Transcript
Anne Holsinger 0:00
Hello and welcome to Discussions with DPIC. I’m Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. Our guest today is Keri Blakinger, a journalist covering mass incarceration. She currently writes for the Los Angeles Times and has previously written for The Marshall Project and The Houston Chronicle. She’s also the author of Corrections in Ink, a memoir about her journey from figure skating, to addiction, to prison, and now to reporting. Thank you for joining us Ms. Blakinger.
Keri Blakinger 0:27
Hey, thanks for having me.
Anne Holsinger 0:29
For listeners who aren’t familiar with your 2022 memoir, could you briefly explain what led you to your career as a journalist covering the legal system and prisons?
Keri Blakinger 0:37
Well, um, I guess the very short version is that after several years of struggling with addiction, I ended up in prison myself, and then, when I got out, I got into journalism, I’m not going to say entirely by accident, like I had been an English major previously and I’d been interested in writing. I’d written some for the kids section of the local newspaper when I was in high school. But then, when I got out, I was paroled to the middle of nowhere with no job and no car and someone that I used to get high with had called me and said, hey, my friend is an editor of the local paper and she’s looking to interview women who have been in the jail, would you be willing to talk to her. And so the editor, name’s Glennis, drove out to interview me. And afterwards, she said, hey, I Googled you, I read some of your stuff you, you know, you seem good, you want to try writing for us? And so I just started freelancing, and covering tiny town board meetings in 5000-person-towns in upstate New York and that was how I got my start. And after that, I got hired full time, there was a staff writer, then went to the New York Daily News as a very low level, web content writer. And then I got a fellowship with Hearst Newspapers, starting in Houston. And it was there that I ended up after a year the fellowship getting hired on staff and getting given the death penalty as part of my coverage area. From there, once I started covering the death penalty, I sort of expanded out into other aspects of the criminal legal system, and my specialty ended up becoming covering jails and prisons and death row.
Anne Holsinger 2:24
How do you think your experience as a formerly incarcerated person influences your reporting on the prison system?
Keri Blakinger 2:31
I think it’s just, it can be pretty subtle. Like I think it’s sometimes it’s just made me look into different things, or notice that something is an outlier in a way that maybe other people don’t. I think one of the sort of obvious examples of this is one of the first stories that I got a tip about when I was, when I started covering death row, which was when some people told me that the guys on death row were all going to be able to get dentures if they didn’t have teeth. And I was like, oh, that sounds like a, that sounds like an interesting story. I was shocked that they couldn’t get dentures, because where I done time, New York, people got dentures and the people that I knew in other systems, were able to get dentures if they were toothless. Then I reached out to the prison system and that turned out not to be true. And I mean, not to be true that they were getting dentures, it was in fact true that they could not get them and if you didn’t have teeth, they would just take your mess hall meal, toss it in a blender, puree it and serve it to you that way. And that was not just true on death row, that was that was true throughout the system. And I was shocked by that. And I think that that is partly because I knew what the norms were in other systems that I’d been in and I knew that there were states that that did it differently. And I think that not everyone would have been shocked by the possibility that we’re serving, you know, pureed food to prisoners, instead of giving them teeth, which does sound horrible on the surface. But I think that maybe folks that aren’t as familiar with the system might not have known that it was an outlier. One of the other ways that it influences my reporting is is a little more subtle. And that’s just that I think I start with the deeply ingrained conviction that the people I’m covering, the people in prison are people. And I know that sounds really basic, but I think historically, there are many people in journalism who have fundamentally not really viewed incarcerated people as people. Not necessarily consciously but I think that for people who don’t have as much constant contact with them, it can be really easy to view people who are locked up as sort of faceless numbers. And to me that was, you know, they weren’t, those were like, my friends. Those are people that I knew. So I think that has sort of fundamentally caused me to cover it in a slightly different way.
Anne Holsinger 4:54
Yeah. Do you find that that perspective affects how you interact with prisoners as you’re going about your reporting?
