This week’s episode: Sick on the inside

For decades, the U.S. has run private “shadow prisons” for immigrants convicted of federal crimes. Now, President Joe Biden has ordered the government to wind down those and other private prison contracts.

We won a huge legal victory defending our investigative reporting

In 2016, Reveal published a major investigation into Planet Aid, a group that received millions of dollars in U.S. government funds for aid programs in impoverished areas of southern Africa. The reporting tied the charity to an alleged cult and raised significant questions about whether the funds from the U.S. and other governments actually were reaching the people they were intended to help. A few months later, Planet Aid filed a libel lawsuit against Reveal that listed 80 objections to our reporting. The group sought $25 million in damages – an amount that’s twice our annual budget and could have forced Reveal to shut down. 

Almost five years, thousands of hours of staff time and a mountain of paperwork later, a federal judge has dismissed the entire case. We won!

This case is a poignant example of a troublesome legal trend taking place in the news industry over the past decade: deep-pocketed interests seeking to silence journalists with expensive defamation suits. The New York Times, Mother Jones, BuzzFeed News and other major news outlets have faced these types of lawsuits in recent years. 

The potential impact of these lawsuits could be a serious blow for democracy. They’re especially challenging for nonprofit investigative newsrooms like our own and local outlets whose budgets and resources have already been decimated.  

The ruling does allow Planet Aid the right to appeal to the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. However, for now, we are taking a victory lap, both for Reveal, as we get back to putting all of our resources toward reporting. As for the First Amendment, this decision should serve as a warning to powerful interests considering embarking on this expensive and failed strategy for attacking press freedom.

The work we do takes an enormous expenditure of time and resources. But we work hard to tell these stories because we see every day that arming people with facts helps them live better lives. 

In the Field: Reporting on the problems with private prisons 

One of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders took aim at private prisons. It directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service to start winding down their contracts with private companies that run prisons and pretrial detention centers – including a network of private prisons that house noncitizens convicted of federal crimes. 

In 2016, reporter Stan Alcorn’s first story for Reveal was a collaboration with Type Investigations reporter Seth Freed Wessler that examined medical care in these “shadow prisons.” Stan and Seth’s story focused on the case of Nestor Garay, a man who died after he had a stroke in a private immigrant prison in Texas. Instead of immediately calling an ambulance, prison medical staff left him in a cell for hours as his condition worsened.   

“What our investigation in 2016 showed is that these private prisons were effectively a separate system, used only for noncitizens, that did not meet the same standards,” Stan says. “Dozens of people likely died as a result of medical negligence in these prisons.”  

Many of the people in this private prison network were convicted not of a violent crime, but of illegally entering the United States. “We found that we were prosecuting more people for crossing the border than for guns, drugs, white-collar crime, all the other federal crimes combined,” Stan says. 

For this week’s update to the 2016 reporting, Reveal host Al Letson speaks to Silky Shah, executive director of the Detention Watch Network, an organization that has tried for years to end immigration detention. 

It’s important to note that the new executive order doesn’t end the use of private prisons altogether in the United States. It doesn’t, for example, affect the numerous immigration detention centers run by private companies for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And the number of people who are held in private prisons are just a fraction of the 2.3 million people who are locked up in the U.S. Stan says the reaction from immigration and prison reform activists has been to call this, at best, a first step. 

“During the campaign, President Biden's position was that he wanted to end the use of private companies running immigration detention. This order did not do that.” Stan notes that the bar is much higher for reform now than in 2016, as criticisms of mass incarceration have become more vocal. “The movement to abolish prisons is a part of more mainstream discourse in a way that was hardly imaginable, I think, five years ago. The expectations are just so different than when this story first came out.” 

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Brett Simpson is a UC Berkeley graduate student and production assistant at Reveal. She helps with everything behind the scenes to make the weekly radio magic happen, including research, engineering and doing the final quality check before the show hits apps and airwaves. 

Listening: I'm late to the game on this one, but I've been binge-listening to the serial podcast The View from Somewhere. After trans reporter Lewis Raven Wallace was fired from Marketplace for writing a blog post questioning the concept of objectivity in 2017, he independently produced a deep-dive series examining the history and forces behind mainstream journalism. I think it's a must-listen for anyone with questions about what we really mean when we say "objectivity," who it serves and who it excludes.

Reading: I just finished “Unorthodox,” a fascinating memoir by Deborah Feldman about leaving her ultra-Orthodox Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn, New York. I usually read at night to help me fall asleep. But this book kept me up LATE. 

Watching: I've been watching HBO’s “The Investigation,” a Danish series dramatizing the police investigation of the submarine murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall in 2017. It's scary to watch as a journalist, but also remarkable to see how the Danish and Swedish police worked against incredible odds – including using timed wind and current patterns to pinpoint exactly where evidence landed on the ocean floor – to bring her killer to justice.

You can keep up with Brett on Twitter at @brettvsimpson.

This newsletter is written by Sarah Mirk. Have any feedback or ideas? Send them my way.