Up First from NPR - The Sunday Story: Breaking a Prison's Code of Silence

Episode Date: May 5, 2024

In recent years, high profile cases of police brutality across the U.S. have brought increased attention and scrutiny to police misconduct and use of force incidents. When something happens, the police often say "we're investigating." But what's really being done to ensure police are held accountable for their actions?Sukey Lewis is a criminal justice reporter at KQED. As part of the multi-newsroom California Reporting Project, she has spent years obtaining previously-sealed police internal affairs records, to find out what happens when law enforcement agencies investigate themselves.In this episode of The Sunday Story, host Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Lewis about the new season of her podcast, On Our Watch, which focuses on correctional officers. Lewis talks about her reporting on New Folsom, one of the most dangerous prisons in California. And she shares the stories of two whistleblowers who worked as correctional officers within the prison and ultimately died while fighting to expose its secrets.You can listen to all eight episodes of season 2 of On Our Watch at kqed.org/onourwatch.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

I'm Ayesha Roscoe, and this is The Sunday Story. A warning before we get started. This episode contains mentions of suicide. In recent years, high-profile cases of police brutality across the U.S. have brought increased attention and scrutiny to police misconduct and use of force incidents. When something happens, the police often say we're investigating. But what's really being done or not done to ensure police are held accountable for their actions? In 2021, a team of reporters from KQED partnered with NPR to take a closer look at the process for how police police themselves. They made a podcast called On Our Watch, and it was focused on select

cases of police misconduct in California. Today, I'm speaking with criminal justice reporter Suki Lewis, the host of On Our Watch. She and her team have continued to uncover thousands of previously sealed internal affairs law enforcement records as part of the Multi-Newsroom California Reporting Project. Suki tells me about the reporting behind the new season of her show. In season two, the show digs into recent incidents at one of the most dangerous prisons in California. Our conversation about the stories she found within the closed world of correctional facilities and what it takes to investigate what happens inside of a prison after the break. Now Our Change will honor 100 years of the Royal Canadian Air Force and their dedicated service to communities at home and abroad.

From the skies to Our Change, this $2 commemorative circulation coin marks their storied past and promising future. Find the limited edition Royal Canadian Air Force $2 coin today. We're back with a Sunday story here with criminal justice reporter Suki Lewis, host of the KQED podcast On Our Watch. Suki, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me on. Before we get into the reporting for this season of On Our Watch. Talk to me about the California Reporting Project. You co-founded that in 2018, right? Yeah. So in 2018, the state here in California passed a new law that would open up internal police records, you know, for the first time, basically. We'd get to see inside this black box of police internal affairs. And that law was called the Right to

Know Act. And it affected certain categories of internal records, including deadly use of force incidents, serious use of force incidents, which means, you know, when somebody gets really badly injured by police, and dishonesty and sexual assault or sexual misconduct on duty by police officers. This law gave you access to the paper trail that opened the window to these police departments and how they run because there's always a paper trail, right? Yes. And for years here in California, it was very secretive. You couldn't see that paper trail. So some states like Florida have had open records laws for a long time. But here in California, because of the power of the police unions, you just could never know. You could never know if somebody was disciplined or

fired or like what had happened. And so we teamed up with a group of different news organizations across the state to file blanket public records requests at all 700 law enforcement agencies across the state to start understanding how these systems work, what happens when a serious police shooting happens, what happens when you file a complaint against a police officer for excessive force. And they say, we're going to investigate. How does a deadly use of force investigation unfold? So season one of On Our Watch came directly out of this reporting. You examined select misconduct cases and kind of the shadowy world of police discipline.

So what were some of the big lessons or takeaways from your reporting on season one? I think one of our biggest findings was that those promises that we have been made in the public that we're investigating, people will be held accountable, are really based on this false assumption that its purpose is to provide accountability and that that's actually not its purpose. It's a risk management tool, basically like HR, right? If you're an employee and you make a complaint to HR, their goal isn't necessarily to hold the person you made a complaint about to justice. Their goal is to protect the company from liability. That's what we really found, especially in a secretive system with internal affairs in the world of policing.

It was much more about protecting the police department and the city from liability. So sometimes that would mean accountability. Sometimes that would mean an officer gets fired or disciplined because that's what would protect the city. But that was not actually the goal or the purpose of this institution or this system. This season, you focused on correctional facilities, prisons. How did you decide on that? We decided to turn to the world of correctional facilities in California because the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is actually the largest employer of peace officers in the state. And while we had gotten some insight into how police departments were functioning and how these internal affairs systems were working in police departments, the world of corrections is even more of a closed system.

