The Lucasville Follies

With nine inmates and a guard murdered, a dozen correction officers held hostage, and an eleven-day siege laid on by nearly 2,000 law enforcement officers and National Guard troops, the prison riot last April at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, Ohio, rated as the longest and third-most lethal disorder in recent penal history, right behind the uprisings in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Attica, New York.

As a news story, Lucasville had to share the spotlight in the second week of the riot with the fiery climax to the stand-off in Waco, Texas. But for a week and a half, this tiny town of 1,600 souls located near the Ohio River at the northwestern edge of Appalachia had good reason to see itself as the center of the universe. Hundreds of news people from the national media and the papers and radio and TV stations in Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo, and Akron flocked to the area. Reporters prowled the streets of Lucasville and the surrounding Shawnee Hills, looking for relatives of anyone working in the prison. TV cameramen paid for standing room on nearby rooftops to get a clear shot of the rioting cellblocks. Some fifteen to twenty TV trucks were lined up along the road outside the prison, bouncing their signals off satellites to viewers back home. To accommodate all the stories, newspapers added hundreds of unbudgeted pages; TV stations went live for hours at a time -- one of them, WLWTn Cincinnati, canceling seven hours' worth of commercials to record the final surrender. Never in the state's history has an event been covered so relentlessly or so massively.

Or, as it turned out, so badly. For the coverage of Lucasville can serve as an epic case in point of just why the reputation of journalists has sunk so low. Glaring mistakes went reported as fact, and were never corrected. Reporters intruded upon the privacy of townspeople, trampling on the grief of families whose relatives had been murdered or held hostage. They vied for atrocity stories. They ran scary tales -- totally false, it was later found -- that spread panic and paranoia throughout the region. And in its general aggressiveness and error, the press ended up greatly hampering the effort to end the disorder peacefully, even in some instances posing a threat to the lives of the hostages.

"I was pretty embarrassed with our profession," says Bill Warnock, publisher of the twice-weekly Scioto County Community Common, which circulates to more than 40,000 households throughout rural southern Ohio and northern Kentucky. "They did everything we're told not to do -- run speculation and hearsay, print rumors. And they were all so backbiting with each other. I guess I'm too much from the country, but it seems like people in our profession did all they could to betray and embarrass themselves."

In terms of general intrusiveness, the worst offender was television news. At the start of the riot, which erupted shortly after 3 P.M. on Easter Sunday, a helicopter from one TV station flew so close to the prison that negotiators trying to end the uprising during its early hours could not make out the demands that inmates were yelling out over a bullhorn. On another occasion, WCMH of Columbus, much to the horror of law enforcement officials, went aloft in its own helicopter to televise a live shot of SWAT units that very minute crawling over cellblock roofs preparing to take up positions should the order come for an assault. In his voice-over report the correspondent blithely told viewers not to worry," because "the inmates are not watching this now because there is no electricity in there." Indeed the power had been cut off, but, as the authorities knew, many inmates could still follow the action on battery-operated sets, and so know exactly where the police were.

At one point in the middle of the riot, the governor's office and the director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, or DRC, had to step in and mediate a bitter squabble between two competing television stations over who should be allowed to go in and film the release of hostages, and under what conditions. "Managing the media was almost as difficult as it was dealing with some parts of the riot," says Reginald Wilkinson, director of the DRC. "The stations were fighting over things like the transponder, and whose logo was going to be shown. That stuff got in the way of us thinking about how to get this thing over."

In the gaffe and bad judgment department, Ohio's newspapers weren't far behind the TV people. In many dramatic cases, when news from official sources dried up, the option the press chose to exercise was to print rumors. "After a while we'd settled into this routine siege," says Bill Sloat, a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

"Well, there's not much news in a siege, so then the story began to become atrocities. Everybody had to have an atrocity." On day eight of the riot, for instance, as friends and family members were attending the funeral for a guard named Bobby Vallandingham, who had been murdered by the inmates, the Akron Beacon Journal ran a front-page story quoting an anonymous source as saying that the man had been mutilated, that his eyes had been gouged out, that his back, arms, and legs had been broken, and that his tongue had been cut out -- all untrue. The paper, which said it got the tip from a relative of a Lucasville guard who lived in northern Ohio, then refused to print a denial from the department director himself, who called to say that a preliminary autopsy had shown the story to be false. Two months after the riot ended, the paper finally printed a correction and apology. Even then, however, it requoted the anonymous relative, who stuck by his story.

