Why have the United States’ civil rights protections fallen short when it comes to victims of police brutality? In her new book Shielded: How the Police Became Untouchable, UCLA Law professor Joanna Schwartz meticulously documents how these protections were established and then eroded by the Supreme Court and local governments alike, and she lays out the enormous number of “shields” that cocoon law enforcement officials even in cases where their actions violate policy, decency, and the law. She also unravels  the pernicious web of assumptions about civil rights lawsuits, including the notions that easing some of these burdens will provoke a torrent of meritless lawsuits, and that the more marginalized a victim of police misconduct is, the less they have been “damaged” by the abuse they suffered.

Bolts recently spoke with Schwartz about the many legal mechanisms and doctrines through which the United States sanctions police violence, and why we need to look far beyond reforming qualified immunity—the doctrine that protects officers from civil suits unless it’s been clearly established by a prior court case that the actions they took were unconstitutional—if we ever want to achieve real police accountability.

Inspiration for the book arose out of Schwartz’s experiences as a civil rights lawyer seeking justice for victims of police violence and misconduct. “I was spending my life bringing these claims in part because I wanted to make a difference—and I thought that it was important to use civil litigation as a tool of accountability and deterrence,” she told Bolts. “But things I saw during my practice suggested that deterrence and accountability weren’t working the way that courts and theorists imagined that they were.” When she went into academia, she started doing research to understand why—and she wrote Shielded to share what she found.

Section 1983 is the principal remedy by which people tend to seek restitution for police misconduct. How has its original intent been contested, expanded, and contracted over time?

The statute that people use most often to bring claims of constitutional violations against government officials was enacted by Congress during Reconstruction, as the newly formed Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups were terrorizing and killing Black people—and local governments were either standing idly by or participating in the violence. This statute created a right to sue in federal court, which was considered really important at the time because in most state courts, Black people weren’t even allowed to testify. The goal was accountability and deterrence of this state-sanctioned violence.

After Section 1983 became law in 1871, and a number of other Reconstruction Era acts were passed, the Supreme Court really lessened the power of those statutes through various decisions—limiting the power of the 14^th Amendment, allowing segregation—and a newly formed Congress further eroded the protections of these laws. And we quickly came into the time, post Reconstruction, where Jim Crow laws were allowed to proliferate. It was a dark time in civil rights protections. Then as we move into the 20^th century, as there is a slowly developing civil rights movement, the Supreme Court began to shift its views about the power of the 14^th Amendment and the need for federal civil rights protections. And that culminated in 1961 in a decision called Monroe v. Pape where the Supreme Court first ruled that people could sue in federal court for violations of their constitutional rights by government actors. In that case, and then in cases soon thereafter, the Supreme Court again talked about the values of compensation and deterrence that were on the minds of congressmen who originally passed the act.

But then, after that high point, the protections of Section 1983 were again rolled back— now under different guises. The Supreme Court created qualified immunity protections, and state and local governments created additional protections for government officials.

Fast forward to May of 2020 when George Floyd was murdered—again, these conversations arose about the need for more robust civil rights enforcement, including ending qualified immunity. And again, opponents to reform raised the same kinds of concerns that had been raised in the ‘60s and back in the 1870s. And that’s essentially where we are right now, with the pendulum continuing to swing back and forth between the recognized need for police accountability on the one hand, and concerns by those opposed to reform about the dangers of “too much justice.”

After this high point with Monroe in 1961, why do you think the Supreme Court has erred so far in the direction of giving leeway to agents of the state at the expense of individual rights of civilians? 

I think the Supreme Court has repeatedly erred on the side of giving government maximum discretion and minimum accountability because the court has described that additional discretion and power as necessary to keep society safe. I don’t think there needs to be a zero-sum game here, that you need to give courts or give officers maximum discretion in order to have maximum security. We’ve seen in recent weeks, as we’ve been exploring the Scorpion unit and other elite units, that discretion given to officers does not necessarily lead to more safety. But the notion that without maximum discretion, officers won’t be able to do their jobs—and if they can’t do their jobs, society won’t be safe—is a frightening claim that I think has motivated the court. The Supreme Court in many of its recent qualified immunity decisions has talked about the importance of qualified immunity to society as a whole. And I think that’s shorthand for the notion that without protection for law enforcement, law enforcement officers won’t vigorously do their job or people will decide not to take jobs in law enforcement.