Keri Blakinger 5:00
I think that, you know, I, first of all, I think they, you know, they interact with me differently than with many reporters not always and you know, not all reporters, obviously. But I think that for some people when they under-, when they know that I understand the mentality, when they know that I understand what it’s like to be just crossing off days on a calendar waiting until you can be consistently viewed as like a real person again, I think that that sort of influences the way that they interact with me, first of all, but I mean, I also think that it gives me a different nose for what is credible when I’m talking to people who are incarcerated. Because on the one hand, they think that there’s a lot of reporters who well, actually not I shouldn’t say reporters, this isn’t just reporters, I think people generally, readers, editors, reporters, are all less likely to believe people who are in prison as if the mere fact of their incarceration makes them less credible, for things that have nothing to do with why they are incarcerated. So I think that my, my willingness to, to trust people, but also, you know, since I’ve been through it, I also have a nose for what is within the realm of possibility and what is perhaps outlandish.
Anne Holsinger 5:00
In the past, you’ve written about the conditions of confinement on federal death row, as well as Texas’ and California’s death rows. What are some common issues that you see across those three systems?
Keri Blakinger 6:34
You know, there’s, there’s so many differences, those are about as different as death rows can get. But I do think the one commonality that stands out that I imagine most listeners to this podcast are aware of, but people in America are not broadly aware of, is just the sheer amount of time that people are spending there. I think that there is still a common misperception that people who are on death row are, they’re somewhat transiently and then either exonerated or executed. And all three of those systems have people who have been languishing on those death rows for a long time. Obviously, California isn’t executing anyone. So people that are on death row, there are just their, their legal system, as Rob Dunham, I know has has been poking into and writing about since leaving DPIC. You know, their their courts are particularly backlogged. So even people pursuing innocence claims aren’t able to move forward with those claims. And then we get to Texas, they are very actively executing people. And yet there are still many people out of the roughly 200 on death row there, it’s a little under that, who have been there for more than a decade, more than two decades. One of the people that I talk to the most, Tony Ford, has been there since like the mid to early, early 90s, I guess. And you know, federal death row, prior to that Trump spree, was not executing people either. And even those that remain have, many of them have been there for a very long time. So I think that’s sort of the one commonality is not even the conditions per se, but just the fact of how long they’re there, which is something that people are just so broadly unaware of.
Anne Holsinger 8:22
In your memoir, you write about some of the ways that being incarcerated as a woman is unique from the experiences that men have in prison. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Keri Blakinger 8:31
There’s so many different ways to go with this one. There’s, there’s little things like I think that logistically, prisons and prison policies are so often designed for men and I, I say that with the understanding that they are, of course not designed to be helpful to men, you know, they’re not designed, they’re not truly designed for sort of rehabilitative purposes are anything, but they are designed with men in mind. And a lot of the, you know, rules and regulations and policies and even like physical structures are often designed to control men, men’s social hierarchies, and male violence. You know, not that women aren’t violent at all, but they are typically incarcerated for less violent crimes and they typically engage in less interpersonal violence while in prison. So like, just the fundamental sort of structure of, of how these places are run, is not designed to control or help or rehabilitate women. So I think that’s sort of a starting point. But then there’s also the smaller things like I remember when I was in New York, I mean, and I say small, but in some ways, this was not small. At that point, everybody, of any gender, got five rolls of single ply toilet paper a month, and that is not enough for a woman, for a woman who, you know, obviously has to simply use toilet paper more than men, but also like, bleeds once a month. Like that’s just not adequate. And you couldn’t get more if you didn’t have money to buy more on commissary, you just couldn’t get more and I definitely heard women offering sexual favors in exchange for more toilet paper. And I mean, that’s just, I mean, first of all, like, obviously, that’s dehumanizing and cruel and shouldn’t be happening to anyone, regardless of what their toilet paper needs or gender are. However, it’s very foreseeable that setting a blanket policy like that is going to be problematic for women in a way that it is not for men. That’s a very sort of small example, in some ways, but I think it’s also very telling, but then there’s also you know, the clothes are designed for men. And if you’re a woman, you get in trouble for altering them to just fit you. Also, fundamentally, since it tends to be disproportionately men who are working in corrections, and many of them have, you know, military background, I think that for women who overwhelmingly have histories of sexual violence and trauma, it can mean at the hands of men, I think it can be really counterproductive from a sort of, I don’t know, trauma sensitive approach or from a point of view of rehabilitation, I think it can be really counterproductive to have sexually traumatized women being yelled at and ordered around and, and, you know, sort of bullied and harassed by staff that is disproportionately male, that sort of undermines some of the sensible rehabilitative goals for women coming at it from their particular trauma.