Where the competition really heated up was in seeing who could come up with the most dead bodies. By day three it was known for certain that inmates had killed seven fellow prisoners, because those bodies had either been dragged out and left in the exercise yard or found inside the prison. Rumor had it, though -- among the prison staff, their family members, and just about anyone you could find to talk to in Lucasville -- that a lot more dead bodies were still inside. Six days into the riot, The Plain Dealer, a Newhouse paper, ran a front-page story quoting anonymous "legislative and law enforcement sources" as saying that "at least 19 more people lie dead inside the Lucasville prison ... . "The story also quoted one "high-level official" of the DRC as saying, "There were some pretty barbarous mutilations of the dead....

The truth is ... [officials] are deliberately sitting on it to not incite a loud outcry from the public."

The paper was dead wrong on the number; but one reason it ended up so far out on a limb was that the news desk back in Cleveland had begun to second guess its troops in the field. "It was terrible; I was ready to go home because the people in Cleveland became experts overnight," recalls Sloat, one of the few Ohio reporters who had covered a prison riot before, in Florida, as well as the war in Bosnia. "Rumors we had heard in Lucasville earlier in the week began to seep up two-hundred miles away into Cleveland, and we'd have to check them out all over again. They would hear that the riot was pre-planned or that the prisoners had stockpiled food for months to have this riot, or how about the extra hostage they came up with from the Cleveland area that we had to convince them was not a hostage. The bodies. They were told there were more bodies. There was tremendous pressure to confirm nineteen."

As wrong as it was, The Plain Dealer story was pretty conservative compared to one printed earlier in the week by the Daily Times in Portsmouth, a Thompson paper published out of the county seat, ten miles south of Lucasville. "Rumors of more deaths than officially reported dominated the landscape Tuesday," the paper wrote in an off-lead story. "Callers from inside the prison told Daily Times staffers that anywhere from 50 to 150 bodies were in the prison gymnasium." The story then went on for two columns of general riot coverage with no more mention of the bodies or how the mysterious callers knew of their existence.

Not to be outdone, a day or two later Phil Hayes, a correspondent for WCMH, the NBC affiliate in Columbus, came up with a grand total of 172 bodies - a truly astounding figure since this would have meant that, with about 400 inmates known to be inside the riot-tom blocks, nearly half the rioters had been murdered by the other half. As proof of his story, Hayes trotted out in front of the camera a woman who said that she was the friend of an inmate and that she had gotten the figure of 172 from prison guards. It soon became obvious that what she had heard was not a "body count" but a "head count" taken of inmates in one of the blocks not involved in the riot at all. In the breathless rush of its coverage, however, the station never bothered to advise viewers of its error.

Spreading erroneous information can create problems in any situation, but the false accounts about Lucasville nearly proved lethal. Responding to the stories of carnage they were getting from the media, citizens throughout Ohio were deluging the office of Governor George Voinovich with calls to storm the prison. Never mind that the head of the state police had calculated that an assault would result in the death of all the hostages, plus that of many inmates and SWAT team members he feared would end up shooting one another in the chaos. The governor's mail, according to his press secretary, Mike Dawson, was running 100 to 1 to use force.

Down in Lucasville, the tales of high body counts were not only rattling the negotiators from the FBI, state police, and the DRC, who were talking to rioting inmates over a phone line; they were also compromising the effort to end the riot peacefully. "My negotiators were on pins and needles because of the stories," says David Michael, a Dayton police detective and also a hostage-negotiation specialist, who was called to Lucasville to help supervise the talks. "They were scared to death to go home at night because the word had gotten around that so many people had died in there. It got around to the tactical people, it got around to the command people running the situation, who were thinking, 'Are we missing something? Here these people are fooling around, playing negotiators when all these people are dead in there.' Well, the negotiators got to thinking it might be their fault." At one point, according to Michael, a SWAT team became so unnerved over the body stories, and by not being allowed to go in anstop the killing, that the prison warden, Arthur Tale, actually had to lock them up inside the prison.

While the coverage was breeding general hysteria outside the prison, the inmates had become convinced that the stories were being planted by the prison administration to lay the political groundwork for an armed attack. Even tiny errors of fact, according to Detective Michael, were interpreted by the prisoners as part of a deliberate plan. They were greatly upset, for instance, over newspaper stories that said that inmates had "tossed" or "thrown" the murdered guard's body out a second floor window, when in fact they had carried it out on a mattress and laid it on the ground -- still dead, but, to their way of looking at it, treated with some respect.