You write a lot about the animating role of myth here: the myth that people are bringing all these frivolous lawsuits, that the lawyers involved are ambulance chasers, that officers would be bankrupted without qualified immunity to protect them. Where do you think these myths arose from, and how have they contributed to actual legal precedent that shields police?

These myths have accompanied civil rights advancements from the very beginning. In 1871, as Congress is debating whether to pass the act that became Section 1983, congressmen opposed to the act were talking about the idea that this statute would turn federal courts into nickel-and-dime courts that would have to hear frivolous or petty cases instead of doing the important work that federal courts should be doing. Those kinds of ideas elaborated more in the ‘60s to include concerns that officers would be bankrupted, that frivolous cases would fill courthouses, that ambulance chasing lawyers would extract punishing settlements and judgments from local governments.

I can’t see into the minds of the Supreme Court justices or the legislators that have made these claims, so I can’t know what is motivating them. What I can say is that I’ve spent my career as an academic studying those justifications, empirically testing them and trying to measure their validity—and all available evidence suggests that they are overblown, if not downright false.

You write that the Supreme Court created a qualified immunity “out of thin air” only six years after it established the right for individuals to sue government officials. To start off, can you briefly define qualified immunity?  

As much as the phrase has been in the press, I think there’s a lot of misunderstanding about what the protection is. Qualified immunity is a protection for officers in civil cases. It doesn’t have anything to do with criminal prosecutions—it provides that officers cannot be sued for money damages, even if they have violated the Constitution, if they haven’t violated what’s called clearly established law.

And it’s not enough to find a prior court case where, for example, officers used force against a non-resisting suspect. The plaintiff has to find a prior court decision where an officer used similar force against a person who was not resisting and conducting themselves in a similar way as the case at hand. In addition, the Supreme Court has told courts that they can grant qualified immunity without ruling on whether the Constitution was violated—which makes these prior court decisions especially difficult to find.

Say that there was a new weapon that police started using, just like tasers were widely adopted at some point. Does that mean there would just be no way to overcome qualified immunity in those cases because that type of technology simply didn’t exist before?

It makes it far more difficult to clearly establish the law in those kinds of cases. What happens with new forms of force, surveillance, or other technologies that police may use? There’s conversations right now about whether police can use robots to use fatal force against people. If that technology begins to proliferate, it’s going to be operating in an area that won’t be clearly established for qualified immunity purposes for a significant amount of time.

You write that ending qualified immunity alone wouldn’t “usher in a golden age of police accountability.” Why do you think it became the solution people turned to in the wake of George Floyd’s murder? And why is ending it ultimately insufficient?

I think that qualified immunity captured public attention following the murder of George Floyd in part because the doctrine is so shocking. When people read about a case of some man who surrendered with his arms in the air and yet had a police dog released on him, and those officers are granted qualified immunity because even though it’s clearly established that you can’t use force against a person who’s not resisting, it wasn’t clearly established in those particular factual circumstances…I think it strikes people as simply an unjust doctrine and perhaps an encapsulation of all that is wrong with police accountability, in the way that George Floyd’s murder—and now Tyre Nichols’ murder—has come to be emblematic of the greater problems of police misconduct and accountability.

Qualified immunity reform should be an easy shift given all the evidence about the ill effects of the doctrine and the very little that it does to advance its policy goals. But I think that if we’re going to have a better system of police accountability, we need to do much more than that.

There are Supreme Court decisions that make it very difficult for people to find lawyers for civil rights cases, particularly outside of large cities. There are standards that make it difficult to begin a case to plead an initial complaint in a lawsuit when you don’t know all the facts underlying the case. I think that the standards for constitutional violations themselves are extremely deferential to the police and the standards for holding local governments responsible for their officers’ misconduct are as if not more difficult to meet than qualified immunity itself. So there’s a lot to change with our current system of legal accountability.

What’s so remarkable to me about the cases you feature is I hadn’t heard of any of them before. For all of the names that we do know at this point, and it’s a lot of names, there are thousands of more victims of police violence who never get any recognition. How did you choose which cases to highlight?

I wanted the cases to reflect the wide range of police misconduct that occurs and also the variation in the life circumstances of people who can have these kinds of traumatic and sometimes fatal interactions with the police. 

