There’s a scene in the movie Chinatown in which Jack Nicholson’s character, private detective Jake Gittes, visits the Los Angeles Hall of Records in search of land transactions in California’s Owens Valley. Acting on a hunch, Gittes scans a deed book and finds numerous names recently pasted onto a page, which a clerk tells him are new landowners in the valley.
Recognizing that the breadth of land transactions is unusual, Gittes carries the book to a secluded records stack and coughs to mask the sound of his tearing out the relevant page. He does not know why these people are buying up property in the valley, but the discovery of the names represents a key turn in the movie’s plot, the first clue to a conspiracy involving murder, blackmail and widespread public corruption.
Though Chinatown is fictional, it is based on a true story about California water rights that was unearthed in seemingly mundane public records (presumably, through more respectable means). Such records are often the nexus of bombshell stories, and though they are today typically accessed on public computer terminals or down online rabbit holes, they may remain as obscure as they were a century ago, when Chinatown was set.
With the decline of local reporting, few media outlets take the time to track down public records, which are sometimes jealously guarded by government agencies. As a result, public awareness tends to be shaped by scattershot probes by larger media outlets or investigative agencies, by baseless social media claims, or by selective official news releases that may conceal as much as they reveal. The irony is that in an era of seemingly endless information, the public is still prone to finding out only what others want them to know. Determination is required to ferret out hidden truths.
The United States has the most liberal open records laws in the world, yet those laws are full of loopholes that officials have become increasingly adept at exploiting. The difference between the U.S. and a nation like China, which manipulates or limits access to public information, is significant, but it is a matter of degrees. In many cases, even simple public records queries result in dead ends.
A case in point involves Joseph Spring, the subject of numerous episodes of this newsletter, who was highlighted in local news reports during the three weeks that he was on the run from the Hinds County, Mississippi jail, after which he receded into the shadows. My subsequent efforts to research Spring’s criminal history illustrate the contemporary difficulties of accessing public records, including those that could prove troublesome for the criminal justice system.
Spring, a habitual house burglar, has been in and out of jail for much of his adult life, and now, at age 32, is inclined to talk publicly about his experiences, including about what he claims is corruption within the state’s criminal justice system. He is knowledgeable about the machinations of that system and has spent decades testing its limits and observing its inner workings at close range. He knows things that we do not know. But in my efforts to verify or otherwise cross-reference Spring’s claims, I have encountered numerous institutional roadblocks. The Mississippi Department of Corrections has not allowed me to conduct in-person interviews with Spring, and other agencies have thwarted records queries into his criminal history and investigations into his escape. There is no way to know, at this stage, whether these denials of access are telling, but they are representative of an approach in which agencies treat the administration of the public’s business as, basically, none of the public’s business.
Some of the stumbling blocks have been comparatively minor attempts at stifling public review, such as the untruthful claim of a staffer in the Hinds County Circuit Clerk’s office that a person’s criminal history is not a public record. In another case, the U.S. Department of Justice used impenetrable bureaucratic protocols to deny access to documents related to the investigation into Spring’s eventual recapture. As the parent agency of the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, the Department of Justice is necessarily secretive. How else could its agents infiltrate criminal networks and uncover wrongdoing? Yet secrecy can also be employed to shroud political chicanery or to cover up wrongdoing.
What happens at the lowest level is indicative of the way the system works all the way to the top. It is possible that DOJ and the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office, which likewise denied access to its investigative report into Spring’s escape, simply considered my queries unworthy of their time, but these are public records, and history shows that significant details are often contained in such otherwise mundane documents. Sometimes the official response is a lack of one. After initially approving an in-person interview with Spring at the Central Mississippi Correctional Facility, MDOC withdrew its approval and ceased further communication. The agency also charged an exorbitant $50 per page to copy routine public records of Spring’s incarceration – another way agencies frequently discourage public review. These activities may reflect nothing more than bureaucratic intransigence, but the effect is the same as if information were being intentionally concealed. The staff of Hinds County Circuit Judge Faye Peterson meanwhile failed to provide access to records related to Spring that are under the court’s purview.
This paradigm makes it difficult to determine how public agencies respond to cases involving obvious public threats, as when I was caught up in a high-speed chase on an interstate highway in Mississippi’s capital city, Jackson. The chase involved a getaway car and an unmarked pickup truck with a blue light bar that passed vehicles on the road shoulder at speeds which clearly exceeded 100 mph, endangering everyone nearby, yet no local law enforcement agencies I queried claimed the unmarked pickup as their own. To even ask DOJ about the U.S. marshals’ possible involvement required creating a complicated, password-protected online account, after which the agency notified me that I would need signed permission statements from the perpetrators to review the records – a Catch 22 because I had no other way to find out their names. My follow-up queries were ignored.