Indeed, the rioters delayed their final surrender until they could do something to soften their image. "The inmates were unhappy that the media was reporting them in a way that made them seem to be monsters," says Niki Schwartz, a lawyer from Cleveland who was called in by the DRC to serve as the inmates' attorney during the final four days of the riot. "The reports of bodies 'stacked up like cordwood,' guards having been mutilated -- they felt those things they knew to be false had been planted by the state to make them look bad." Before agreeing to the final terms, the three inmate negotiators Schwartz was dealing with made him call a press conference to try to counter some of the negative publicity - to little avail, as it turned out. "One of the things I said to the media was I felt the inmate negotiators were acting very responsibly in terms of their desire to negotiate a peaceful resolution to this; they had gone without food, for instance, so the guards could eat. And the place just erupted: 'How n you call these rioting, guard-murdering so-and-sos responsible? Rrr. Rrr. Rrr.'"

To be sure, one reason the press was tempted to run rumors was that the corrections department released very little real information. Aware that everything its spokespeople told the press would get right back to the inmates on radio or TV, possibly gumming up the bargaining strategy being employed by the negotiators, the department often chose to say nothing at all. In their daily briefings to packed press conferences outside the prison walls, corrections p.r. people often infuriated the reporters by reading short statements, then refusing to take questions. In at least one case, a press spokesman literally ran away from reporters trying to get him to clarify something he'd said,

It's a generic truth, of course, that few government bureaucrats loathe and distrust the press more intensely than do prison administrators. But in Ohio the problem was compounded by the fact that Arthur Tate, the Lucasville warden, harbored similar feelings toward his own p.r. operatives, who were kept out of earshot when major decisions were discussed. Thus, the p.r. people often couldn't tell reporters anything because they didn't know much themselves. "I wanted us to have regular briefings even if there was nothing to say, because I believe we cannot not communicate," says Sharron Kornegay, the chief press spokeswoman for the DRC and a former reporter for the Chicago Sun Times and Newsweek. "He [Tate] and others in the command center, they didn't see the need to do that.... So for me to come in and say, 'We've got to do a briefing,' I think I was perceived as a nuisance." Back at the state capital in Columbus the department also dragged its heels in responding to Freedom of Information requests and rused altogether to release the names of the guards held hostage or details about the inmates who appeared to be the riot leaders.

While not getting much in an official way, the press still couldn't seem to get itself organized enough to take things on an off-the-record basis either. At one point, negotiator David Michael and his partner, Sergeant Frank Navarre, appeared in the press area and volunteered to explain what was happening in the talks, so long as they could speak off the record. "I said to myself, 'I'm going to go out there and be honest with them,'" Michael recalls. "I wanted to first off give a little information on the negotiation process that the whole world didn't need to know. And I also wanted to tell them, 'Let's don't generate falsehoods, let's not put things like 150 bodies in, because it's going to cause people in here to panic.' So I said, 'Please, no pictures, no pencils, no photographs.'"

He vividly remembers what happened next: "One guy down in front says, 'Well, if you say something, I'm going to write it down.' Someone else says, 'If he's going to write it down, I'm going to take a picture of you.' Another says, 'Well, if he's going to take a picture, I'm going to take a video.' That was it, I was stuck. I talked for just a few more minutes and told them I was through and turned around and walked away. They even grabbed at my coat, physically grabbed it. 'Hey, hey,' I'm telling them."

When it came to knocking down the atrocity stories, state officials faced the difficult task of having to prove a negative, of demonstrating convincingly that the bodies didn't exist.

And in the eyes of some editors, the burden became not for the press to prove a story was true but for the state to show it was false. "The media is going to get out all the information they can get," says Gary Abernathy, managing editor of the Daily Times in Portsmouth. "And if the state doesn't do its job of shooting it down, it's going to keep on feeding on itself."

Referring to his paper's 150-body "scoop," Abernathy says, "although it turned out to be wrong, most media felt it was a safe mistake to make, because if you're wrong, who's hurt? The best argument about who's hurt is family members of prisoners who don't know if their family members are alive or dead. Otherwise, you're not naming names, you're not saying that Joe Smith or Bill Jones are dead. You're saying 150 unnamed, faceless inmates in there are dead. No one's going to be able to come back later and say, 'Gee you were wrong, and we're going to Sue you.'"

