Calvert Porter sits down behind the anchor desk and straightens his collar. His co-anchor, Keith Williams, studies his script.
“Do you want a sound check?” Porter asks.
“No, you’re all right,” the cameraman says.
“Do you want to start off with some light banter?” Porter asks.
The anchors chat about football for a few minutes, then tell the cameraman to roll. “Hello, everyone,” Williams says, “and thanks for tuning in.”
Porter is a convicted rapist. Williams is an armed robber. Their audience, not measured by Nielsen, is 2,000 or so murderers, rapists, robbers, forgers, car thieves and muggers at a Hagerstown prison. Their goals are not unlike Diane Sawyer’s: Tell viewers things they don’t know. Given the setting, most of their news is local.
“We have some very, very interesting facts coming up,” Williams says, his voice echoing off the cinderblock walls in a storage space doubling as a newsroom.
The newscast at the Maryland Correctional Training Center, or MCTC, is one of several such programs in the state’s prisons, and experts say they know of few other efforts like it in the United States. The newscasts put a modern spin on a jailhouse journalism tradition that dates to the 19th century, when Jesse James’s gang was known, among other things, as a group of influential and incarcerated newspapermen.
These days, prisoner newspapers are dwindling or gone, unable to survive as more violent inmates began entering the system in the 1980s, forcing more lockdowns and creating tougher environments. Costs skyrocketed, draining funding for inmate perks.
Experts say TV broadcasts could provide a cheap solution for cash-strapped states shouldering massive corrections budgets.
Having an outlet in which to record and share information is, even among wards of the state, a primal need, if not a basic right.
“You put a few thousand people together, and you have a community,” said historian James McGrath Morris, who has written a book on jailhouse journalism. “A community wants to record its actions. In the 21st century, now you’re either going to start a blog or a TV station.”
Because the Internet is banned in Maryland prisons, inmates a few years ago went the route of Matt Lauer, Katie Couric and Bob Costas — all heroes to the anchors — and wardens encouraged the newscasts to save money on copying thousands of monthly newsletters. They are recorded with personal video cameras more often used by tourists on cruises.
There are segments on victims’ rights, sports, prison rules, health, religion, phone calls, books, legal decisions, the chow hall and watercolor painting. Some shows are simulcast in Spanish. The emphasis is on providing an educational, positive vibe and, when possible, clearing up rumors that could cause tension with guards. One popular segment: “Life for Lifers.”
The newscasts, with approval by the warden, are beamed to cells, where inmates watch on TVs housed in clear casings to prevent the hiding of contraband. (TVs are allowed in most state prison cells, but not federal.) There is usually one newscast at the end of the week, although the anchors can break in midweek if news warrants. The ratings, though not measured scientifically, rival those for two prison favorites: sports programs and soap operas.
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