Stop Lapping Up Fake News about People in Prison

Chandra Bozelko
Thu, 10 Jan 2019 15:49:35 -0800
Opinion

It started last weekend. USA Today reported that inmates in federal prisons enjoyed decadent holiday spreads with the headline: "Government shutdown: Federal inmates feast on Cornish hens, steak as prison guards labor without pay."

Since then, other news organizations like NBC News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Daily News picked up the story. Even the vaunted Washington Post ran an almost identical piece with very little fact-checking.
Updated: Fri Jan 11, 2019

It started last weekend. USA Today reported that inmates in federal prisons enjoyed decadent holiday spreads with the headline: "Government shutdown: Federal inmates feast on Cornish hens, steak as prison guards labor without pay."

Since then, other news organizations like NBC News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Daily News picked up the story. Even the vaunted Washington Post ran an almost identical piece with very little fact-checking.

Any media outlet that followed USA Today's lead on this story got punked. This is fake news. As someone who both ate and prepared these meals, I know prison holiday trays aren't sumptuous or expensive. They're just different than what's usually served; they're more novel than they are indulgent. Steak? More like sandwich meat dunked in gravy. Cornish hens? Purdue rejects. In prison, special meals just aren't.

Besides, any menu planned for Christmas was conceived well before the shutdown was a twinkle in President Donald Trump's eye. Conflating the prison meal and the hardship imposed on federal workers and their families by the government closure was as cheap and flawed as the food itself.

Judging by the comments on these articles, the public's not falling for the claim that inmates figured into the fed's failure to fund itself.

What they are buying, though, is the idea that inmates are treated exceedingly well inside and that such humanity is bad policy. It's clear that many people don't think a nice, special meal should have been served in federal prisons — though, again, it wasn't.

"Gosh, we sure need to keep up the morale of convicted criminals, don't we. This sort of liberal mindset is what is destroying our country!" wrote one reader about the USA Today report. "Democrats are more concerned about how these POS inmates are treated and could care less they committed crimes against good people," commented another.

These responses shouldn't be surprising given the ways the media has stoked anger against incarcerated people with headlines that feed into the public's penchant for punishment.

Duke University Law Professor Sara Sun Beale has theorized that "market-driven news" actually promotes punitiveness and discourages humane and proportional responses to crime. Beale says that even when crime rates were going down in the 1990s, coverage of salacious crime stories increased on local and national television news because, unlike the past, news programming had to make money and sell ads.

Now those ads are coveted clicks, and USA Today and many other news outlets added to their conversion rate with this biased and error-ridden story about holiday meals in prison.

You could just write off this whole clickbait practice as grimy until you understand how damaging it is, ultimately, to policy and the lives of average Americans.

These stories have tricked the public into voting for tough-on-crime politicians who've enacted retrograde policies that ended up locking up a huge sector of this country. Half of all adults in the United States — 113 million people — have a family member who is or was incarcerated. Seventy million more were involved themselves with the criminal legal system.

This mass incarceration isn't the result of dark hearts. It's the result of fake news.

I don't think it's an accident that this narrative emerged shortly after the First Step Act was signed into law on Dec. 21, 2018. Aside from it's sentencing reforms which have actually already led to at least one man's righteous and deserved release from custody, the First Step Act was a modest nod towards the inherent dignity of the prisoner.

Stories like this alleged inmate yuletide bacchanalia misleads the public into believing that reform is a bad thing, that humane treatment of incarcerated people comes at a cost to working families when really it's the opposite that's true.

As a policy matter, what inmates eat on Christmas needs no scrutiny. We need to examine why this faulty story was worth reporting again and again. We need to ask ourselves why we feasted on this tale so satisfyingly when it's just another instance of market-driven news' cannibalization of this country.