It was really important to me not to focus on cases that have received a lot of public attention for a couple of different reasons. The kinds of barriers that I’m talking about in the book don’t have the same power in cases that get a lot of public attention. The officers who killed Tyre Nichols were immediately fired and have been criminally charged—and I’m guessing that a civil suit brought against those officers in the city will settle for a significant amount of money without ever raising qualified immunity, or any of the other barriers I discuss. That’s what happened in the case brought by George Floyd’s family, it settled without the city ever arguing that Derek Chauvin was entitled to qualified immunity.

I’ve included these stories because I want people to learn about the whole range of things that can and do occur that we never hear about. James Campbell, who was on his way to the Indianapolis Jazz Festival when he was stopped and accused of possessing marijuana that he didn’t possess and then forced to lower his pants and underpants on a public street in Indianapolis—his story haunts me, and yet the stories of everyone in this book haunt me. When I tracked him down, he expressed real happiness to know that his story would be profiled and that people would come to know about it and all of the challenges that he faced getting justice in the courts.

You filed a number of public records requests trying to figure out who actually pays the bill when officers violate the law. What inspired you to follow the money and what did you find?

This is a question that was first posed to me by a client when I was in practice in New York City. Clay Tiffany was the village gadfly who was always stirring things up—he had a public access television show called “Dirge for the Charlatans” where he would tell stories about corruption in his town. One day, a Briarcliff Manor officer named Nick Tartaglione assaulted him. Tiffany started investigating Tartaglione and putting what he found on his public access television show. It ended up that Tartaglione assaulted Tiffany four times, with increasing severity—the last assault landed him in the hospital. Tartaglione—in uniform, the final time as he was beating and kicking Tiffany—said “you can’t tell lies about me on your television show.”

Tiffany sued the department and the officer for violating his rights. The village tried to distance itself from Tartaglione—they actually fired him for an unrelated issue, but he sued and managed to get his job back and $300,000 in back pay. Soon afterward, Tartaglione offered to settle just his claim with Tiffany for $200,000. Tiffany wanted to know where the money was coming from: the officer or the village.

I assumed that it must be coming from Tartaglione. After all, the village had fired him, and he’d just come into $300,000—and he’d nearly killed our client! But after the settlement had been paid, we learned that settlement had been paid by the village of Briarcliff Manor’s insurer. If Tartaglione wasn’t made to pay, it got me wondering about whether individual officers ever pay settlements and judgments and police misconduct cases. And if not, I was very curious to understand how the goals of deterrence were being met.

After I became a law professor, I sent public records requests to well over 100 large and midsize and small law enforcement agencies across the country trying to get information about how much they paid in these civil rights cases over a six-year period and how often officers had contributed. At the end of the day, I got information from 81 law enforcement agencies. What I discovered was pretty shocking to me: officers among those 81 jurisdictions in that six-year period paid .02 percent of the dollars awarded to plaintiffs in these cases. Only in two jurisdictions could I confirm that any dollars had actually changed hands between the officers and the victims in these cases. And this was true even when jury verdicts had been awarded against these officers, even when punitive damages had been awarded against these officers, which are intended to punish—and even when officers had been disciplined or fired or criminally prosecuted for their conduct.

And it’s not just that it’s coming out of police department budgets, right? That money often comes from elsewhere in the city government.

In small jurisdictions, there’s usually an outside liability insurer that pays settlements and judgments. In larger cities and counties that are self-insured, sometimes the money came from the police department’s budget, sometimes it came from the central budget, sometimes it came from some pooled budget where different agencies contributed.

Regardless of the arrangement, in the vast majority of cases, settlements and judgments in police misconduct cases did not have any financial effect on the law enforcement agency, meaning a rise in payouts did not require them to cut back on other aspects of their budget. And when there was more paid than expected, the money would come from other parts of the city’s budget—and as a practical matter, that often meant that money was coming from budget allocations earmarked to help the most marginalized in our society. A lawyer who previously worked for the city of Chicago remarked to me that when lawsuits increased against the Chicago Police Department, the money to pay those settlements and judgments came from lead paint screening for people living in public housing, which was disproportionately the same people who were being abused by the police.

You write that now, ironically, states are using their own laws and courts to sidestep the many barriers to relief in Section 1983 cases created by the Supreme Court. What are some hopeful examples?