Anne Holsinger 11:40
In the early days of the COVID, 19 pandemic, you did a lot of reporting on the prison conditions related to that. How did the pandemic exacerbate problems for incarcerated people, especially those on death row?
Keri Blakinger 11:52
So I think in Texas, a lot of the ways that it exacerbated problems for people on death row are very much mirrored in how it made things worse for the general population, which is that there were not volunteers coming in in the same way, there were fewer opportunities to get out of your cell at all. People in GP, that meant they were just going from being out and about all the time to just being locked down and in solitary confinement. And I did one story at the time about how there was something like when I counted it early in the pandemic, there were like at least 300,000 people, I think that were in solitary when you counted up the systems that said they had locked down completely. And you know, some of the systems that had specific prisons that were locked down. For people on death row in Texas, they were already in solitary, but it did mean that they were getting out for rec, even alone, far less frequently, that they were getting out for showers less frequently. I remember at one point talking to a guy who hadn’t been out for shower in 51 days. And now some of that was because of concerns about COVID, but some of that was also because COVID exacerbated a staffing crisis in a lot of prisons. And I know that there’s some people that like say, oh, it’s not an understaffing crisis, it’s an over incarceration crisis. And I think those are both relevant things, but they’re, they’re separate things. Staffing did decrease in, in some prisons during COVID. And in many places, it hasn’t recovered. I think that sometimes people are surprised when I tell them that prisoners themselves do not actually want there to be bad staff to prisoner ratios. Like they actually want there to be more guards instead of less, because those are the people that they need to unlock their cells and take them out so they can shower, or take them out to rec, or escort people into the facility who are planning to do programming. And all of those things can’t happen if there are not an adequate number of guards to simply do those tasks. I will say though, the pandemic did have one advantage for some people in prison, I guess actually two now that I think about it. So for death row in particular, it paused executions in a lot of states, not all executions, and not for as long as many people might have hoped. Billing Wardlow was still executed in the middle of 2020, like June or July of that year. And then, you know, the other thing is that because guards were less interested in doing cell searches early in COVID, when there were still a lot of concerns about how exactly it was spread. There were a lot of people who were able to hold on to their contraband phones for a lot longer, like people that had a contraband phone when COVID started, they, the in prisons where they were never able to keep them from within a few weeks at a time they were suddenly able to hang on to the same phone for like, nine months or a year or more. I think that was a lifeline for a lot of people. There’s you know, when you say contraband, I think people assume that there’s something nefarious people are doing with the phones, which is definitely true in some cases, although honestly, a lot of people are, if they’re going to do something nefarious, they’re probably going to do it anyway with or without a phone. But most of the people, I think most of the people that I’m aware of that had phones, or most of the people that I talked to that had phones, were really just so grateful to be able to like, FaceTime with their families, and in some cases, ordered themselves books on Amazon. I talked to people that were doing remote learning college classes, from their contraband phones. You know, there were people that were self-publishing books, you know, taking coding classes, there was just there was, there were so many amazing things that were so impressive to me that people did with their phones that I think, really, you know, upended the idea of what you what people might think of when they think of what a prisoner does with a contraband phone. And of course, as a reporter, that was amazing, because it made it so much easier to report on bad conditions in a much more credible way. Because I can interview two dozen people experiencing the same terrible condition, or telling me about how bad the food is, but until I can show pictures of moldy, rotten, hot dogs and I don’t know, like stale moldy buns, like until I can show pictures of that, people don’t really believe or I think fully appreciate how bad some of these, can some of these very subjective conditions are.
