The Sunday Story: Breaking a Prison's Code of Silence

I'm Aisha Roscoe and this is a 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.

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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 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 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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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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 ever asked. Nobody even 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?

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 you know, 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.

So when he had his first day there, he had come over after.

You know, they had a nickname for him, called Half Patch, to indicate like he. 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.

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.

Reading through his text messages, you can see it's not like he sets out to become a whistleblower. It's just eating away at him and he can't quite let it go. He can't quite turn away from what he's seen in 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.

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?

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, 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.

I mean, these are, you know, two extremely tragic losses.

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.

You're confirming this culture of silence that both Still and Vow experience and try 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.

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? Like, 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 and just 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 experience 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, 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.

Yeah, well, thank you so much. I think this reporting is so important, and 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 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.

Hey there, this is Felix Contreras, one of the co-hosts of Alt Latino, the podcast from NPR Music, where we discuss Latinx culture, music and heritage with the artists that create it. Listen now to the Alt Latino podcast from NPR.

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