To my mind the bill that was passed by Colorado in the summer of 2020 is in many ways a gold standard. It created a right to sue under the state constitution and provided that qualified immunity is not a defense. Additionally, it provided that if a city finds that their officer has acted in bad faith, they can require their officer to contribute up to $25,000 or 5 percent of settlement or judgment, which provides some financial sanction for the officer while still ensuring that the victim is paid. The Colorado bill and a number of other bills have done other important things, including creating bright line rules prohibiting chokeholds and no knock warrants. So there’s a lot happening at the state level.

One concern I have about state reforms is that they’re only as effective as the states that enact them, so we are going to potentially get to a place where meaningful accountability is extremely regionally variant. For that reason, I would prefer the federal government take a more robust role. But if they’re not going to, then states can and are stepping in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post How the State Sanctions Police Violence appeared first on Bolts.

The Riders Scandal rattled the city of Oakland in 2001, leading to a historic prosecution, a massive civil-rights lawsuit, and decades of federal oversight. As investigative reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham detail in The Riders Come out at Night, their exhaustive new history of the Oakland Police Department, the fate of the men on trial essentially hinged on a central question: were these officers bad apples, or were their actions evidence of a far deeper rot?

The Alameda County DA’s prosecution strategy relied on painting the “Riders,” as the gang came to be known, as rogue cops within an otherwise functional system. It’s not hard to imagine why the DA might be invested in excising the Riders from the rest of the OPD. I noticed the same dynamic during the trial of Derek Chauvin: other cops testified over and over that his actions were against procedure. By proving the aberrance of the few, the state can demonstrate guilt—and preserve the good name of the many.

Meanwhile, in arguing that the Riders’ actions were within procedure, the defense advanced a far more damning indictment of the OPD, inadvertently making an argument more common among abolitionist critics of American policing. The Riders’ lawyer, Winston and BondGraham write, called the Oakland police chief to the stand, then used his testimony to “show the jury a picture of a city where cops had been told to be aggressive, put their hands on suspects, hit the corners, and attack the drug trade head-on. Their actions, no matter how egregious, were all in the name of public safety and hitting the mayor’s magic 20 percent crime drop.” The Riders, in other words, “weren’t rogue cops; they were following orders.” The fact that the case would end in two separate mistrials, with one officer ultimately acquitted, suggests that the bad apple theory failed to sufficiently compel jurors. And though Winston and BondGraham argue repeatedly that the Riders were far from rogue cops, the real question they’re interested in exploring is slightly different.

What are the preconditions that allow a group like the Riders to flourish, the journalists ask, and what can be done to preclude those conditions? Or, in plainer language: why are police the way they are—and is it possible for them to change?

Winston and BondGraham answer the first half of this question clearly, devoting a considerable amount of Riders to the OPD’s 19^th-century origins as a violent and graft-prone institution that exploited and suppressed minority groups. 

“During the first century of the department’s existence, custom and practice condoned the quick use of the nightstick and revolver to control restive populations: labor unions, the Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants who upset the city’s image of itself as a pious, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon settlement,” they write. Dozens of Oakland police officers were members of the KKK; at one point, Winston and BondGraham refer to the Klan as night riders, wording that draws a direct line between the Riders and these grim forebears, especially given the supposed origin of the nickname (a Black man who’d been stopped for a traffic violation allegedly thanked the officer for being respectful, and added, “This isn’t at all what it’s like at night. At night, the Riders come out.”)

When African Americans started arriving in Oakland during the Great Migration, the combative, us-vs.-them mentality the OPD had cultivated against immigrants and radicals was neatly transposed onto this new population, with a heaping dose of anti-Black racial hatred thrown in to boot. In 1950, during one of the city’s first panels on police brutality, a local civil rights attorney testified that “the Negro citizens of Oakland live in daily and nightly terror of the Oakland Police Department.” The chief of police, meanwhile, dismissed this criticism as a Communist plot. 

Whether police can change, though, is a trickier question—and a divisive one, especially on the left. The reporters lean into this tension. To say that reform is impossible, they argue, discredits the painstaking work of activists, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary people to expose the department’s abuses and bring it to heel. For evidence of this truth, look no further than Riders itself, which would not have been possible without both authors’ years of dedicated reporting on the OPD, statewide legislative reforms that required law enforcement to turn over more internal records, and the hard work of an attorney who sued on behalf of the two journalists, forcing OPD to comply with these new laws. To contend that nothing can be done would be to imply that there is no reason to fight.