Anne Holsinger 16:35
In 2023, you wrote about how prisoners on Texas’ death row were using the game Dungeons and Dragons to build community and cope with their circumstances. Could you share a little bit about how that story came to light and what you think it says about death row and about the prisoners themselves.
Keri Blakinger 16:51
So I learned about their Dungeons and Dragons games probably around, I don’t know, 2017, maybe 2018. It’s 2017, probably. The first time I visited Larry Swearingen. I was at the Houston Chronicle and he was on Texas death row at that point, he’s since been executed. But, I, the first time I visited him for an interview, he mentioned that they played Magic the Gathering. And I was like what? Did not expect that one, hadn’t even thought about that game since I was in elementary school, probably. And then he was like, I expressed my surprise, and he was like, oh, yeah, you know, they play D&D, too. I was like, wait, what? But he had stopped playing by that point, and was not able to tell me the names of people who had or who were still playing because a lot of the guys didn’t know each other’s full name. Like they lived next to someone for years, and only have referred to each other by their jail names. So I spent like, I don’t know, the next couple years trying to track down more people who played and every time I would go and interview someone, I would be like, hey, do you play? Do you know anyone who does? You know, eventually, I identified a few people who did and were willing to talk to me and I was hesitant to do a story on it at first because I was a little worried that like, if it was on the front page of the Houston Chronicle, because that’s where I was at the time, that Texas officials would see it and really take it the wrong way and be like, wow, they’re doing something they enjoy, let’s figure out a way to take that away. But, but I also felt like this was a very, very good, sort of humanizing story, it was a chance for some of these guys to talk about an aspect of their lives other than their crime. It was a chance for people to see death row from a different angle, like through another lens, and to understand the impacts of the intense isolation that Texas death row has entailed since, since they put them all in lockdown in 2001. And I thought that it was a very important way to talk about solitary confinement and the tortures of long term solitary, but without just sort of writing an article about like, this is how bad solitary is. So I thought it had value as a story and as a narrative that could draw in different readers. But I started by doing a stage piece for Pop-Up Magazine, which is live and not recorded. So I figured that if I did it in that scenario, I could get a sense of how people responded to it, without risking the sort of blowback that it might if it were on the front page of the Chronicle. When I did that piece, the reactions were so so sympathetic, and people were not being like, why are these guys doing something fun? So I thought that was good, good initial set of responses, and I wasn’t necessarily going to do anything else with it, but then when I got hired at the Marshall Project in 2020, The New York Times magazine came to us and was like, hey, we like your stuff. Do you have any stories you want to pitch? And I was like you know what, I think this could make a good magazine story. And by that point, I’d also become aware that death row in, in Texas was making a few small positive changes, so I was a little less worried about how officials there would respond. And I spent the next like three years off and on like reporting this out, obviously, it was waylaid by the pandemic, because there was no visiting for like a month and a half, or for a year and a half in there. Finally, the story came out last year around September, and by that point death row already made several other sort of positive changes. The prison started a radio station, and they allowed the guys on the row to participate by letting them write to the other prisoners and have their words read, which is sort of the first time that they’d had interactions with the larger general population community there. And you know, they’d also gotten TVs in the day rooms. So for the first time, in like two decades, they’ve had access to TVs. And they’d also started one Faith Based program. So they’d made a few changes and I felt pretty good by the time the story came out that they were, you know, not going to kill a thing, simply because it appeared positive. So yeah, it came out in September and I guess there’s a possibility now that it could end up being a film, I’m sort of pitching…Yeah, there’s been some some film and TV interest and I’m pitching, I think I’m going to pitch a second book around it, in part because the two main characters per se, saying characters in air quotes because they’re people, also have really good stories. And at its core, the story that ran in the New York Times in September ended up being about how two guys on death row, one probably innocent one guilty, became best friends over the course of two decades in solitary confinement through their connections that they built in this game and this game world. And how D&D became a kind of therapy for a lot of guys who didn’t have other access to ways to help themselves or each other. So it became a very unexpected way in which they bridge the isolation, there’s a lot to unpack there and their game narratives have been so interesting for some of the ways in which they seem to mirror their own lives and backgrounds. And I’m always struck by the fact that their game narratives give them a chance to sort of rewrite their own stories and imagine better lives for themselves and imagine worlds in which they are the heroes instead of instead of being where they are. And so yeah, it’s been a long journey telling that story. And I guess the journey continues, because I’m trying to figure out where to move with it from here.
