I never thought I’d become a journalist. When I was younger, I resented journalists because news headlines were how I found out my dad was facing life in prison — before my family had the chance to tell me — and those stories included sensational details.
At 15, that was deeply harmful and shaped the way I viewed the media. My mom had it even worse. As she was trying to process everything that had happened, reporters called her at work asking for comment.
My resentment grew as I got older and started visiting my dad in prison nearly every weekend. He’d tell me about harsh and dehumanizing conditions: people being denied showers, subjected to strip searches, having visits canceled at the last minute or whole facilities locked down because of one person’s actions.
At the same time, I saw the humanity of people in prison. They were parents, journalists, tai chi instructors, chefs, baseball players and mentors. I didn’t see those sides in most news outlets.
Nearly every time a mainstream news outlet mentions the word “prison,” it’s in the context of someone being convicted of a crime, not the people and conditions they have to live in afterward. That didn’t feel responsible to me.
It wasn’t until I took a journalism course as an elective in college and completed an investigative reporting internship that I realized these experiences were why I should become a journalist. I could treat my sources with dignity and respect and look beyond the narrative coming from the department of corrections.
Last academic year, I had the chance to put those lessons into practice by teaching students at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California, how to report on prisons ethically and sensitively while avoiding the pitfalls that hurt my family and countless others.
When I got the call to coach students in reporting projects centered on prisons, I knew I had to take it. Reporting on incarceration as a social justice and human rights issue is still relatively uncommon, so I was happy to do my part to help educate the next generation of journalists on how to do so while making a positive impact.
We called it the CIM (California Institution for Men) Reporting Project, a fellowship for four students funded by a grant from the Howard Scripps Foundation. The goal was to teach students to report on prisons while bringing more coverage to CIM, an institution that has very little news coverage, and collaborate with Chaffey’s Rising Scholars Program, which teaches in the prison.
We kicked off the semester with an orientation, where I met the four students and gave them a rundown on the most important lessons in prison reporting.
I started the presentation by explaining why covering incarceration matters: About 2 million people are incarcerated in the United States, I told the students, and California’s prison population is larger than the total prison populations of most countries. The system also disproportionately impacts Black people and Latinos. Many people in prison refuse to be defined by their worst mistake. They seek transformation, even venturing to help others.
I encouraged the students to find stories by following and developing sources with abolitionist nonprofit groups — many led by formerly incarcerated people — familiarizing themselves with the prison system and getting curious. I told them to think about how incarceration intersects with other beats like environmental justice, racial justice and capitalism. That’s how I approach my own reporting as a freelance journalist.
Student fellows in the California Institution for Men Reporting Project pose after their final fellowship meeting in May at Chaffey College in Rancho Cucamonga, California. (Courtesy of Victoria Valenzuela)
An important point I wanted to teach was people-first language. The media often refers to people in prison as “inmates” or “prisoners,” terms that The Marshall Project and nonprofit media outlets have said are dehumanizing. Inside prison, correctional officers routinely use “inmate,” and it becomes harmful. Instead, these outlets advocate for people-first language like “incarcerated people” or “people in prison.” The Marshall Project has a guide for people-first language with the input from formerly incarcerated people.
Another point I wanted to discuss was discretion. I advocate for reporters not to ask and include what somebody did to get into prison, unless it is essential to the story, such as in coverage of sentencing. If the story is about prison conditions or programs, a person’s crime is often irrelevant and distracts the reader. There are enough criminalizing narratives of prison. Journalists can show readers a human narrative beyond that. Including a person’s crime can also cause lasting harm because it will come up whenever someone searches for them online.
After the presentation, I met with the fellows every other week as they worked on their own prison stories. They updated me on their progress and I helped them troubleshoot problems.
One of the biggest barriers was getting information in and out of the prison. The fellows’ primary form of communication with people at CIM was through Chaffey’s Rising Scholars Program, which teaches English and journalism inside the prison. Rising Scholars is a statewide network of community colleges that offers diverse courses for degrees in prisons and provides support to formerly incarcerated people pursuing education. The fellows sent questions through Rising Scholars professors, who brought back written responses. Meanwhile, the prison’s public information officer never responded to their requests.
The students got direct experience with prison reporting. One of the fellows, Lionel Getten, reported on the barriers the fellows faced getting information in and out of the prison. He said those challenges reminded him of “The Red Ink,” an allegory by Slavoj Žižek in which a man writes letters in code because he knows they will be censored. At the same time, they wrote uplifting stories, like a feature on a valedictorian of the Rising Scholars program, and Pulitzer Prize finalist podcast Ear Hustle’s visit to Chaffey’s campus.
In addition to their individual projects, students collaborated on a reporting guide for future journalism students, distilling the key lessons from their yearlong work.
I appreciated the chance to work with students because learning to report on prisons in college was difficult. At USC, most of my classmates were interested in entertainment or sports journalism. I learned this work largely through the mentorship of Melissa Segura, who I met during an internship on BuzzFeed News’ former inequality desk, and Narda Zacchino, a former vice president at the Los Angeles Times who was helping investigate exculpatory evidence on a death penalty case at the time I met her. They gave me the advice I later shared with the students and empowered me to use my lived experience as a reporter. I kept telling the students that I wish I had a program like this when I was in college.
As someone personally impacted by the prison system, it gives me hope to see that the next generation of journalists is moving beyond crime narratives and telling human-centered stories that do justice to the people and families who have to live with coverage long after the headlines fade. Given the same opportunities I had, I believe they’ll continue pushing journalism in that direction.
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