One of the papers that covered the riot more conscientiously was the Gannett-owned Cincinnati Enquirer, which threw more than a dozen reporters and editors into the story. "One of the things we worried about from the very first was making mistakes," says Ben Kaufman, who normally covers the federal courts but worked as one of the lead reporters on the riot. "Those of us with any history at the Enquirer knew we had blown some major stories in the past" -- and getting a large amount of egg on its face in the bargain. In 1977 there was the disastrous Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, which killed 164 people. The Enquirer more or less dropped the story after a day or so, whereas The Courier-Journal sent reporters 100 miles up from Louisville and one of its reporters walked away with a Pulitzer Prize for the thoroughness of his effort. Ditto in 1988, when a drunk driver plowed into a church bus in nearby Carrollton, Kentucky, killing twenty-sev people. Again the Enquirer gave it only token coverage, and again stories in The Courier-Journal won a Pulitzer. "With Lucasville," says Kaufman, "we wanted to do this story right."

Unlike The Plain Dealer, whose desk people back in Cleveland were putting the lash to reporters on the scene, the Enquirer let those in the field call the shots. "Instead of being pushed to get what other people had," says Kaufman, whose only experience inside a prison had been to do a feature story about a Jewish chaplain, "we were told what the other papers were running and it was up to us to verify it or discard it. They said, 'If it's there get it, but if you believe you don't have it we don't want you to write it.'"

Although no one on his staff had covered a major prison riot before, the Enquirer's executive editor, Larry Beaupre, had. As a young reporter working for the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle back in 1971, he was sent down to cover the four-day Attica uprising, and the experience taught him an important lesson -- that what you hear is often at great variance with what's actually happening. Right after the Attica riot ended, in the appalling deaths of thirty-nine hostages and inmates, Beaupre remembers being taken aside by the head of public information for the New York State Department of Corrections and on a not-for-attribution basis given an exclusive, inside account of exactly how the guard hostages had been murdered by the inmates. "He gave me the goriest description of how they saw the knives going through the throats and blood spurting out, and I filed a story based on that." Fortunately for Beaupre, it never ran. At the same time he was being fed the atrocity story, two other Democrat and Chronicle porters were in the medical examiner's office collecting evidence that the hostages had not died at the hands of inmates at all, as the state was putting out, but had been shot in error by state troopers during their assault on the prison. The resulting expose won the reporters a Pulitzer Prize.

"In Lucasville we were hearing the same rumors everyone else was," says Beaupre. "But when we pressed one of these local sheriffs about how he really knew, well, his nephew or brother or cousin or somebody who was a guard had heard it from someone. So even the responsible person who should know, it turned out he didn't know either."

The riot also posed an ethical question for reporters: To what degree should they allow themselves to become players in the event -- and, finally, to be used by both the authorities and the rioting inmates to achieve their various ends? From the first day of the uprising, the inmates were so frightened over the possibility of reprisals by the Lucasville guards that they wanted press coverage of every meeting they had with the prison staff. For their part, the negotiators held back the press as a bargaining chip, dangling reporters in front of prisoners' noses as a way to pry out the release of some of the hostages. On day two of the riot, Michael Sangiacomo of The Plain Dealer was chosen by lot to fulfill an inmate demand that a reporter talk with them over the phone line being used by prison negotiators. The deal, as it was explained to Sangiacomo, was that there would be two phone calls -- one, during which he would just identify himself as a reporter, and a second, during which he could actually talk tan inmate.

Says Sangiacomo: "I was told, 'Identify yourself and let the guy on the other end of the line talk for the briefest time and, when we indicate, you have to hang up. A lot of lives are hanging in the balance, so, if you can't follow our rules, whatever happens is going to be on your head.'" In the event, the negotiator dialed up the inmate and Sangiacomo got on the line and identified himself. "The inmate then started right away to list their demands -- 'Here is what we want' -- and the negotiator is telling me, 'Hang up! Hang up! Hang up!' I hated it. Every instinct I had was saying, 'Don't hang up. Don't hang up.' All they had wanted me for was to prove to the inmates that they had done what they said they could do [which was to produce a reporter]. I understood that. I didn't like it. I was still hoping to get an interview. But on the other hand I didn't want to be the cause for any screwing up." In the end, Sangiacomo didn't get his interview during a second call either, since negotiations subseently broke down and the call never took place.