Anne Holsinger 23:05
That’s fascinating to hear, you know, That’s fascinating to hear, you know, the ways that it has affected the prisoners and, and also the story of reporting it out. The bureaucracy of the prison, I think, creates a lot of interesting wrinkles in your approach to a story.
Keri Blakinger 23:20
It so does, it’s so hard because on Texas death row, you could only, as as a reporter, you can only interview a given inmate every once, for one hour every 90-days.
Anne Holsinger 23:31
Oh, wow.
Keri Blakinger 23:32
Which is really super inconvenient for a long form narrative.
Anne Holsinger 23:37 Sure, yeah. So to move to a different part of the prison system, journalists are often among the very few people to witness executions and to provide an account of what happened for the public. What role do you think journalists play in that process? And what level of responsibility do you think they bear to the public and to the people being executed?
Keri Blakinger 23:57
At a sort of most basic level, the really important aspect of having a journalist there is to truthfully report what happened, especially if something goes wrong, or even if something doesn’t go what officials consider wrong to, to report what has actually said. I mean, I very quickly noticed when I was covering executions in Texas that they would post their official last words, but they would only post online their official last words. So I didn’t realize from reading prior coverage, that the guys were routinely saying other things afterwards, like after their official last statement ended, they were saying things like, it’s burning, or they would narrate their own deaths, like there were these things that were really telling and I think important aspects of what is going on, that were not, like recorded in the official TDCJ record of things. You know, and there was also times like I remember, there’s a guy with Parkinson’s that was executed and I could see him continually have tremors as he was dying. And I mean, as would be expected, like he had Parkinson’s, you know. And I put that in the story and the prison spokesman at the time, who was frankly, just a just a jerk, He called me up afterwards, irate to be like, no, he wasn’t, he wasn’t shaking. I was like, yes, he definitely was, like I was sitting there, I saw it. And I just thought that was interesting, because he was literally just trying to gaslight me out of reporting what was frankly, a very reasonable thing to seen. It’s not like, oh, like, I wasn’t sitting there saying that this was because of the execution, I was just observing the man was clearly shaking. And, yeah, it was probably because of the Parkinson’s. But um, you know, I just thought that was also kind of interesting, because those are the sort of details that don’t get recorded necessarily in the official record of things. And, you know, the public can only hear about them broadly through reporters, like there’s often, but not always, family witnesses, or victims’ family witnesses. I think a lot of people are maybe less likely to trust some of their accounts because they clearly have a horse in the race to, so to speak. But they also don’t always have a platform to broadly tell people in a sort of searchable, findable way as to what really happened in there. So I think, on just a basic logistical level, I think that’s important. But I think sort of more broadly, it just seems like, if this state, if the government, if the people are going to be executed someone, which obviously whether or not that should ever be happening is a completely different thing. But if it’s going to happen, like it just seems like there should be people there, you know, people there that are some sort of outside oversight for the rest of us who are not in there, to tell us what our government is doing, given the seriousness of, of what it is.
