“The eggshells I’m walking on turn into glass,” wrote Demetrius Buckley in a piece for Prism published in August. “I have to hold my tongue to keep from yelling.”
Buckley is incarcerated in Michigan’s Richard Handlon Correctional Facility, where he detailed how officers often abuse their power by writing frivolous tickets to keep incarcerated people from accessing rehabilitative programs like substance abuse treatment and college courses. In Buckley’s piece for Prism, he also illuminated how the prison’s grievance system does little to quell officers’ abuse of power, leaving those incarcerated with few avenues for meaningful redress.
While Buckley’s writing has been featured in the Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Scalawag, The Marshall Project, and Belt Magazine, it was his August story for Prism that he says led to severe retaliation from prison officials.
On Aug. 30, one week after Buckley’s Prism article was published, Buckley said he was moved into a cell with a man who had a history of violent behavior and who immediately attacked him. Following the altercation, Buckley said corrections officers stripped him, pepper-sprayed his body, and then placed him in solitary confinement—not even allowing him to shower off the chemical residue before placing him in isolation.
In a first-person essay written for Spectre last month, Buckley recalled the incident and the subsequent hunger strike he began in response to the retaliation he experienced.
“They spray me several times (who sits down and comes up with this kinda shit to hurt humans?),” Buckley wrote. “And the spray is really not a spray but a straight-up shower. Needles start to poke at me, hot needles all over my body. I fall, World, straight to my knees, kick off one shoe, then the other. I’m still being sprayed. I’m literally on fire at this point. I can’t see. I’m coughing and vomiting through my nose and mouth.”
While Buckley has used his pen to speak out about his treatment within Handlon, Michigan Department of Corrections (MDOC) has steadily refused to comply with public records requests for video footage of the alleged pepper spray attack that would help corroborate Buckley’s story and force the facility to be held accountable.
Last year, journalist Daniel Moritz-Rabson learned about Buckley’s abuse through Empowerment Avenue, a nonprofit that helps incarcerated artists and writers publish and share their work with the public. The organization has previously worked with Buckley and even helped coordinate the piece penned for Spectre.
In early November, Moritz-Rabson, who has covered the prison system for outlets including The Appeal, The Intercept, and Gothamist/WNYC, filed a public records request to MDOC requesting video footage and audio recordings of the area of the facility where Buckley was attacked. A week later, MDOC denied Moritz-Rabson’s request, arguing that any responsive records may impede their “ability to maintain the physical security of custodial or penal institutions,” thus exempting them from disclosure. MDOC also argued that the records Moritz-Rabson requested include information about the facility’s “security measures, including security plans, security codes and combinations, passwords, passes, keys, and security procedures.”
In December, Moritz-Rabson submitted an appeal of MDOC’s decision, and by early January, MDOC once again upheld its denial.
Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against MDOC on behalf of Moritz-Rabson, arguing that MDOC’s repeated denial of the records requests violates the Freedom of Information Act and that the exemptions named by the agency are not applicable to the records requested.
“The public interest in disclosure of the recordings outweighs any public interest in nondisclosure,” according to the ACLU’s lawsuit. “The public has an overwhelming interest in knowing whether penal institutions treat prisoners humanely, particularly when the actions of the corrections officers implicate the free speech and expression rights of incarcerated individuals. Penal institutions throughout the country and this state have disclosed, on many occasions, video and audio footage of incidents involving the treatment of prisoners because doing so is in the public interest.”
While media access in prisons can help satiate growing public interest in prison life and potentially hold facilities accountable for mistreatment and human rights violations, the ability of journalists, both on the inside and outside, to report on prison conditions has not been without struggle. In 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment does not guarantee the press access rights that exceed those given to the public, including the ability to interview incarcerated people. Even before 2007, the Bureau of Prisons did not allow incarcerated writers to publish under their own names until a federal court ruled the policy unconstitutional.
The COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated these challenges, as lockdown measures further restricted the press’ ability to connect with incarcerated people who wanted to tell their stories. However, in the wake of “social distancing” protocols, incarcerated people continued to find ways to connect with the public throughout 2020, including using contraband cell phones to share their personal stories and illuminate how quickly the virus was spreading within their facilities. Such stories were not shared without repercussions. In April 2020 as COVID was ravaging prisons and jails, Aaron Campbell, a man incarcerated at Ohio’s FCI Elkton, used a contraband cell phone to go on Facebook Live. Campbell pleaded for help and shared firsthand how poorly the facility was managing the pandemic. While Campbell’s video went viral, it also led prison officials to place him in isolation for months.
According to an ACLU press release, Buckley’s case is not the first time that MDOC has violated the Freedom of Information Act by denying access to public records related to prison conditions. The organization says this story harkens back to the “nearly identical” case of Woodman v. Michigan Department of Corrections, where in 2017 the ACLU successfully sued MDOC after it denied two journalists’ request for records related to an altercation with corrections officers that led to the death of an incarcerated man. Similar to Buckley’s story, MDOC argued that the release of the footage would undermine the facility’s security.
In a statement, ACLU of Michigan Legal Director Dan Korobkin noted that what happens in American prisons is often shrouded in secrecy—to the great detriment of incarcerated people.
“Transparency and accountability are critical to ensuring that their rights and well-being are not abused,” Korobkin said. “The freedom of the press to access public information is critical to penetrating the veil of secrecy and holding government agencies, and those who work on their behalf, accountable.”