I mean, it's literally behind walls, right? And so getting behind those walls, even if it was just through the paper trail, as you say, seemed like a really important thing to do and to understand how these prisons, how these small cities work and how accountability works in a system where often the people who are making complaints are incarcerated and have even less power than a civilian on the street. How did you land on the prison that you focused on? So we ended up focusing on a prison known as New Folsom or California State Prison Sacramento. And that's because as we were analyzing data and records from prisons all across the state,

there was this pattern that kind of jumped off the page at us. And for this category of serious use of force incidents, that's when an officer uses deadly force or seriously injures somebody. There were three times as many of those type of incidents at this one prison than any other prison in the state. And this just kind of raised our alarm bells. We were like, you know, what is going on at this prison? You know, why is that such an anomaly in the data? Let's look closer. We took our findings to some attorneys who work in this space. And these attorneys, they were also surprised, but they said this prison has been,

you know, a kind of known problem. They said, did you know about the whistleblowers that died there? There are these two whistleblowers that died there in the last year. And those two whistleblowers' names were Correctional Officer Valentino Rodriguez and Sergeant Kevin Steele. Officer Valentino Rodriguez, his death was found to be accidental overdose due to fentanyl. And the second officer, Sergeant Kevin Steele, who died about 10 months later, died by suicide. So within the space of a year, two whistleblowers at this prison had died. I mean, I think that's going to stop anybody in their tracks. What did you think when you first heard that?

You know, your first thought goes to, is there foul play? Is someone retaliating against these whistleblowers? And so we started doing, you know, what we as investigative journalists do. My colleague Julie Small reached out to the family of Valentino Rodriguez. We both started filing public records requests for the death investigations of each of these men to try and understand what had happened to them and if there was anything in those death investigations that pointed back to the prison or to anything else that we needed to uncover. Ultimately, we did not find any evidence of foul play in either case, but we learned a lot more about what they had each been uncovering before they died. Coming up after the break, Suki and her team follow the trail of evidence left by Correctional

Officer Valentino Rodriguez and Sergeant Kevin Steele after their deaths. We're back with a Sunday story. Suki, once you heard about the two whistleblowers who'd worked at the same prison, New Folsom, you started retracing the events before their deaths. How did you go about that? So one person who ended up being a really key source for us was the father of Correctional Officer Valentino Rodriguez, who has the same name. So his name is Valentino Rodriguez Sr. And he ended up being really central to our story. My colleague, Julie, reached out to him. And at first, he was really, you know, cautious.

I just want this to work both ways. Right. Right? Okay. I need to know what you're doing. Okay. That's all I've ever asked. Nobody even knows we're having these meetings other than my wife.

Right? knows we're having these meetings other than my wife, right? When we met him, Val Sr. was really clearly, you know, still in the midst of the grieving process. And I think part of that process for him was trying to understand, you know, what led to his son's passing. I just can't, I just can't turn my back on my son, you know what I mean? And I owe that to him. And I'm going to go as far as I can. And in the end, if nothing, it's nothing.

I tried, right? I'll find my answers when my time comes. So he started to share with us the evidence that he had been gathering, including his son's phone. What did you learn about who Valentino Rodriguez was, how he was as a person and this journey that he was on? It was really incredible. We learned a lot about him. He was a really kind of funny, goofy guy. One of the things that we found on his phone was this video of him

in the investigative services unit offices inside this prison. It's one of the most dangerous prisons in the state of California. And he sets up the camera and then he steps back and then he starts dancing and he's practicing.

He's learning the cumbia because he's about to get married. And so he's learning the cumbia because he's about to get married and so he's practicing the cumbia in this you know in this office and um i just loved kind of coming across these little artifacts of who this person was he also had a dog named daisy that he loved and would sing to his dog super Super dog, super dog. There's the song about Daisy the super dog. One day there was a dog named Daisy and she was super lazy. And he really worked hard at the prison.

Like he was really wanted to get into this investigative unit. It was a big career opportunity for him. But the unit itself, once he joined, they didn't really think he had earned the right to be there. So when he had his first day there, he had come over after. And I asked him, how was your first day? And he goes, it was a bunch of older guys that had been there. He called them OGs. I said, well, how'd it go? He goes, they asked a bunch of older guys that have been there. He called them OGs. I said, well, how'd it go? He goes, they asked, who the f*** are you?

You know, his first day, and I just, it's prison talk, I guess. You know, they had a nickname for him called Half Patch to indicate, like, he wasn't a full member of the team, and he didn't quite deserve to be there yet. And you can see in his phone, you know, he is trying really hard to fit in with this group of guys and they kind of needle him and call him names, like just really kind of harassing behavior, you know, from work colleagues. You can see that it really does begin to take a toll on Valentino, and he starts to struggle with his mental health. So he actually has a breakdown at work one day

and shares with the chief deputy warden that he is going through some really difficult things, and she tells him, okay, you should go out on stress leave. And so he takes some time off work from the prison. But even once he leaves the prison, he really can't leave it all the way. Like he's still mentally there and still kind of struggling with the effects of his time there. I remember sitting on the couch with him and him saying... This is Mimi Rodriguez, Valentino's wife. I remember this very clearly. He said, this is my identity. He's like, I feel like I've given up on everything.