Though these sorts of institutional obstacles are increasingly common nationwide, they have a long history in the American South. In their book The Race Beat, journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff noted the degree to which press freedom was restricted in the region during the civil rights era through media blackouts, harassment of journalists, the dissemination of fake news and restricted access to public officials and records. More recently, the Mississippi Legislature adopted a rule exempting all of its contracts from scrutiny after the news site Mississippi Today submitted a routine records request. A Mississippi Today reporter was covering a story about the legislature’s hiring of a private firm to revamp the state’s controversial educational funding program, and after she filed an official request for the contract, a legislative committee passed the rule exempting such contracts from the state’s open records law.
“Even legislators could only view the documents – they couldn’t copy them or share them,” the reporter, Kate Royals said. Royals then queried the state attorney general, who informed the committee that the rule was illegal. The rule was subsequently rescinded and Royals received a copy of the contract. Few reporters today are likely to be as persistent as Royals was, with the result that such institutional roadblocks often go unchallenged. Royals noted that the governor’s office had also simply ceased responding to requests for comment from Mississippi Today following a reporter’s pointed question about state poverty statistics in a census report.
My introduction to Spring and his criminal backstory was serendipitous and complex: First, I was a wary resident of the area he roamed while he was on the run. Next, I was a journalist covering the story. More recently, I have become a de facto advisor on a book that he is crafting about his experiences. As a result, there seemed no simple answer when a state corrections agency staffer asked my connection to him. I am often asked this kind of question when I request public records. Sometimes it stems from basic curiosity, but in other cases the clerk is looking for a way to assess my agenda or to thwart my request. Often I am told that I have no right to the information, which a less experienced person might accept as true.
In addition to being a writer, I work as a political opposition researcher, roaming courthouses and other records repositories across the United States, digging up dirt on politicians. My research partner and I are frequently asked, pointedly, “Who are you with?” Our response, which became the title of our book on the topic, is always: “We’re with nobody.” Legally, you do not have to be with anyone in America to gain access to public records, with occasional exceptions. When it comes to visiting prison inmates like Spring, the Mississippi Department of Corrections does have full administrative discretion, so the staffer’s question was legit.
Spring’s story taps a fairly low-level strata of Mississippi’s criminal justice system, but it is illuminating of the whole. My interactions with the Hinds County Sheriff’s Office illustrate that public records sometimes run counter to official proclamations and in other cases are subject to being withheld for unknown reasons. The chief records clerk at the sheriff’s office told me that the investigators’ report about Spring’s escape would not be released, that it was provided only to the circuit clerk and to Judge Peterson’s court. A staffer in the circuit clerk’s office told me the records were held only by Peterson’s office, or, more likely, by her court reporter. Court reporters are typically private, contractual positions, which means the records had been moved one step further from the public realm.
A Peterson staffer said she would call me back with the court reporter’s contact information, but never followed through. After numerous follow-up phone calls and emails, a different staffer said he would send me the court reporter’s contact info, but likewise did not do so. When I finally reached him again, he said the delay was the result of a recent hacking of the county’s computer system. He then gave me the email address of the court reporter, who did not respond to multiple messages. The staffer himself did not respond when I emailed to inform him that the court reporter had not replied to my queries. At this point, I found myself in a bureaucratic box canyon. There were no potential repercussions for any of the public employees involved. They simply ignored my queries.
What is surprising about the intransigence of Peterson’s staff is that she has been portrayed as someone who strives to increase public access, including by live-streaming certain court proceedings during the pandemic. It seems unlikely that her staff is intentionally trying to conceal the records; more likely, they consider my requests insignificant when they are busy working on big cases such as a multimillion-dollar state welfare scandal. But the effect is the same: Potentially illuminating public records are inaccessible. The documents do not belong to them, nor to the court reporter. They are public.
After his recapture, Spring was transferred from the Hinds County jail to the state’s Central Mississippi Correctional Facility. Since his attorney put me in touch with him by phone, Spring and I have spoken numerous times using a commercial inmate phone service that has a contract with the state – the only available means, which carries hefty fees. Spring has had a lot to say, including about the corrections system, and felt it would be useful to talk in person, when he could speak more freely than over easily monitored phone calls. He also has questions of his own. While writing his book, Spring is trying to navigate the publishing world and is interested in whatever guidance I might offer, given that I have published nonfiction books.
