Corrections in Ink: A Memoir

by Keri Blakinger

I had no idea where to start. I didn’t know anyone who’d done time in Texas prisons, and I didn’t know anything about how to start covering a beat. It was one thing to chase down a random lead every few weeks, file a few records requests to flesh out a particular story, or take care of an occasional jailhouse interview. But figuring out how to stay on top of something as big as the Texas prison system and as vast as the death penalty caseload in the killingest state—that was something else entirely. It would require trawling through the Chronicle archives to learn about the past, unraveling the twisting legal process for capital cases, finding guards who would give me the inside scoop on the state’s hundred-plus lockups, developing a network of reliable sources among the 145,000 prisoners in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Since I had no idea how to do that, I called Reuven. “Start-with-a-bunch-of-records-requests-ask-for-solitary-numbers-and-drug-testing-data-and-audits-of-their-prison-factories.” He paused. “Death-reports-and-contraband-stats-and-settlements-we-got-such-a-huge-trove-of-lawsuits-settlements-from-the-comptroller.” As soon as we got off the phone, I started filing. Now that I knew what to do, I wanted to dive in. That first night, I put in enough requests that I got a call from a bemused prison spokesman the next day. “I’m not sure we’ve ever gotten that many different records requests from one person in the same day,” he said, with a dry chuckle....