Opinions vary over whether reporters should willingly become bargaining tools, often depending on how deadly are the stakes involved. Many would argue, however, that if reporters end up serving the interests of either side they should take themselves out of the action journalistically. In the case of Attica, for instance, when, at the inmates' request, Tom Wicker, then an associate editor at The New York Times, joined the team trying fruitlessly to end the riot peacefully, he removed himself as a reporter covering the story. Sangiacomo, on the other hand, played a slightly different role, and he stayed on as one of his paper's major correspondents, on the last day again going into the prison as part of the official media team requested by the inmates to observe the surrender.

The more local the press, the more difficult it became not to choose sides, and no one certainly was going to line up with the inmates. When the National Guard troops appeared on the scene, for instance, the Scioto County Community Common went out and bought 5,000 three-by-five-foot sheets of cardboard and some magic markers, so the boys could fashion targets and sharpen up their marksmanship.

The news person most intimately involved in the uprising was also the one who had the least problem with cooperating with the authorities. Frank Lewis has been a radio man for thirty-three years, the last thirteen at WPAY-FM out of Portsmouth -- "100,000 Watts of Power Country." The station's popularity among inmates prompted the Ohio State Patrol to request that Lewis clear all his news stories before airing them, on the ground that they might in some way affect the negotiations. "We kicked it around and determined that was what we were going to do," says Lewis, the station's general manager who doubles as a disc jockey and political commentator, taking conservative jabs at President Bill Clinton, liberal members of Congress, and just about anyone from the Cleveland area. His decision to cooperate rankled him later, however, partly because he often couldn't locate his state police censor in time to get permission to run stories being given out routinely to the rest of the media, and partly because his stion came up with some pretty good exclusives, which it had to keep mum about. After the guard's murder on day five the station learned that the authorities had secured tape-recorded confirmation that the rest of the officers were still alive and comparatively well. At the request of the police, however, Lewis held off reporting this, lest the story in some fashion jeopardize the safety of the remaining guards. That was a little wrenching, admits Lewis. "We knew the families would have loved to have heard their men were alive. But we were so afraid that if we jumped the gun on it that they would panic inside, and maybe take another life."

Lewis was also the first broadcaster the state used in a trade of free airtime for the release of a hostage. On his way into the prison, Lewis had to sign a waiver promising not to sue should anything happen to him during the broadcast. (In fact, he was mildly teargassed while passing near a cell block where the state police were discouraging a group of unruly inmates from joining the main riot.) Finally, he was led out to the exercise yard next to L-Block gymnasium -- the one that housed all the phantom bodies -- where the prison staff snaked his microphone and cord through the chain link fence and razor wire to a table in the middle of the yard. Soon an inmate appeared from the door of the cell block, and with him came one of the hostages, his head covered with a piece of cloth. On his way across the yard, the inmate removed all his clothes to show he carried no weapons, sat down naked at the table, and, while Lewis watched from the other side of the fence, started talking into the open mike. "Occasionly," says Lewis, "he would yell back to the cell block, 'Are you hearing me, brothers?'" After about fifteen minutes, during which the inmate threatened that more hostages would be harmed unless the demands were met and a few choice words escaped over the airwaves into the Bible-belt region of Ohio, "motherfuckers" being among them, the prisoner rose from the table and returned to the cellblock, leaving the freed hostage to be collected by the authorities.

Fairly drained by the ordeal, Lewis emerged from the prison, having now to give his own press conference in front of a clamoring horde of news people, and the next day he showed up on NBC's Today Show to tell it all again. His station also took considerable flak for giving free airtime to rioting convicts; but, clearly, Lewis would do it all again if given the chance. "What I learned more than anything through all this is, it's certainly not hard to make a decision on whether you're going to have journalistic integrity or save a life," he says. "I'm sure there are some news agencies around the world who would consider that a hard decision. That was not a hard decision on my part." In appreciation for his effort, at year's end the Southern Ohio Officers Association voted him "Honorary Correction Officer of the Year."

After it was all over, after the prison was cleaned up and rioting inmates had been shifted at their request to other prisons in the state so as not to run up against the Lucasville guards, came the inevitable blizzard of after-action reports. The DRC issued a rundown on what had happened; the guards' union came out with a report, mostly critical of the prison administration; the governor's office produced a list of intended reforms; and the DRC responded with another report on how these were being implemented.