I feel like I give up on my job. He wasn't at the prison physically, but mentally he was still there. He was still talking to people from the prison. He was still reaching out to people from the prison, reaching out to him, telling him what was going on within the prison. And so six days before his death, he ends up going in to talk to the warden. And he tells him about the harassment that he experienced personally and also different kinds of misconduct that he witnessed, including allegations that other officers in the unit that he worked in were involved in planting drugs and weapons on incarcerated people. And that's really important because the unit that he worked in is kind of like the police force for the prison. They have this very special role.

And so if they're dirty, that could taint criminal cases that stem from the investigations they do. And the officers in this unit are supposed to be held to a higher standard because they have this higher level of responsibility in the prison than other officers do. So after he makes this report, the word eventually gets out that he's talked. And he was really nervous about that happening. So he was nervous about anybody coming to the house. At one point, he had put things at the door. So if someone opened it, you can hear the door open he also like he had a gun and he would sleep with it just to make sure and I'm like what who's coming and I would ask him like is everything okay you know who's who are you nervous about coming what is going on

it's hard to it's hard to see the person you love turn into something different. The night that he died, one of the last text messages you can see he sent to his wife was, it's out now that I told on the team. And then she comes home to find him slumped over in the bathroom and no longer breathing. I mean, it's so horrible. Who is the other whistleblower? Tell me about him.

So the other whistleblower, his name is Sergeant Kevin Steele. He had worked for the California Department of Corrections for about 20 years at this point. He's a military veteran. Just this real kind of straight arrow guy. Had a very kind of rigorous sense of morality, a very rigorous sense of right and wrong. He's seen a lot and been through a lot and was beginning to come to this point of disillusionment with these systems that he had been promised were going to affect change and provide accountability. And it's in for Steele at this point, Valentino's death was kind of like the last straw for him. He felt like all these things he's seen over the years and tried to report up

the chain had not been properly addressed. And then there was this kind of moral failing in response to the death of an officer and how they treated Valentino's family after his death. And so Steele decides to make his last stand, basically. And what he does is he writes up a memo to the warden detailing the list of failings as he sees it. Times where the institution failed to keep its promises to the public and times where it failed to keep people safe and times where it failed to protect officers from harassment and things like that. And so he writes up this memo and sends it off to the warden. And after that, he actually leaves California. He moves to Missouri. And it seems like his plan was

to drop this bomb and then ride off into the sunset. He was planning to retire at the end of the year and just kind of be done with the prison and with this whole institution. But much like we saw with Valentino, even though Sergeant Kevin Steele is out of the prison and, you know, even miles and miles away, he's still trapped there mentally. And, you know, at one point, about eight months after he's left the state, things reach ahead for him. And one day, Steele goes into the shed on his property in Missouri, and know, two extremely tragic losses. But both of these whistleblowers, they left behind evidence for you to understand Nufolsum, right? The failures that happened there? Like for Valentino, you had his phone and Steele wrote a memo that talked about his concerns about use of force incidents going back years. What did you find out when you started

looking into those? So one of the things that was really incredible about this story is the evidence that was left behind. Steele's memo kind of gave us this key to understanding what he saw was wrong with these incidents, which was that the injuries that people were showing up in the hospital with, incarcerated people, were not matching the reports. So we started kind of looking at our incident reports kind of through this lens that he had left for us and seeing how repeatedly these incident reports had this kind of pattern to them almost. And a lot of these incidents that appeared very troubling, you know, occurred in areas where there was no camera coverage. And the use of force described often did not, you know, at all make sense on how they got injured. So it would be something like, I think one of them was like, we guided the man to the floor and they ended up, you know,

with internal bleeding and broken ribs. And you're like, okay, like how does that even make that make sense, right? And what we saw over and over again in these cases is that they didn't result in discipline for officers. You know, one theme that we just kind of ran into over and over again is the code of silence. And it's basically an agreement, you know, unspoken agreement to never tell on each other. And it's, this is something that we've seen in policing as well with the thin blue line, but I would say it's even stronger in a prison context. And because there isn't that thing of a bystander who can kind of intercede or be an outside witness to events, that code of silence is just a really, really thick wall to

break. And so many people that we talk to, we talk to correctional officers for this story, many of whom did not want to go on the record because they fear retaliation. Even retired officers who still feel like potentially the agency could come after them for their pensions if they talk. There is no real incentive to do so. Like even institutionally, you will be reassigned. You will not be rewarded basically for reporting things like that. You're confirming this culture of silence that both Steele and Val experienced and tried to disrupt. What did you ultimately end up finding out about their deaths? So again, we did not find there was any evidence of foul play.