Anne Holsinger 26:54
Your book includes deep reflections on how you were given a second chance after your incarceration, which you attribute to your race, class and educational privilege. While it would obviously take a great deal of reform to offer every prisoner the opportunities that you’ve had, what are a few policy changes, you think, would have the biggest impact in ensuring that formerly incarcerated people are able to successfully reintegrate into their communities?
Keri Blakinger 27:18
I’m not sure that I know what policy changes would really accomplish this, per se, but I just I think that the biggest things that were helpful and meaningful, for me are meaningful, fulfilling employment, and safe housing. And those are both really expensive and difficult things, but those are two of the biggest things that have been life changing for me because having not just a job that pays the bills, but like, an actually fulfilling, meaningful job that I definitely want to do. And I want to like, not go do bad things in my life that will screw that up. Because I want to be able to continue to do this thing that I am passionate about, you know, a lot of people, a lot of people in world don’t have that luck to have a job that they’re so passionate about. But for me, it’s also been really crucial to not going back to the sort of life that I led before. And of course, also, I don’t think it requires much explanation when I say that safe housing is, is key to being able to come back and, and to have a productive and meaningful life after prison.
Anne Holsinger 28:31
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?
Keri Blakinger 28:34
So yeah, you know, actually there I guess there is now that think about it. Starting in guess 2021, maybe, maybe 22. I was work, I started working on a documentary, a short documentary about a guy on Texas death row, John Henry, John Henry Ramirez. He has since been executed. And I mean, this documentary was like two years in the making, and it is going to premiere at Big Sky Film Festival in Montana, which is an Oscar-qualifying event, so that’s very cool. It’s gonna premiere later this month.
Anne Holsinger 29:10
Congratulations.
Keri Blakinger 29:12 Thanks. It was, um, that was I, I feel like that was a case that broke me in some ways.I got to see I got to see and talk to him at the very end, a lot more than I than I ever have with anyone else at that point. They weren’t really monitoring a lot of the phone calls very well. So he was making like three way calls to people all the time in those last few weeks. And I had never talked to someone on an almost daily basis, like the last two weeks before their execution. And you know, we talked to his whole family, like we recorded like, we witnessed his last phone call with his son. We talked to his, his victim’s son, and you know a lot of the people in his life as well. And he’s come up in a few other stories I’ve written, so you can see some of the other like writings I’ve done about him, but he was someone who just really, I think, really had, he really felt that remorse very deeply. He didn’t try to deny what he’d done. And I think he really embodied a changed person. And it was, which, which I think made it all the more tragic when he was ultimately executed. And, you know, watching his faith journey, I’m not religious, but watching his faith journey really moved me in a way that I didn’t expect. So I think about him a lot. And I’m, I, I wish that he, I shouldn’t say I wish that he could have been here to see how this came out. But that’s not true. I actually think he would not have liked the film because there’s one part where he like, almost cries, and he was very self-conscious about that at the time. And we talked about it, but I, I feel like he would be like, oh, y’all put that in. But I think it really showed his deep humanity in a way that is sort of hard to refute. Like, I think people see interviews with people on death row, and they’re like, oh, they don’t mean it. But when you watch the moment, when he starts talking about his regrets and his remorse, and he chokes up, and he starts crying, like you can’t watch that in a good faith, like not believe it’s sincerity as you just see the way it comes across. And I think that that alone, aside from the whole rest of the film like that, to me is really powerful. So yeah, I’m, I’m so glad to see that out in the world soon.
Anne Holsinger 31:57
Yeah. Could you give us the name of it again?
Keri Blakinger 31:58
It’s called “Warden, I’m Ready.”
Anne Holsinger 32:00
Thank you. We’ll definitely keep an eye out for it. If our listeners are interested in reading your work, they can find it at the Los Angeles Times and your memoir, Corrections in Ink. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.
Keri Blakinger 32:13
Thanks for having me.
Anne Holsinger 32:15
To learn more about the death penalty listeners can visit the DPIC website at deathpenaltyinfo.org. And to make sure you never miss an episode of our podcast, subscribe to Discussions with DPIC on your podcast app of choice.