Health care in the United States is not a right — unless you’re incarcerated.
The Supreme Court has interpreted the Eighth Amendment, the one that guarantees freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, to mean that people in prison should have a basic standard of medical care. However, reporters Lauren Bavis and Jake Harper started hearing stories from the Indiana Women’s Prison about lifesaving care that was delayed or denied.
Bavis and Harper hosted WFYI Public Media’s “Sick” podcast, and they wanted to investigate these stories in their next season. Bavis thought it would be an uphill battle to get the general public to care about these women. Many were already marginalized because of their gender, race and socioeconomic status. All were convicted of crimes.
To draw the audience into the issue of health care in prison, Bavis and Harper designed the podcast to fit the wildly popular true crime genre. That storytelling choice worked well in the first season of “Sick,” which explored the world of fertility medicine.
To tell the best stories, Bavis needed more insight into interviewing incarcerated people, access to data and connections to other journalists and experts in the field. That’s when Bavis learned that Poynter offers workshops about the causes and consequences of local jail incarceration.
“I was really excited to sign up,” said Bavis, who attended an online version of the Poynter workshop in January 2021. “While our focus was on prisons, I knew jails have similar mandates when it comes to providing health care for a challenging population. The data presented in the workshops about rising rates of women’s incarceration showed us we were also on the right track in deciding to focus on the stories we found in a women’s prison.”
Poynter senior faculty Al Tompkins began the effort to help journalists cover jails and incarceration in the United States four years ago. With funding from the MacArthur Foundation Safety and Justice Challenge and in collaboration with the Vera Institute of Justice and The Marshall Project, Poynter has trained more than 1,000 journalists in at least 45 states. In 2022, Poynter will bring these tuition-free workshops to St. Petersburg, Florida, Memphis and Minneapolis.
RELATED TRAINING: A Journalist’s Guide to Covering Jails
According to numerous surveys of participants, one of the most powerful sessions in these workshops is led by Lawrence Bartley, the director of “News Inside” at The Marshall Project. He provides a view from inside the system from a person who lived it and now covers it.
“I honestly hadn’t had the chance to interview a lot of people with lived experience in jails and prisons before this project,” said Bavis. “(This session) was helpful in how I crafted my questions for the dozen or so incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women we interviewed about hard experiences like sexual abuse and mental health in prison. I went back and looked at my notes, and I wrote down that formerly incarcerated people are ‘not looking for sympathy, but humanity’ in stories about their experiences. I took that with me into all my interviews.”
RELATED TRAINING: The Words We Use to Cover Criminal Justice, Jails and Prisons
Before Bavis started working for WFYI, she worked at a small-town newspaper and — like most reporters — often covered quick-turn stories that focused on a single incident and included a mugshot of the accused.
“You didn’t always follow up on if that charge got thrown out or where that person is now, but their mugshot is on the internet forever,” said Bavis. “So this project and this workshop was like having to reprogram my journalistic brain to focus on a different aspect of criminal justice reporting.”
More journalists and newsrooms want to shift away from episodic, shallow and police-centric crime coverage. They want to repair relationships with communities that have traditionally distrusted local news, hold law enforcement accountable, identify trends and encourage citizens to engage with civic leaders.
To meet this demand and transform the way people talk about crime, Poynter designed a new, intensive online seminar for newsrooms interested in public safety journalism.
“We’ll start by first identifying a journalistic purpose for covering crime,” said Kelly McBride, Poynter senior vice president, ethics chair and lead faculty for this new seminar. “We’ll hear from newsrooms who’ve gone through a transformation. And we’ll walk each newsroom through a logical progression that will help them create meaningful change.”
That change starts with more humanity in reporting, which is what Bavis carried through in “Sick.”
“The response to the new season has been pretty positive!” she said. “The five new episodes we released last year have been downloaded more than 350,000 times.”
It turns out that when reporters focus on the humanity of the incarcerated, people listen.