But I feel like our reporting really does clearly show that they were victims. They were victims of this system and they were victims of this code of silence and that fear and the kind of psychosocial trauma that they experienced by having to go against this machine in order to try and do what they felt was the right thing really contributed to their deaths and contributed to the decline of their mental health and led them to their end. And this was, in fact, a finding that was made after their deaths.

Their widows filed basically workers' compensation claims with the state to get their death benefits. And during that process, they found that these deaths were industrial. These deaths were related to their jobs and their work as correctional officers for the state of California. Your sources included law enforcement, former law enforcement, incarcerated people, their family members. What are the particular challenges of reporting in and about a prison? How does it require a different approach, especially when you're dealing with people who likely have dealt with some very traumatic things. Yeah, there are a lot of different challenges. I think, you know, in terms of bringing correctional officers in into feeling like they could speak to us and trust us,

it was a lot of conversations about confidentiality, how we could keep them protected, and also that we were trying to tell a deep, nuanced story that wasn't just a story about how correctional officers always are using excessive force or something like that. It was this story that we had found, which was very complicated, and it was about the mental impacts of working inside a prison on officers and that they experienced some of the same difficult things that incarcerated people experience. And then for the incarcerated people that we spoke to, there was also a lot of different factors to consider.

You know, for one thing, a lot of the phone conversations or all the phone conversations that we had are recorded. So you know that you are being listened in on and that what they say could have impacts for their lives. Some people I talk to who have been in prison for years have kind of a vague idea about what a podcast is, but not everybody does. So just kind of walking people through what this means,

what their participation means, what going on the record means and stuff like that so they can be informed and make informed decisions about participating or not. And then, you know, in terms of people who have been dealing with trauma, you know, we talked to Val Sr., obviously, who was kind of in the throes of his own grieving process. We talked to the family of Sergeant Kevin Steele as well, his brother, who agreed to go on the record with us. And we talked to Mimi, Valentino Rodriguez's wife. And I think, you know, just in terms of having a trauma-informed approach as much as possible, a lot of it was about giving them the power, not trying to be extractive or just take their story and see how it fit in with our narrative, but to hold space for them to talk about what they had gone through. And also the power to be like, okay, if you don't feel like you said that right, or if you want to rethink that, like, this is how you're going to be portrayed in the story. This is the context in which your story is going to be used. Are you comfortable with that?

And saying, if you're not, you can take it back anytime. And so it was a lot more conversation than I think you would normally have of going back to sources and playing pieces of tape for them and that kind of thing. But it really felt like the responsible thing to do. So there were no surprises when the podcast came out. And so we could also be sure that we were being accurate and that we were accurately representing the experience of our primary sources. You know, people will say sunlight is the best disinfectant. Is it making a difference? Is the reporting, the transparency,

how is it impacting these prisons? I think it's still too soon to say. And it's also kind of the next step. I feel like this is the first step, is saying, like, look, this is what's happening. And then the next step is actually beyond our power as journalists. I feel like it's in the hands of lawmakers and the oversight bodies over the prisons here in California or nationally. One thing that's interesting to know about the California prison system is that there is an oversight body called the Office of the Inspector General of Prisons, and they do get a lot of insight into the prisons, but they have no power. So they regularly issue these reports that say, you're doing a bad job, you need to do better. Or like this person violated policy. We don't agree with this. But until there is a real appetite internally in the agency to take action or a body like that has teeth, this transparency only gets you so far. I think it's really important, again, for the public

to know about it because that is how happens, is people taking an interest and people taking a care about this public institution that we own. Like, this is our bag. And so I think that's why I do this work. But then I have to hand it off and see where it goes from there. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. I think this reporting is so important and it's the, it's reporting on people who truly don't have a voice. People who have died, people who are incarcerated, and you give them a voice. So we're so grateful to be able to tell this story. Thank you. And I also feel honored, you know, that people allowed me to share their stories with so many people. That was criminal justice reporter

Suki Lewis, host of On Our Watch from KQED in San Francisco. You can listen to all eight episodes of their latest season at kqed.org slash on our watch or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode of The Sunday Story was produced by Justine Yan and edited by Liana Simstrom with additional editing by Jen Chien, the director of podcasts at KQED. Production support from Chris Agusa.

Our engineer was Robert Rodriguez. The Sunday Story team includes Abby Wendell and our senior editor, Jenny Schmidt. Liana Simstrom is our supervising producer and Irene Noguchi is our executive producer. If you're experiencing mental health-related distress or have a loved one who needs crisis support, please call or text 988-THE-SUICIDE-AND-CRISIS-LIFELINE. I'm Aisha Roscoe. Up First is back tomorrow with all the news you need to start your week.

Until then, have a great rest of your weekend. Thank you.