Media

Amy Harmon's work is so particular her job title is pretty much synonymous with her name. Though technically Harmon reports for the The New York Times' national desk, the two-time Pulitzer winner writes almost exclusively long features that explore the human experience of science and technology. The Times invests in Harmon's brand of journalism: She spends many months...

A few days ago Dennis Myers, the news editor of the Reno News & Review, sent along a press release about Nevada's insurance exchange, called Nevada HealthLink. I glanced at it quickly, thinking it had come from the Nevada Division of Insurance, the state's regulator in Carson City. It said "FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE" in the top right corner, gave...

by Justin Elliott

Last week, the Washington Post published an internal audit finding the NSA had violated privacy rules thousands of times in recent years.

In response, the spy agency held a rare conference call for the press maintaining that the violations are “not willful” and “not malicious.”

It’s difficult to fully evaluate the NSA’s track record, since the agency has been so tight-lipped on the topic.

What information about rule violations has the agency itself released? Take a look:

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That is the publicly released version of a semiannual report from the administration to Congress describing NSA violations of rules surrounding the FISA Amendments Act. The act is one of the key laws governing NSA surveillance, including now-famous programs like Prism.

As an oversight measure, the law requires the attorney general to submit semiannual reports to the congressional intelligence and judiciary committees.

The section with the redactions above is titled “Statistical Data Relating to Compliance Incidents.”

One of the only unredacted portions reads, “The value of statistical information in assessing compliance in situations such as this is unclear. A single incident, for example, may have broad ramifications. Multiple incidents may increase the incident count, but may be deemed of very limited significance.”

The document, dated May 2010, was released after the ACLU filed a freedom of information lawsuit.  

As the Post noted, members of Congress can read the unredacted version of the semiannual reports, but only in a special secure room. They cannot take notes or publicly discuss what they read.

For more on the NSA, see our story on how the agency says it can’t search its own emails, and what we know about the agency’s tapping of Internet cables. 

UPDATE 8/22/13: The Obama Administration has now declassified the most recent version of the semiannual report to Congress and posted it online. The document includes some information about rates of "compliance incidents" but is also heavily redacted.

It's not easy being a little magazine. But The New Inquiry, an online journal and monthly magazine of culture and politics, is making it look easy. "We have no paywall, no advertisers, no benefactors, and we're creative commons," said 27-year-old editor in chief Rachel Rosenfelt. Instead, the publication relies on revenue from subscriptions, with readers signing on for as little...

Last year the Turkish government jailed 21 journalists working for the DIHA news agency on trumped up anti-terrorist charges. The reporters were covering the Kurdish separatist movement, but Ankara maintains the journalists reporting endangered national security. This last weekend, the UK government detained and interrogated for nine hours, under the parameters of an anti-terrorist law, the partner of Guardian journalist...

The Independent reported this weekend that the UK police are investigating Rupert Murdoch's News International (now called News UK) for corporate-level crimes in the hacking and bribery scandal. The development has caused pandemonium at the upper echelons of the Murdoch media empire. Shortly afterwards, executives in America ordered that the company dramatically scale back its co-operation with the Metropolitan Police......

This month, CJR presents "Required Skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. BLDGBLOG -- An always delightful collection of architectural curiosities, urban-planning innovations, and miscellaneous cool stuff. 99% Invisible -- Fascinating and fun design podcast about "the 99% invisible activity that shapes our...

Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger filed an astonishing column tonight that shows just how far the British authorities are going to suppress the paper's NSA/Snowden reporting: A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or...

Felix Salmon, my sometime colleague, has a typically good post about the economics of producing journalism. Read the whole thing, as well as the first two installments of the trilogy. But I've got to dispute this part about the value of the Washington Post's sale to Jeff Bezos (emphasis mine): ... the Washington Post, just as much as the Boston...

When people die, the words used to describe their passing vary greatly, often depending on how close the writer was to the dearly departed. In paid obituaries or death notices, written by families or funeral homes, death is disguised: people "cross over" or "cross to the other side," "are called home by their maker," "went to their eternal rest," and...

Human rights organizations, freedom of speech groups, and the Brazilian government are among the plethora of groups condemning the detention and interrogation of the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is the Guardian reporter who has been working with Edward Snowden to expose widespread surveillance by the National Security Administration. UK police detained David Miranda for nine hours under the...

by Christie Thompson

Last week, we published an investigation into the New York prison system, and how, despite protections, inmates with severe mental illness are still ending up in solitary confinement.

But New York is far from unique. Prisons and jails across the country are filling with mentally ill inmates, while access to community mental health services dwindle. The Department of Justice estimated in 2006 that over half of all U.S. inmates suffer from a mental health problem.

Those prisoners also often end up in the isolated cells known as “special housing units,” “secure housing units,” solitary confinement, or simply, “the box.” There, inmates can be locked down for 23 hours a day with little human contact. Studies show such isolation can cause or exacerbate psychiatric problems in prisoners.

We’ve rounded up some of the best deep-dive reporting on the mentally ill in U.S. prisons. Did we miss any? Let us know in the comments below.

Mental Illness Among Inmates

My Name is Not Robert, New York Times magazine, August 2000
A mentally ill man from Los Angeles is mistaken for a wanted criminal, and ends up in a maximum security prison in upstate New York. His kafkaesque story details the bureaucratic breakdown and flaws in mental health care that led to his imprisonment.