But there are limits, and Winston and BondGraham, who spent years covering the OPD as local investigative journalists, explore them in excruciating detail. Take the Riders whistleblower Keith Batt, a rookie whose testimony allowed the case to go to trial and was key in establishing the federal consent decree that’s covered the department since. On its face, the story pits the Riders’ “bad cops” against Batt, a “good cop” who did the right thing under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But without negating anyone’s agency or moral culpability, Winston and BondGraham show how it’s ultimately less about the individual will of the officers than what the system they work within condones—and encourages. The department rewards and promotes aggressive, confrontation-prone cops, and constrains ethical ones: taking them off assignments, making their work lives hell, and often driving them to quit. Two Black officers who are presented as critics of the OPD’s practices eventually leave; one ends up writing a sociology dissertation about the force’s endemic racism. 

For every Batt, there are dozens of officers depicted in this book who look the other way, and face few consequences for it. The whistleblower ultimately served just 17 days in the OPD. He was harassed relentlessly, essentially forced to resign, and found himself threatened by other cops when they crossed paths afterward—even as one of the Riders successfully sued the city for wrongful termination, walking away with $1.5 million in damages. Someone illegally pulled Batt’s DMV records, accessing his home address and other personal information. And with the scariest of the Riders remaining a fugitive from justice today, Batt is probably still looking over his shoulder more than two decades later.

Riders begins with the book’s eponymous scandal, then zooms out to capture the historical and political context that led up to it, the fight to prosecute the officers at its center, and two prominent local civil rights lawyers’ simultaneous efforts to hold the department accountable. The result: a federal consent decree—a court-enforced reform agreement—from which the department has still not emerged, two decades later.

Winston and BondGraham make the stakes clear. The consent decree is the external accountability tool for reforming American police departments, and Oakland has been under one longer than anyone—even LA, where the Rampart scandal, which came on the heels of the Rodney King beating, occasioned one in 2000. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write.

From the beginning, though, the authors sow doubt as to whether the OPD will ever be able to fully comply with the terms of the decree, a comprehensive settlement agreement that required the OPD to overhaul its training and internal investigations, implement an ‘early warning system’ to root out problem officers, and make sure all officers were supervised in an attempt to avoid the lack of oversight that led to the Riders’ abuses. 

Many in the department are openly hostile toward its imposition. (“You’ve got to stop using that word reform,” a captain nicknamed ‘Maniac’ tells one of the external monitors, suggesting that his men will bristle at even the mention of change.) There is a culture of silence and internal loyalty around officer misconduct that extends even to the most egregious cases. To call OPD’s Internal Affairs team merely feckless feels charitable; the division often gives the impression of actively stonewalling investigations. Punishments, when they are occasionally meted out, are downgraded, and then downgraded again; it’s not uncommon for officers to resign rather than accept their slap on the wrist. The department’s union, the Oakland Police Officers Association, is willing to spend whatever it takes to defend its men, which often results in cops who brutalize and kill civilians getting their jobs back through arbitration.

And Winston and BondGraham also show how opportunities for change have been thwarted by historical vicissitudes: the war on drugs; state and municipal budget crises; the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx homeowners; the leadership of politicians like Jerry Brown, whose lefty-radio vibes quickly morphed into law-and-order rhetoric in order to win his mayoral race in the late ‘90s. The book doubles as a rich political history of Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a city that has been repeatedly devastated by austerity and racist policies. 

“So long as Oakland and the rest of America is riven by extreme racial and class inequalities and the power of the federal government is not brought to repair the economies of destitute cities and rural areas, and deal with the intergenerational trauma that leads to despair and hopelessness,” they write, “then it’s very likely the police will continue serving more or less the same function they have for well over a half century: containing and repressing the symptoms of broader social problems through violence.”

The second half of the book explores OPD’s glacial progress post-consent decree, which is continually marred by the revelation of scandal after scandal. At one point, Winston and BondGraham describe this advancement as “two steps forward, and one step back.” Often, reading Riders, it felt more like the other way around.

There’s a moment around 2014 where things are starting to look up: For the first time in decades, the OPD had a chief interested in reform and willing to stand up to the police association. The department was finally making good progress on its settlement agreement tasks. “In just a year, the Oakland PD went from utter failure to a national leader in policing reforms,” the journalists write.

Reading this feels sort of like watching the beginning of a horror movie: you suspect that something awful is coming, even as the characters remain unaware. And the next scandal to be revealed is one of the most stomach-churning in the book: the Celeste Guap case. Guap was the pseudonym of a young woman named Jasmine Abuslin who was groomed, abused, and pimped out, both before and after her 18^th birthday, by multiple OPD officers as well as cops from a laundry list of other departments in the region.  

