A KY inmate published a story about sexism in prison. Now she faces discipline
A Kentucky prison inmate says she faces punishment for writing a story in a national publication that criticized the state Department of Corrections for discriminating against female inmates in violation of a 1982 federal court order.
The Department of Corrections told the Herald-Leader on Tuesday it believes the inmate’s published story contained “several inaccuracies.” The agency would not say what specific prison rules this allegedly broke.
The incident raises questions about the rights Kentucky inmates have to shine a light on life behind bars.
“The prisons are so opaque,” Greg Belzley, an Oldham County civil rights lawyer who has successfully sued jails and prisons for decades and who is looking into the inmate’s disciplinary case this week. “That’s probably the main reason horrible things continue to happen in prisons.”
“So the First Amendment rights of inmates to write truthfully about the conditions they’re experiencing during their incarceration needs to be sacrosanct,” Belzley said. “If I come to the conclusion that she’s being punished for exercising her First Amendment rights just because somebody doesn’t like what she said, I can tell you this, I’m going to do something about it.”
Taira Beller, 41, wrote a June 9 story for the Prison Journalism Project, a nonprofit based in Chicago that trains inmates in journalism and publishes their work.
Beller wrote that she and other women housed at the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women in Shelby County get less access to food choices, clothing, visitation and vocational programs than the men who make up most of Kentucky’s prison population.
For example, she said, most clothing provided to inmates by the state prisons and their official vendor are sized for men’s bodies, not women’s, and there are too few options for mandatory undergarments like bras. And male inmates have a choice of about 30 different brand-name shoes while woman get six, some of which are usually out of stock, she said.
A federal district judge, Edward H. Johnstone, ordered the Kentucky Correctional Institution for Women more than 40 years ago to cease “the unequal treatment to which women inmates are subjected in the allocation of basic privileges,” Beller noted.
“But until Kentucky women’s prisons are resourced as full institutions with equal priority, stark differences will remain,” Beller concluded.
A midnight visit
On June 13, four days after her story appeared online, Beller says a correctional officer woke her around midnight to hand her a disciplinary report. Beller’s published story contained “false narratives” that “defamed the institution protocols,” she said the officer told her, reading from a prepared text.
Beller said she was charged with the “major violation” of Category 4.25: “Placing personal ads in any publication or with any internet provider that includes false, deceptive or misleading personal information, photographs or drawings.”
Other violations in the same category level include injuring another inmate during an assault and smuggling contraband into the prison.
Beller is appealing the disciplinary action this week, so she has not yet been punished.
At stake is her position in her prison’s “honor dorm,” where inmates with clean institutional records get private cells and access to better bathroom and kitchen facilities.
“She has been in that honors dormitory for nearly 10 years, which means she hasn’t gotten a write-up in almost 10 years,” Beller’s husband, Erik Beller, told the Herald-Leader.
In a prepared statement to the Herald-Leader on Tuesday, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Morgan Hall said Taira Beller has not been punished at this time.
“A disciplinary report has been issued, which provides notice of the alleged violation and initiates the institutional disciplinary process,” Hall wrote. “That process includes an opportunity for the inmate to be heard, respond to the allegations and receive the due process protections required by law before any disciplinary determination is made.”
Hall did not respond when asked specifically what Taira Beller did wrong.
She said the inmate’s story about how female inmates are treated was inaccurate on several points, and that supplies and services are equally available to women and men in the state prisons.
Reprisal on inmates is rare
Erik Beller said his wife pitched her story to the Prison Journalism Project only because she couldn’t get anyone to respond to inmates’ concerns about unequal access to clothing, food choices and the like. He said both he and she reached out to the prison, the Department of Corrections in Frankfort and prison vendors.
“It’s not like we didn’t try to take proper channels to fix these things first, you know,” Erik Beller said. “They did nothing.”
After Taira Beller submitted a draft of her story to the Prison Journalism Project, on May 4, deputy editor Wyatt Stayner wrote to the Department of Corrections with a list of 13 questions and a request for any additional information the agency could provide that might give the story more context and greater accuracy.
The Department of Corrections never responded to Stayner, according to the Prison Journalism Project.
The first time the department acknowledged Beller’s article appeared to be the chilly midnight visit from the guard last weekend.
Inmates who write about living conditions inside their jails and prisons understand they are taking a risk, but official reprisal after a story is published “doesn’t happen as much as you might think,” said Yukari Kane, founder and editor-in-chief of the Prison Journalism Project.
“What we have learned is that they legally have First Amendment rights, so they have the right to express themselves publicly,” Kane said. “But the challenge is that they’re not physically free, so the gray zone there is huge. They’re at the mercy of the system.”
“This one caught us off guard, quite frankly, because I don’t think the story is — you know, the story is rooted in the first person, it’s more of a criticism of the system rather than what one institution or one individual is doing, and it represents a problem that is happening more broadly,” Kane said.
“We’re careful about the language and making sure that it’s fair,” Kane added. “It’s part of our training with our writers. Our goal is to do good journalism.”
Sensitive to public criticism
Kentucky state agencies under Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration often don’t respond to questions, but they are keenly sensitive to criticism, said Tres Watson, a Republican political and public affairs consultant.
“They get very upset when anything remotely having to do with the administration in any department or cabinet comes out in a negative light, and they don’t have full control over the message,” Watson said. “That’s been clear for six years, seven years, however long it’s been now.”
“Certainly there is a heightened awareness of that at this moment, because he’s running for president, and they probably have more people out there looking for mentions of the administration than they ever had before and attempting to squash any sort of negative press that they find,” he said.
The Department of Corrections is mistaken if it believes punishing Beller will be the final word on this, said Belzley, the civil rights lawyer. Apart from the First Amendment concern, he said, there’s also the question she raised in her story about the alleged unequal treatment of inmates based on their gender.
“I’ve pulled down the 1982 federal court decision of Ed Johnstone that she referenced in her very well-written article,” Belzley said.
“I think there’s a real problem there,” he said. “So I’m taking a very good, hard look at this case, not only from the perspective of whether punishment of Ms. Beller is justified under the circumstances, but whether or not there is noncompliance with that federal court case she cites in her article.”