For its part, the Ohio press establishment also issued a report. It was not, as might have been expected, a self-examination of how the media managed to get things so fouled up. Rather it was one commissioned by the Ohio governor's office, wherein media representatives were to provide a critique of the state's information policies and to recommend changes. Not all the state's big papers chose to become involved in what was called the Media Task Force, among them the Toledo Blade and The Plain Dealer. "I'm dubious about such undertakings," says Dave Hall, editor of The Plain Dealer. "I'm worried about getting into making sort of press-government compacts about what is the right way to get a story. There's always going to be a situation like this, between what a newspaper is demanding and what a state authority feels it can give out. Where we had trouble getting stuff, we reported it."

Along with considering various ideas for better educating the state's p.r. people -- one suggestion was to inflict workshops on them where they would role-play with journalism professors -- the task force spent a lot of time this past January discussing whether state agencies should do things like provide portable toilets at the site of riots and other disasters, along with a "hot food and drink area, depending on the length of the emergency." This latter suggestion prompted one task force member, Frank Hinchey, state editor of The Columbus Dispatch, to testily remind his fellow task force members: "Look, it's not as if we're covering a golf tournament here!"

In the end, the task force also got some advice it didn't particularly want to hear. One witness brought down from Cleveland was Niki Schwartz, the inmates' lawyer, who won praise even from law enforcement officials for his effort to end the riot. Because of his background as a prisoners' rights advocate and his strong civil liberties approach to law, the task force had clearly wanted from Schwartz some words of support for more open press access to prison records in times of a crisis. "For instance," Schwartz recalls, "they'd wanted the files of the inmate negotiators, so presumably they could publish that Joe Dokes was a rapist and murderer."

Schwartz replied that, in his opinion, such stories would not only have further increased public pressure to storm the prison but would also have caused the inmates to reconsider their determination to surrender. "I told them that I started out wanting to be a journalist, and as a lawyer and citizen I'm devoutly committed to the First Amendment," he says. "But if the media had gotten some of this stuff and used it the way I suspect they wanted to use it, it would have inflamed passions down there, increased the pressure to go in with an Attica-style solution. The inmates, if the press had dug the bad stuff out of the files, would have regarded it as a hostile act on the part of the state, and it could well have queered the deal and prevented the development of a higher rapport, which you needed to end it peacefully."

One question the task force failed to ask itself was why, in the welter of all their coverage, none of the newspapers or TV stations produced more than an isolated story here and there about the "other side" of the riot -- namely, what it was like to be imprisoned in Lucasville and why the inmates would commit themselves to so desperate and futile an outburst.

As is common throughout the country, none of the Ohio papers has a reporter assigned exclusively to the prison beat. And what coverage the press gives the prisons usually amounts to once-over-lightly feature stories or stories from state capital correspondents based on the dry bones of prison lawsuits. "It was a problem before Lucasville started and now that the riot's all over, the problem's back: nobody in the media gives a shit about the prisons," says Peter Wray, director of public affairs of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represents the state's correction officers. "I spend lots of hours begging people to cover this or that story -- how last year Ohio had the most overcrowded prisons in the country, the terrible problem of understaffing -- and every time I call a paper it seems I'm talking to someone else. It's very frustrating, always having to bring them up to speed on the issues, and then they disappear."

Thus, no paper in the state possessed the contacts it would have required to write a truly vivid account of life behind the Lucasville wall, as opposed to the occasional gee-whiz account based on an interview with an ex-inmate. When, for instance, the DRC finally allowed the prisoners to make their twenty-one demands public, no one was more surprised than the reporters at how eminently reasonable seemed the issues that drove so deadly a disorder. Demand Number 2 asked that disciplinary proceedings against inmates "be fairly and impartially administered without bias against individuals or groups"; Number 11, that medical staffing be brought into compliance with national correctional standards.

"I looked at those demands," says Ben Kaufman of the Enquirer, "and I could not understand people being willing to die for a 'review of commissary prices' or a phone call. Had we known about those demands earlier, I know I would have had a greater respect for the inmates because of their plight. Those of us who have never been in a prison have no idea what it's like, and that would have put a human face on what became a white-hat versus black-hat, get-the-guards-out-alive-and-God-help-everybody-else kind of story."

Maybe so. But while a more intimate acquaintance with prison life would certainly have improved coverage, the basic flaw at Lucasville was the media's willingness -- even eagerness -- to assert as fact things it did not know to be true.

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