Cases like Abuslin’s stand out for their shock value. The abuse was discovered when a cop who groomed and statutorily raped the girl shot himself in the head and left a damning suicide note. That decision unleashed a chain of events that eventually lead investigators to realize that the cop had most likely killed his wife several years earlier, staged it as a suicide, and had the whole thing covered up by the department. This was after Abuslin revealed the abuse directly to an OPD sergeant, who responded to her by writing “tell me you were an adult.” The internal investigation went nowhere. 

But the individual instances of cruelty, incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance detailed in Riders can start to blur together. In a way this is the point. The book does center the Riders scandal, but it doesn’t argue for its exceptionalism; those officers’ wrongdoing is presented alongside many, many more examples big and small, lurid and mundane.

One in particular struck me. It could have happened in any police department in the country. It’s the case of Spencer Lucas, a young Black man who was stopped by OPD officers while driving to a friend’s house in 2005. Lucas was just 30 days away from completing a three-year parole term when he was pulled over. He was essentially homeless, but otherwise doing well. The cops seemed to want to mess with him. When they found out he was on parole, they got their chance. They strip-searched him in broad daylight, finding nothing. Even after calling his parole officer and finding out he’d been complying with all his terms, they forced him all over the city in handcuffs, trying to find something that would constitute a violation of his parole. After hours of this, they showed up at the home of his estranged wife, searched it, and found a BB gun.

In this brief anecdote, we see this institution, even under federal decree to do better, return to familiar habits: doing nothing to keep people safe, but instead intruding greedily into their private lives, searching for ways to snatch them back within its clutches, and fostering only rage and humiliation and despair in those it targets. As a result of that encounter, Lucas ended up going back to prison for almost a year.

The post Oakland’s “Riders” Scandal and the Fraught Road to Police Reform appeared first on Bolts.

There’s a moment in the middle of Corrections in Ink, a new memoir by Marshall Project staff writer Keri Blakinger, where she describes why solitary confinement still terrifies her. 

It was the spring of 2011 and Blakinger, who had already been jailed for months on drug charges, had just recently been transferred from one county lockup in upstate New York to another because of overcrowding. Guards had isolated Blakinger when she arrived at the new jail, not even as punishment but due to bureaucratic foot-dragging, separating her from others until, on her fourth day in solitary, her old jail finally sent paperwork proving that she’d already been tested for tuberculosis and was cleared for general housing. 

“As soon as the door clunked shut behind me, the weight of seclusion hit me like a wall of dark seawater, knocking me off my feet and leaving me gasping for breath,” Blakinger writes about her time in isolation. Other women in jail tried shouting to communicate with her, but she could only hear muffled and nonsensical voices, “like someone had slipped an opaque filter over reality.” She tried journaling but struggled to finish a thought or couldn’t comprehend the words when she tried reading whatever she wrote. She remembers drifting in a “half-awake fugue state, unmoored and incorporeal—like the brain in a vat we used to talk about in philosophy class.” 

“I quietly lost my mind to a degree that still terrifies me,” Blakinger writes. “To me, it felt like unraveling, but looking back it also feels like a turning point, a moment at which I began to see how broken the system could be, and how much it could break a person.” 

Blakinger’s book, her first, is many things—a vivid page-turner that recounts her descent into addiction, a powerful redemption story, and at times a hilarious and moving portrait of joy and resistance in the face of darkness. 

But what connects Blakinger’s memoir to the larger body of journalism that she’s produced since leaving prison is the raging indictment it makes of the American criminal legal system. She details the escalating callousness she encountered while at her most broken and vulnerable, from arrest to jail to prison, from the media that paraded her mugshot on television and the judges who looked at her with disdain to the corrections officers who seemed to revel in inflicting pain and the prison doctors who berated her for seeking treatment behind bars. 

Incarceration, Blakinger writes, is a constant lesson in humiliation, until eventually identities are erased and replaced with a number—in her case 11G0845, marking her as the 845th female to enter New York prisons in 2011. She describes officers laughing at women who wept on the bus during transfer from jail to state prison; being weighed and measured and interrogated about tattoos and birthmarks “like specimens” when entering state custody; the guards who searched a woman’s cell and tore through her belongings for hours, claiming they got a tip about contraband while the woman sobbed, only to announce “April Fool’s!” when they found nothing and admitted there was no tip; and other women sent to solitary, supposedly for their protection, after being sexually assaulted by guards. 