The New Asylums, Frontline, May 2005
Frontline documents the movement of America’s mentally ill away from shuttered psychiatric hospitals, and into the nation’s jails and prisons. The result is a massive strain on the minds of afflicted inmates, and on the strapped prison system tasked with treating them.

An American Gulag: Descending into Madness at Supermax (three-part series), The Atlantic, June 2012
Federal prison policy says mentally ill inmates shouldn’t be housed in the maximum-security prison ADX-Florence (also known as Supermax) in Colorado. But a lawsuit against the facility found many troubled inmates were still locked down at Supermax, where they were neglected or out-right abused by prison staff.

Trouble in Mind, Texas Monthly, March 2013
Andre Thomas had been hearing voices since he was 10 years old, and made multiple attempts at suicide. Eventually, his psychotic breakdown led him to brutally murder his wife and her two children. As Thomas awaits execution for his crimes in Texas, his story “forces uncomfortable questions about the intersection of mental illness and the criminal justice system,” writes journalist Brandi Grissom.

The Impact of Solitary Confinement

A Death in the Box, New York Times Magazine, October 2004
Inmates battling psychological problems often find themselves in “the box” for failing to comply with rigid prison policies. But what toll does isolation take on an already fragile mind? Mary Beth Pfeiffer details the death of one New York inmate who committed suicide after being stuck in solitary—rather than provided treatment. Pfeiffer’s 2011 investigationfor the Poughkeepsie Journal shows how even with new protections, the number of suicides in New York prisons spiked in 2010.

Hellhole, New Yorker, March 2009
Atul Gawande explores the trauma of long-term isolation, a daily reality for tens of thousands of U.S. prisoners. “The wide-scale use of isolation is, almost exclusively, a phenomenon of the past twenty years,” Gawande writes of confinement, a tactic meant to separate the most dangerous inmates. But while solitary can have a massive impact on inmates’ mental health, studies show it’s done little to reduce prison violence.

New York's Black Sites, The Nation, July 2012
While solitary is used across the country, New York stands out for using it to punish violations as minor as having too many postage stamps. Jean Casella and James Ridgeway (also editors of the website Solitary Watch) detail how New York State came to house roughly 4,500 inmates in solitary confinement, cutting them off from almost all human contact, often for months at a time.

Solitary in Iran Nearly Broke Me. Then I Went Inside America's Prisons, Mother Jones, November 2012
After being held for over two years in an Iranian prison, journalist Shane Bauer was shocked by what he found at California’s Pelican Bay prison: their solitary confinement cells were, in many ways, even worse. “Here, there are no windows,” Bauer writes. California uses solitary confinement to isolate thousands of inmates they claim are gang-affiliated, putting many in “the box” for up to decades.

This month, CJR presents "Required Skimming," a daily miniguide to our staffers' beats and obsessions. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments. Jezebel: Gawker's sister blog is the elder stateswoman of ladyblogs at this point (along with Feministing), but it remains relevant, witty, and just the right amount of ranty about everything from...

Aaron Kushner and his revamped Freedom Communications get huge slack around here. As Ryan Chittum explained in the May/June CJR, the 40-year-old former greeting-card executive, with zero experience in newspapers, is running the most interesting and important experiment in journalism right now, based on the simple ideas that newspapers' wounds are in large part self-inflicted and there is money...

CHARLESTON, SC -- Last Thursday, folks in the newsroom at WCHS, an ABC affiliate in Charleston, WV, were feeling pretty good. Indictments had just come down against two public officials the station had named in a May broadcast, citing anonymous sources, as targets of a state and federal investigation. One employee even used the word "relieved"--though not everyone at the...

Ross Douthat has been writing a bit about how the Washington Post missed out on becoming Politico. Or owning Politico. Or something. I say hat's off to the WaPo for not becoming Politico. But Douthat makes some whopper errors when he tries to get into the numbers: We can't know exactly how that counterfactual would have played out; maybe it...

News came Tuesday on the front page of The New York Times that the Obama administration is delaying yet another provision of the Affordable Care Act--this time, an important one that will affect household pocketbooks in short order. The article, by the well-connected veteran reporter Robert Pear, disclosed that a much-touted provision to limit out-of-pocket costs, a category that includes...

Culled from CJR’s frequently updated “Must-reads from around the Web,” our staff recommendations for the best pieces of journalism (and other miscellany) on the Internet, here are your can’t-miss must-reads of the past week: Murder by Craigslist -- A serial killer finds a newly vulnerable class of victims: white, working-class men Advice for Jeff Bezos from the Post's former ombudsman...

DETROIT, MI -- Want to learn what the deal is with the hundreds of layoffs unfolding at Gannett newspapers across the country? You can get slivers of the story from the local business press and alt-weeklies, and stabs at a big-picture take from industry-watching blogs. But one place you won't find news about the layoffs? Many of the affected newspapers...

There's a petition signed by 100 left-leaning economists that proposes raising the minimum wage to $10.50 an hour. The petition relies on an estimate by Jeannette Wicks-Lim and Robert Pollin that says it would only increase business costs to a McDonald's by 2.7 percent and suggests a restaurant would increase the price of a Big Mac by just a nickel,...