Transcript of the audio:

I’ve been a journalist for most of my career, actually probably all of it, really. I’ve never stopped being one, but I spent 11 years also at The New York Times as an investigative reporter, a guy covering the war in Iraq from Baghdad, covering the military justice system, covering the state of Connecticut as its bureau chief of a one-man bureau. But my tour de force as a New York Times reporter, anyway, really happened in the first several years of this century when I spent a year covering and writing about jail and prison health care of all things.

Never had done it before but I was assigned by the metro section to cover Rikers Island as a beat. Rikers Island being the giant jail complex. Nobody had ever covered Rikers as a beat and so when I started reporting on it what I learned in the first several weeks of doing this job was that there had been a spike in Inmate suicides, which is just one of many really kind of gnarly subject matter that goes along with covering a jail as a beat.

And so I asked questions about like, why now? Why is this happening? And as it turned out, the way that suicide watch, as it’s called, works, or worked at least at the time on Rikers Island, is that if you’re on a suicide watch because you’re an inmate with, you know, a serious mental illness or desire to harm him or herself. You go into a cell with paper scrubs, nothing you can hurt yourself with, and then you’re watched by another inmate that’s paid 16 cents an hour, if I recall right. And that’s suicide watch at Rikers Island, at least it was then. And so it’s not hard to imagine how that system doesn’t work out very well.

So the spike in suicides preceded a number of stories I wrote for the New York Times where I was asking the New York City Health Department, which was in charge of health care for the inmates, all inmates in the city, most of whom, it should be said, in jails around the country, but certainly at Rikers.

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Jails are where people go before they’re convicted of anything. They’re arrested for something, they go to a jail, and they’re called pretrial detainees, so they aren’t Convicted of anything, but they’re waiting to see a judge and to appear in court. So the majority of people at Rikers are pretrial detainees.

And frankly, the majority of them have some kind of mental illness of some kind. It’s why a lot of people are in jail in the first place. And so it’s a very...it’s a, you know...it’s sort of a catch all, jail is, for what happens when people can’t cope. So when I started reporting on this, all of these stories came out, and what I eventually learned, which was the crux of the series, investigative series that I wrote for the Times, which took a year to report to the point where many of my newsroom colleagues at the Times thought I’d quit because they just didn’t see me.

They didn’t see my byline in the paper for a year. They didn’t see really me in the newsroom because I was either in Alabama or upstate New York or Florida, somewhere else where this company, called Prison Health Services, had a contract with a local government to provide jail healthcare.

And so what I learned was that New York City had changed the contractor that gives inmates healthcare in New York City. It used to be a charity of some kind, like a Catholic charity. I think it was St. Vincent’s Hospital that had the contract in New York City for inmate healthcare for decades.

But then something happened in the early 2000s where New York City was offered and took the offer by this company called Prison Health Services, based out of Tennessee, a for-profit company publicly traded at the time. And the company’s pitch was, we can save you 10% or 15% on what you’re paying now and we’ll give you better healthcare.

So a win-win. Well also, once again, you can see how that might not actually work out as planned. And so the company’s playbook was really to take the money that it was owed by contract from the city and then save money, serving its shareholders in the process. But the way they saved money was by cutting a lot of psychotropic drugs from the inmates and hiring cheaper people to work as nurses, physician assistants, doctors, replacing doctors with cheaper physician assistants, and so on. And what happened was you had more people being more sick. Spikes and suicides kind of went along with the business decision to cut back on healthcare and really put those screws down on the people who needed those psychotropics the most.

And so after, like I said, a year, I published one, two, and then three or four front-page stories in The Times within a couple of months period documenting just the serial abuses by this company, which clearly knew what it was doing and didn’t care. And whatever you think about people in jail, people in prisons, it’s not a very sympathetic cohort, for sure. But what I found in these documents—and I documented everything. I got paper trails, and I was interviewing people at the prison unions, meaning the correction officers’ unions, prison guards.

I was interviewing PHSs (the company’s, Prison Health Services’) own employees in Rikers Island and other places around the country because they were not very happy about what they were being asked to do. Of course, I talked to government officials, New York City’s Health Department, the department that runs the jail complex, Rikers Island in New York City.

They weren’t very happy with me because of what I was reporting. But people were dying because a company with shareholders was making decisions on purpose to cut short very expensive drugs that would keep these people alive or keep them out of the range of psychosis. And that series eventually was what The Times nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

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And I’m really proud of it because I reported the ever-living bejeezus out of that story. I mean, it was about 18,000 words total over the course of four front-page stories and several other follow-up, shorter stories. For every assertion in those stories, I had a document or an interview backing up, bulletproofing, the assertion so that there was no way the company could come and say, “This isn’t true.” And I had a paper trail for everything because, believe me, the company came after me and my reporting afterward and they wrote a, I think it was a 8- or 10-page memo claiming that I had gotten all of these facts wrong.

I wish I had the memo that I wrote in response, which I handed to the executive editor of The Times, Bill Keller, at the time. I took a week to rebut every last claim that the company had against my reporting. And I rebutted it with a document or with an interview—sort of incontrovertible evidence that they were full of shit. Utterly full of shit. On every last count. And I was really proud of that because I knew that if they could show that I’d gotten one thing wrong, or one and a half things wrong, they would say, well, that just shows that, you know, this reporting is flawed.

But it wasn’t. And I spent months making sure that every last assertion in the story had a factual basis that I could prove. Things have changed a little bit, unfortunately, but that’s the way I believe reporting should be and that’s what I hope people find in the reporting I do now.

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