Later in the book, once she’s locked in state prison, Blakinger describes having another realization, again related to the threat of solitary. She remembers hearing guards chatting about a woman they’d thrown in isolation who, either due to deterioration or defiance or some combination of both, had started defecating on her food tray and sliding it through the slot in her door. In response, the guards had shut off water to the faucet in the woman’s cell, but one of them wondered aloud: What will she drink, won’t she get dehydrated?

“She can drink out of the toilet,” another guard answered. “If it’s good enough for my dog, it’s good enough for her.” 

“My head snapped up in shock,” Blakinger writes, “and that is when I realized: Behind bars, there are no rules. Sure, there is a rulebook and there are things you cannot do. But when it matters, no one is watching.”

—

Prisons and jails in the United States, which claims the highest incarceration rate in the world, are largely black boxes. Unlike most other public institutions, and even private ones like banks and mines and zoos, independent oversight of American lockups is a rarity. Horrific conditions and treatment behind bars remain mostly hidden from public view, leaving most sheriffs and wardens to run jails and prisons like fiefdoms with little accountability. 

Blakinger’s work since leaving prison in 2012 has been an antidote to that darkness. Her reporting reads like a laundry list of reasons to create more independent oversight of American prisons and jails. After getting out of prison, Blakinger wrote for the Ithaca Times and New York Daily News before joining the Houston Chronicle and eventually taking over the paper’s prison beat, which she revitalized. 

I and most other reporters struggling to cover the remarkably closed-off, dysfunctional and combative Texas prison system were awed by her scoops and stories—which largely seemed to stem from intently listening to incarcerated people and their families, taking their concerns seriously and investigating to get to the truth. Her acknowledgements at the end of the book thank “all the prison officials whose lies and insults keep me motivated enough to uncover the truth.”    

If Blakinger has made reporting on prisons better in innumerable ways, her work has also initiated more tangible change. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) started giving out dentures after she reported on the prison system denying them to toothless prisoners. TDCJ tossed hundreds of disciplinary cases against incarcerated people and fired several staffers after she reported on a quota system that pushed guards to make bogus write-ups and even plant contraband in cells. She brought attention to the rise in suicides and atrocious medical care inside Texas prisons. And she helped shame some newsrooms away from wantonly posting people’s mugshots. In late 2019 she became The Marshall Project’s first formerly-incarcerated staff writer, where her reporting continues to break new ground. 

In Corrections in Ink, Blakinger turns that investigative lens inward, interrogating the details not just of her own life but also the dehumanizing conditions and treatment she faced in lockup, an origin story of sorts for one of the most acclaimed journalists writing about American prisons today. 

She acknowledges that she grew up with all the privilege afforded a white, upper middle-class family with two Ivy League-educated parents, unlike most who enter the belly of America’s carceral beast. As a child she excelled in and out of school, eventually becoming a star figure skater with a daunting training schedule and on track to someday compete in the Olympics. She attended Cornell University before her arrest and incarceration, and finished the degree after prison. Anyone who knows Keri-the-Reporter will see flashes of who she eventually became in the book’s early pages—an indefatigable work ethic, over-organized, and on the edge of chaos.

But Blakinger had demons, at first eating disorders and then drug addiction, and in the book she writes in harrowing detail and with heartbreaking honesty about the hard road she traveled because of them. Blakinger chooses to not blame others for the chain of events that led her to encounter the harsh prison system, but Corrections in Ink speaks volumes about larger dynamics of treatment and punishment in this country. “One time when I was eighteen, a drug counselor told me that if I’d been raped more than once, at some point I was asking for it,” Blakinger writes. “That played to my worst fears, or maybe to my deepest desires for self-loathing. On good nights, I told myself she was wrong. But I still wondered—was there a grain of truth?”

Ever the reporter, in her memoir Blakinger blends self-reflection with data and research about prisons and who ends up there. More than half of women in prison are survivors of physical or sexual violence, roughly three quarters of them struggle with mental illness, and a significant amount of prisoners under the age of 30 have spent time in foster care. Studies show that most people who wind up in prison grew up in poverty, most did not graduate high school, and many are illiterate. 

