It’s been just over a year since Lester Holt and I slept in those hot, dimly lit cells inside America’s largest maximum-security prison, filming Dateline’s “Life Inside.”
For three days, we’d embedded inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, to report from the front lines about what we saw as a clearly heated and simmering problem: mass incarceration.
As a producer for "Dateline NBC" for more than two decades, I’ve witnessed how the criminal justice system operates, from nearly every perspective.
I’ve embedded with tenacious, hardworking homicide detectives in New York and Las Vegas as they investigate murders; I’ve interviewed brutal killers and spent countless hours visiting with grieving victims; I’ve covered dozens of trials, shadowing prosecutors determined to find justice, and public defenders fighting impossible odds; and I’ve conducted many investigations that have helped lead to the release of innocent people who were wrongfully convicted.
As a result, I’ve become a passionate student of our vast system of justice. And unfortunately, what I’ve learned is that the system that many believe is the best in the world is now in crisis. The policies and laws created to keep us safe have come to do exactly the opposite, according to many experts and politicians on both sides of the aisle.
The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other country on earth. While we represent about 5 percent of the world’s population, we lock up more than 20 percent of all the prisoners in the world.
It wasn’t always this way.
The birth of mass incarceration can be traced to the early 1970s, when President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs” and demanded “tough on crime” policies. Politicians from both parties agreed and began to pass more punitive laws that sent more people to prison, for lesser crimes and longer periods of time. This trend continued for the next 40 years. Today, 2.2 million people are behind bars in America … a 500 percent increase since the 1970’s.
Yet, we aren’t any safer, we’re spending billions of dollars, it’s tearing families apart and disrupting entire communities.
So what have we been doing wrong? Why is reform so important? And what are the solutions?
We came to Angola to try and find answers.
We wanted to better understand why so many people have landed behind bars, what prison is like for the average inmate, and why many officers, wardens and corrections officials think criminal justice system is broken.
When it first aired last September, many viewers found “Life Inside” revealing, telling us that it challenged their own deeply rooted perceptions of what justice should look like.
Of course, we had no idea back then that George Floyd’s death would soon become the tipping point for a national reckoning with some of these very issues…that decades of pent up anger and frustration would spill into the streets.
Hopefully, now that criminal justice reform has landed near the top of our national agenda, “Life Inside” can be seen through a new prism, and meaningfully contribute to this important and ongoing conversation.