As I set out to arrange a visit at the prison, I found my way through MDOC’s labyrinthine phone system to a staffer who, I was told, handled applications for inmate visits. When I told her I was a journalist, she said I would need special approval and referred me to a media liaison, who directed me to Leo Honeycutt, an aide to Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain. According to Honeycutt, anyone could apply to visit but an official media interview would be a special case subject to approval by the commissioner.
So, I got back in touch with the original staffer and followed the routine procedure for applying to visit an inmate, assuming that if I were denied permission to do an official interview I might at least be allowed to advise Spring on his book project. Because Spring was considered a flight risk he was being held in close custody, and as a result, the staffer informed me, he could receive visitors only on the fifth Saturday of the month. This seemed an odd stipulation, given that not every month has a fifth Saturday, but that month (September 2023) did, which meant there were a few days available for processing my application before the window closed. The next opportunity would be the end of December 2023. As the visitation day approached, I was unable to reach the staffer or anyone else to find out whether my application had been approved. It began to look like the visit was not going to happen, even if I was willing to meet with Spring only as a friend to his nascent book. Then, late in the day on the Friday before the visitation day, I managed to get through and the staffer informed me that my application had been approved. That was it. I did not know whether Honeycutt had facilitated this (it turned out he had not), but it was welcome news.
Perhaps 30 minutes later, the staffer called back to say the visit was cancelled. Spring, she said, could not receive visitors because he was housed in what was known as Section 6, a maximum security unit. She offered no explanation for why she had previously told me that he could have visitors on the fifth Saturday of the month, nor why, if he could not receive visitors, my application to visit him had been approved. So, I reached out to Honeycutt to see if he could help sort this out. By the close of the business day I had not heard back. Honeycutt did return my call after hours, though I missed his call. When I texted back to explain what had happened and to ask his advice, he peppered me with questions. Who had approved my visit? He wanted names. I had assumed everyone was aware of my application because I had followed official channels as they were described to me. By this point, I was fine with limiting my conversation with Spring to discussing his book idea. He and I could continue our official interview – including about potentially sensitive topics -- by phone or through the mail. Spring had originally suggested that I approach Commissioner Cain directly about helping him with his book, and said he planned to write Cain a letter in hopes he would embrace the idea of an inmate embarking upon a new career as an author.
Now, Honeycutt informed me that the process should have started with Cain, not the staffer to whom I had been referred, who, I hasten to add, had led me to him. I asked if we could then backtrack and get Cain’s permission, so I might proceed with the interview as well as advise Spring on his book. I also asked whether it was true that inmates held in Section 6 could not receive visitors. Honeycutt did not respond to those questions in his subsequent texts. Instead, he asked for a copy of my visitor application, which I had already submitted to his agency. In his words, “There’s a piece here I’m not understanding. I still wouldn’t be averse to you talking to him but I can’t give that approval unless the Commissioner okays it.” I did my best to fill in the blanks for him, and provided a scan of my visitor application, but noted that, to borrow his phrase, there were several pieces that I likewise did not understand.
Two weeks later, I am still awaiting a response from Honeycutt. I like to think that Cain, who has a long history in corrections, would find Spring’s story interesting and informative. Cain came to his position as a reformer. The state of Mississippi had sued 10 people and 15 corporations in 2017 to recoup more than $800 million in state money lost in a seven-year prison bribery scandal. Defendants in the lawsuits included former Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps and former Republican state House Member Cecil McCrory, who with four others pleaded guilty to their involvement in the conspiracy. Then-Attorney General Jim Hood argued in the lawsuits that multiple corporations, including prominent private prison contractors, paid millions of dollars in bogus “consulting fees” to people who used the money to pay bribes and kickbacks to Epps.
Obviously, it is not always wise to accept the official line.
Unfortunately, barring approval from Cain, I am back to communicating with Spring by phone and mail, while continuing to push public officials to provide those potentially illuminating, ostensibly public records.
Notes
Telephone queries, Mississippi Department of Corrections
Committee to Protect Journalists: What is the worst-case scenario?
Courthouse News Service: Mississippi Seeks $800 Million in Prison Bribery Scandal
I appreciate that. One more unexpected window that the story of Joseph Spring has opened.
Treating the public’s business as if it’s none of the public’s business. Absolutely nuts.
Good reporting!