“I knew about the girl who ate glass, the girl who had sex with her sisters, the girl who was so illiterate she could not dial a phone, the girl who grew up in group homes watching her friends get raped,” Blakinger writes. “The whole premise of prison began to seem absurd: Locking hundreds of traumatized and damaged women in together and threatening them constantly with additional punishments is not rehabilitation. It is not corrections. It is not public safety. It is systemic failure.” 

Blakinger also describes flashes of solidarity, love, and even genuine happiness, like the time the women around her broke into spontaneous song when Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” came over the radio. “It was as if some cosmic cog had slipped out of place, a celestial shift I would not have fully appreciated a year earlier,” she writes. “This was not just women singing, this was women learning how to steal joy in a place built to prevent it.” 

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Blakinger was writing her memoir during a particularly bleak time in American incarceration. Many public officials across the country, including in Texas where Blakinger lives and often still reports, turned a blind eye to the increased suffering and death behind bars as the pandemic ravaged correctional facilities. “The news sounded so dire, and the news I heard from the inside sounded apocalyptic,” she writes in an epilogue. “Even after everything I had survived, and everything I had reported on, and everything you have read in this book, the first year of the pandemic taught me more about the casual cruelty of prisons than the ten years before it had.” 

COVID-19 both exacerbated dangerous and degrading conditions behind bars and also further isolated incarcerated people, in turn making prisons and jails even more opaque. But Blakinger stayed up late into the night, texting with guards, messaging with terrified families of people in prison, and talking to prisoners on contraband phones. She wrote devastating articles about how life in lockup had grown even more miserable—from moldy and inedible food to rivers of sewage and fires that some prisoners began setting to protest the deteriorating conditions. 

The emotional toll of such reporting can be heavy, especially for journalists like Blakinger who have personally experienced the grotesque flourishes of American criminal punishment. Early in the pandemic, when reporting on increasing unrest inside Texas prisons due to extended lockdowns, Blakinger wrote about footage she obtained from a contraband cell phone documenting something that prison officials claimed had not happened. In reaction, TDCJ’s communications director, who has since left the agency, threatened to investigate her for “participation in a felony.” 

Blakinger told me that the threat made her panic, thinking again of solitary confinement. “I’m always thinking if I get arrested or end up in jail that for some reason I could still end up in solitary.” 

I’ve seen prison officials try to undermine Blakinger’s work in other ways. When Texas froze over last February and the power grid collapsed, people locked in prison defecated in paper bags and overflowing toilets while guards passed out half-rations of unidentifiable food. A reporter at the magazine where I worked at the time had obtained video showing snow falling through a broken window in a cell and piling up on the windowsill. Before we published a story with the video, the same prison system spokesman called me and demanded I tell him where it came from, claiming Blakinger had given him such information when reporting on other stories with contraband footage, which I knew was a lie. (The new communications director declined to comment when I asked about the agency’s treatment of Blakinger, saying in an email, “the previous communications director no longer works for the agency”). 

Some Texas lawmakers have in recent years cited Blakinger’s reporting to propose independent oversight of the state prison system, but legislation that would do so continues to languish. As people in power in the state largely ignore the compounding crises that Blakinger has helped document behind bars, she likely remains the most effective source of oversight for the Texas prison system. In her book, Blakinger reflects on second chances, and how she was lucky and privileged enough to get one when so many others don’t. Reading Corrections in Ink made me think about how much less we’d know if Blakinger hadn’t been given one. 

In the months before she published her book, Blakinger started crowdfunding to send copies to hundreds of people behind bars who wanted to read it. She told me that she had hoped to write the kind of book she was searching for when imprisoned—someone who left prison to become a successful writer. And for people who haven’t experienced the criminal legal system, she hopes that the book humanizes incarcerated people and helps explain why so many do not succeed after release. “The people who don’t succeed after prison, it does not mean they’re bad people,” Blakinger told me. “It means the prison system put a lot of obstacles in their way.” 

In the memoir, Blakinger writes about a new prisoner asking her for pointers on surviving just as she was about to leave lockup. Blakinger told the woman she survived “in spite of this place, not because of it.” Her advice captures the false promise of rehabilitation in American prisons.

“It’s like some of the tools you need to survive time in here are the tools you needed to survive life out there,” she recalls telling the new prisoner. “And if you had them, you probably wouldn’t be here in the first place. But now that you’re here, it’s just harder to find them.”

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