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In the late summer of 2023, Jeremy Busby was brutally attacked by a cellmate in the Texas prison where he was being held. Over the next few days, Busby started to feel like he was the one being punished. He was locked in solitary confinement, and then transferred to a prison facility in a different part of the state. The person who attacked him was never charged with assault.
At the time of the attack, Busby had been preparing for an interview with a local television reporter who was working on an investigation into widespread drug use and acts of violence inside the prison; they were scheduled to meet in person just a few days later. Instead, Bryan Collier, the executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), issued a statement acknowledging the problem with drug use and violence, and put the entire prison system on lockdown—temporarily barring all visitors. Busby is certain he was targeted because of his work.
Busby was sentenced to seventy-five years for homicide in 1999, in relation to an incident he has described as self-defense. Since then, he’s worked as a writer and journalist, including a stint as a staff reporter for the Texas prison newspaper The Echo, covering everything from the alarming rise in suicides and drug use to prison killings and inhumane conditions. His writing has appeared in Slate, the Marshall Project, and the Houston Chronicle.
He also says he’s faced repeated acts of retaliation, including threats, solitary confinement, and surveillance. In the last several months of 2024, as he continued to report and speak out about the Texas prison system, Busby was transferred to four different facilities. His personal property was repeatedly lost or destroyed. He reports being refused telephone access, media visits, and basic necessities like toilet paper, deodorant, toothpaste, and adequate medical care. “This is the life of an incarcerated journalist,” Busby recently told us from his windowless solitary-confinement cell at a prison facility in Huntsville. “It’s the price you pay for reporting to the public what’s going on in here.” (In an email to CJR, a spokesperson for the TDCJ said the department “denies these allegations of retaliation,” and noted that Busby has continued to conduct media interviews. The spokesperson added that being moved between facilities “is not uncommon due to medical, classification changes, and program needs.”)
We have spent years fighting for the rights of incarcerated people who report on conditions inside prisons. One of us, Theodore, was incarcerated alongside Busby over a decade ago and has helped him tell his story, and those of other TDCJ inmates, to the outside world ever since. The other, Seth, was working as a lawyer in Illinois when he first became aware of the obstacles facing incarcerated people who raise concerns about their circumstances.
Busby is far from the only incarcerated journalist to allegedly face retaliation for doing their work inside the prison system. Jason Walker, who’s reported on the spread of dangerous synthetic drugs inside Texas prisons, has been moved repeatedly and kept in solitary confinement—ostensibly to protect him from being attacked. Kevin Sawyer, an incarcerated journalist at San Quentin in California, has had his writing censored and confiscated, amid frivolous investigations. Kwaneta Harris, who’s written about sexual abuse and the misuse of solitary confinement in her Texas women’s prison, told us that officials used tactics like arbitrary solitary confinement to punish her for her reporting.
Recent studies by the Prison Journalism Project and the Prison Policy Initiative show that many states have passed laws or regulations that explicitly restrict prison journalism, including the censoring of communication with outside media and bans on receiving compensation for their work. Instead, we should be passing laws, at the state and federal level, to ensure that outside journalists have access to prisons and incarcerated people, and that incarcerated people aren’t censored or retaliated against when they expose what those outside journalists can’t see. We need less red tape and procedural obstacles for incarcerated journalists who file lawsuits to fight back against retaliation. And we need corrections agencies to hold their employees to account.
Incarcerated journalists tell stories no one else can. Prisoners are often held in deplorable conditions, regularly attacked, and sometimes murdered. Missing out on those stories is a major loss, not just for the incarcerated but for anyone who wants their government held accountable for how it treats their fellow citizens. When the public entrusts and pays for correctional agencies to care for those who are incarcerated, it deserves to know what’s going on.
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