basic information about that. But it is kind of difficult to just like, not shut it off, like I can shut it off, but like just knowing that there's folks out there that need legal help primarily, and that have situations that I would really like to dig into, kind of stinks. And I wish it were something that I could just spend all my work time on. I think it would be interesting for people to read. And I think it might be able to like do some good. But ultimately it is just a little small part of what we're doing here. Sure. Tierra, why don't you ask your question? I'm going to spotlight you as well and introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Tierra Stone. I'm interning with the Afro. And one of the questions that I have is out of all the cases that you've written about, which one was the hardest The hardest ones in terms of like emotion or like reporting? As far as emotion and reporting, but mostly emotion. How did you learn how to maneuver and to keep your emotions in check? You live and you learn. You write about these things over and over again and you kind of like, you think about how you would have done things differently and stuff like that. As far as really hard ones, you know, there's a kid who's my age. who went in and he had Crohn's disease and he didn't get proper health care and ultimately he died of cancer that likely could have been prevented. And I met with his family and that was tough just because I could see similarities between myself and him as far as age and stuff like that. It's also tough, just because you're a lot of times I'm interacting with people that did something really stupid or, you know, maybe inexplicable when they were children. I don't say children. I still consider people that are 19 or 20 to mentally be children in a lot of cases. I know I was and is difficult. And I've had to think a lot about like what role the prisons play in our society when you talk to a grown man who's an entirely different person in prison than he was when he was when he made his mistake. And it's hard to it's hard to see those people kind of stuffed away when you think that if they were out, they probably wouldn't make the same stupid mistake that they made. or they could be a positive influence in the lives of their family. So that's difficult too. But yeah, as far as like there's been a lot of like emotionally kind of difficult things. like some of the stuff that weighs on me most is just the stuff I haven't and never made time to get to. Yeah, John, do you have a question? Yeah, over the last year I had the opportunity visit a friend of mine who was incarcerated and eventually got transferred to what they call the Plumber Center, which is a work release center. And I would go visit him down there. And what really I know, what I noticed is the incredible labor intensity involved in just one person visiting one person there, far as security, as far as this and that. This story that Lex did is just incredible. I think that the prisons have an opportunity to eliminate a huge amount of security and personnel costs by using these so -called Zoom calls for the prisoners to their families. So I want to commend you for having this show today and also Lex for writing about it, because I knew nothing about any of this. And it's amazing how Al Mosaic our prisons are as far as their operating procedures and this is one of them and I was familiar with the telephone procedures and of course many years ago in Philadelphia prisoners were they were the subject of of experiments for fragrances and aftershave and things like that up in Holmesburg prison in Philadelphia so not really a question just more of a commentary and I think it's a This is a tremendous story, Lex, and keep up the good work. Thank you. Thank you, John. Well, and I wanted to just ask also, how do you fit all this in? mean, you're obviously reporting on other things as well. So you're not straight prison. You're looking at courts. You're looking at local government. So how do you, just on a mechanical level, do you have all these threads of stories just sort of open that you kind of rotate through and see what's like, okay, something's different here. Like, how do you do it? The short and most honest answer is I struggle every day. It's nice to know you're human. You know, I try to allocate a little bit of time to curate my contacts, like, you know, open up the prison inbox and try to work through that Even in that, there's like organizational tasks that have to occur because the user interface is garbage. And it's hard to keep up with like what I sent before and what people said previously. And like, you sent me a message most recently and that kind of thing. I don't know. And it changes with the job. The job changes, particularly at a paper like ours, you know. there was a period of time in which the paper was emphasizing subscriber stories, hard paywall stories. So they wanted something, they wanted things more meaty and more thorough, thoroughly research that you, they understood took time. And then, you know, with time that's become more of an emphasis as far as administratively on more quick turn stuff. the kind of organizational procedures change with the job requirements. I do have lists upon lists of things that I would like to get to. Lots of great ideas out there, it sounds like. It really is. mean, and it goes back to like, kind of what I was saying earlier about prison generally, like, there's a, it's a system that supposed to be rehabilitating people, but often fails. And I think as societally, We know that bad things happen in prison. I think it's in the back of people's minds, they're able, folks are able to write it off. Particularly if they don't have a loved one in prison, folks are able to write it off as, prison's tough, prison's hard. But I reject that notion because it's supposed to serve a purpose for rehabilitation. And it's, and also people have rights in there. And. I think writing about those things and kind of helping people understand the complexities of those smaller things that isn't like somebody getting beat up and it's obviously a wrong is helpful and should be done more. Absolutely. Well, I feel like those are such fitting words to end with. And I thank you so much for your time with us today. This has been terrific. In the show notes, we'll put a link to the story in case people want to want to read it. And I hope to see more award winning and fabulous work from you in the contest next year. So thanks so much. All right. I appreciate you all having me. Take it easy.
