Reading the Marshall Project/New York Times series on violent prison guards that was a finalist for the Investigative Reporting Pulitzer this year, I was haunted by the courage of the sources. Inmates secluded in a Fishkill, New York, cellblock went on record about the brutality of their guards, whom they’d already seen retaliate and kill.
As the inmates decided to take the bodily risk, they must have weighed a secondary risk, too: that what they said might not be believed. For a collateral cost of being a felon – or of being obese, addicted, illiterate, undocumented, homeless, or on public assistance – is how easily your experiences will be discounted. The distribution of benefit of doubt is as inequitable as the distribution of justice itself. Thus reporters like me, who work in stigmatized communities, field routine requests to find a “better victim” or choose a more sympathetic, articulate, even photogenic source. “You overestimate our ability to empathize with people who have IQs under 50,” wrote one Washington Post editor in 1999, as I was trying to document wrongful deaths and frantic profiteering in D.C. group homes for the intellectually disabled.
So what should a reporter do in the face of grudging concern? Speak solely to those with good teeth and clean urine? Early in my career, I wondered, instead, whether I could challenge the level of concern by changing the way I reported. By spending more time in the communities I was covering, I could better portray the people I was meeting as the complex, compelling individuals they were.
Meanwhile, I could ground those individuals’ credibility by smothering their experiences in documentation. It truly sucks when you have to overprove injustices against the powerless to secure an underwhelming degree of public interest. But the photos, recordings, land records, audits, court judgments, and coroners’ reports I sweated to accrue became a sort of insurance against the possibility that traumas and crimes would get blown off.
If the institutions inhabited by, or relied upon, by the unprivileged rated regular beat coverage by the media, deep-dive reporters like myself would find far less injustice to bring to light. But that was rarely the case then, just as now. So as I investigated the group homes with the help of disabled sources, I found men virtually enslaved in the home of one profiteer; a series of rapes that were treated as comedy; social workers destroying evidence of wrongful deaths; and on and on. In documenting those crimes and their human consequences, I had multiple journalistic aims. “Giving voice to the voiceless” — that creepy phrase — was never one of them. Even people who can’t speak have their own voices, and they have them whether or not we reporters pull near. The problem (then, now) was not a lack of voices but of listeners. But becoming more patient in my reporting helped me write more urgent, convincing sentences, in the hopes of drawing those reluctant listeners in.