PRAIRIE VILLAGE, KS — “Had the World-Herald not broken the story, nothing would have happened.”
So said Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers at a dramatic Sept. 4 hearing on a scandal that has rocked the state’s Department of Corrections, spurred litigation and criminal investigations against state officials, become a political football in the governor’s race, and disrupted the lives of hundreds of convicts.
The reverberations followed a June investigative report by the Omaha World-Herald that revealed corrections officials had released dozens of convicts, many with violent records, too early after miscalculating their release dates. The scandal has shed light not only on bureaucratic misdeeds and incompetence, but also on the state’s acute prison-overcrowding crisis and on the mandatory-minimum regime that has helped create it.
It all began in the halls of an Omaha courthouse in May, when World-Herald courts reporter Todd Cooper happened to run into prosecutor Katie Benson.
“She was red-faced and fuming,” Cooper told me in an interview last week. “I said, ‘What’s the problem?’ She said, ‘Do you remember the 20’s shooter?’”
Benson was referring to Quentin Jackson, who had been convicted in a nonfatal shooting at an Omaha nightclub three years before.
“He’s out,” Benson told Cooper.
“I said, ‘What do you mean he’s out?’” Cooper recalled.
Cooper did some checking, and found that Jackson was out on a “day pass”—a “pre-parole parole”—that he was using to try to have his conviction vacated. A Corrections spokeswoman explained that Jackson qualified for the pass because he had less than three years left on his sentence; though Jackson had been sentenced to 14 to 15 years in prison, he was scheduled for release in 2017—after six years.
Cooper’s article about the day pass, he says, was a “pithy little smartass story about, ‘Why is this guy out?’” But after it was published, he kept digging. A judge pointed him to a 2013 state supreme court ruling laying out the rules for mandatory-minimum sentences like the one Jackson received. Inmates routinely get time off their sentences for good behavior and other factors. But it turned out that corrections officials had violated the court’s formula, and cut Jackson’s sentence by 2½ years.
Cooper went to his boss, metro-regional editor Cate Folsom, and told her he would have a story that weekend breaking the news of Jackson’s miscalculated sentence.
Still, “something didn’t feel right,” he said. He couldn’t shake the feeling this might not be an isolated case. So with support from Folsom and the help of colleague Matt Wynn, a “data guru,” Cooper plumbed the state’s online corrections database looking for other convicts whose scheduled release date came before their scheduled parole date.
What they found: The state had improperly cut years off the sentences of at least 200 prisoners; many had already been released, and others were set for early release. This, Cooper told me, was a conservative estimate. State officials would later revise the total to a whopping 873 prisoners, 306 of whom had already been released.
The consequences of the World-Herald’s report, published on June 15, were dramatic.
The Department of Corrections, contacted by the World-Herald a few days earlier, acknowledged that the newspaper’s reporting was correct (“I about fell out of my chair” upon hearing the admission, says Cooper) and went into “triage mode.” Two corrections officials retired in advance of being fired, and two others were suspended. Gov. Dave Heineman announced a criminal investigation. A special panel that had been formed to address prison overcrowding in the state turned its attention to the early-release scandal. The issue became a point of contention in the governor’s race.
The impact on prisoners was also far-reaching. Hundreds still in custody were told that they had been given incorrect early release dates and their jail time would be prolonged for years. Of the prisoners who had been prematurely released, some were already back in prison; others had had been out of jail long enough for their original sentences to elapse, and had not committed further crimes, so the attorney general determined they would remain free.
Some 20 to 25 remaining presumptive ex-cons, however, who thought they had served their time and put prison in the rearview, would be rounded up, beginning just 10 days after the World-Herald broke the original story. A few of those prisoners have filed lawsuits against the state challenging their re-incarceration, and others may do the same.
Cooper has watched the maelstrom that his reporting set into motion with mixed emotions.
“It’s been fascinating and sort of devastating all at once to see how many lives have been upended by this,” he says.
While Cooper describes many of the convicts who have seen their sentences lengthened or been re-imprisoned as “the worst of the worst,” he has sympathy for some. The common denominator among all of them is that they were convicted of crimes for which the state has enacted mandatory-minimum sentences over the decades. Many are violent offenders or child molesters. Others have been convicted of drug dealing and are carrying out sentences mandated by a statute passed decades ago, in the heat of the war on drugs.
The drug sentencing guidelines, Cooper says, “have been around the longest and probably need to be reexamined.”
One Nebraska publication, the McCook Gazette, went further in its analysis of the scandal, with a July 30 editorial casting part of the blame on mandatory minimums that have helped swamp the prison system.
“In too many cases, the Department of Corrections is asked to deal with prisoners sent to it more for political goals—laws enacted to make elected officials appear tough on crime—rather than to serve real justice,” the Gazette argued.
Mandatory minimums are among the factors that have contributed to overcrowding in prisons around the country. In Nebraska, the overcrowding situation is especially severe. The state’s prisons operate at 58 percent over capacity and at an ever-increasing cost for taxpayers.
“I think it’s clear that Nebraska’s system is one of the costliest per prisoner in the country and one of the most overcrowded in the country,” says Tyler Richard of the ACLU of Nebraska, which has issued reports warning about the state’s overcrowding problems, including one earlier this month in which inmates reported deteriorating conditions within the state’s facilities.
Given the stresses of overcrowding, bureaucratic snafus like the Nebraska scandal “can’t come as a complete shock,” says Ryan King of the Urban Institute, which has studied the overcrowding issue nationwide. “There are a lot of people flowing in and out of the system in a given year, and that’s a logistical challenge.”
State officials have denied that overcrowding caused the scandal, though recently uncovered emails from corrections employees suggest that concerns over crowding may have at least subtly influenced decisions within the department. The department’s former legal director, who was forced into retirement in the wake of the scandal, stunned observers at the Sept. 4 hearing when he admitted he had never read a 2013 court ruling laying out how to calculate the sentences until after the World-Herald broke the story in June.
“I think incompetence is the biggest factor” in the scandal, Cooper says. But, he adds, the problem of overcrowding was an “undercurrent that affected this. It was on everyone’s minds.”
The World-Herald, to its credit, has not ignored this larger aspect of the story, nor has it ignored prison overcrowding in the past.
And there will be plenty of opportunities to report on that angle, and the broader question of prison conditions, in the future. A national think tank has begun an assessment on how to reduce overcrowding in Nebraska’s prisons. Inmates have filed multiple lawsuits over conditions created by overcrowding, and the ACLU has promised to file suit if the legislature does not act. The civil liberties group’s latest report documents poor mental and physical health care, overuse of solitary confinement and restraints, and violent and noisy living conditions for inmates.
Cooper, for his part, says he wishes he had uncovered the sentencing scandal earlier, as there had been whispers about early releases for years. But he’s glad that he kept pursuing the issue rather than being satisfied with his initial “pithy little smartass story” about Quentin Jackson.
There’s a lesson for all journalists here, he says.
“If it doesn’t make sense, keep asking questions until it does make sense. And if it still doesn’t make sense, you may have a hell of a story on your hands.”
Deron Lee is CJR’s correspondent for Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska. A writer and copy editor who has spent nine years with the National Journal Group, he has also contributed to The Hotline and the Lawrence Journal-World. He lives in the Kansas City area. Follow him on Twitter at @deron_lee.