How prison reporting changed my heart

Reflections five years after a heart attack

Apr 15, 2023

Most people familiar with my work know that I focus on injustice in Alabama, but since I have many new subscribers (Hi y’all!) and because I just passed a major milestone in my health (5 years of survival after a heart attack), I wanted to share some of the ways that writing about Alabama prisons, and more specifically getting to know people INSIDE the prisons, intersected with my own personal and professional journey of trying to become a better human on this twirling rock.

I won’t go into detail about my heart attack here, but if you’re interested in reading about SCAD (the #1 cause of heart attack in women under 50) and my symptoms, diagnosis and subsequent treatment and recovery, I wrote a lengthy essay about all of it when I was still working in traditional media at WBRC.

I made the decision to no longer work as a TV news anchor and reporter the first night I spent in the hospital after my heart attack in 2018. I’d held various jobs at network and cable affiliates around the country for the better part of two decades, but by the time my heart staged a mutiny, I was seriously unhappy for many reasons. Removing myself from on-air work was an easy decision, like turning off a light, or in this case, flipping the switch from off to on.

I’d been uncomfortable in my career for a long time, but felt trapped by the golden hook of good earnings in a competitive field that made me feel special, chosen. If so many people wanted to work in TV news, what was I complaining about? I had a plum, well-paid position on the anchor desk and should make the best of it. I should be grateful. This circular conversation went round and round in my mind as I delivered the news, pretending all was well.

But all was not well.

So what was wrong? For one, I prefer longform journalism— researching a story, interviewing multiple sources, developing the narrative and constructing a thorough multi-media piece, all things that take time and TV news doesn’t like to give it. Volume takes priority over quality and creativity. One colleague joked that I was working in the wrong restaurant. “You want to cook a five-course, gourmet meal, and we’re slinging news burgers here,” he said.

I had become resentful of all the physical requirements to do my job— hair, makeup, outfits—a never-ending carousel of vigilance and effort that became more intense as I got older, plus TV news went to high-definition and the standards became sexier. For example, when I started off as a reporter in 1998, no women in TV news wore fake lashes. 20 years later, almost everyone was wearing fake lashes and tromping around in skin tight, sleeveless dresses and high heels, myself included.

(ONE OF THESE GIRLS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS—me today top left, surrounded by various forms of TV news me)

I not only felt like I was wearing a costume, but also that the real me underneath it was not enough, because that’s the literal message sent in an industry that dictates appearance down to the eyelash. All of it felt like a performance, one that I had no interest in attending let alone starring in—I still cringe when I recall the thousands of times I feigned interest in sports on live TV, smiling and nodding as the sports anchor talked, trying to mask my boredom and resentment.

Another factor fueling my discomfort was the over-reliance on crime reporting in daily news, and a particular bent to said crime reporting, namely, that it came almost exclusively from police. I’ve previously said publicly that I began referring to the nightly newscasts as a “mugshot parade,” because of the high story count on arrest reports, which consist of police statements and a mugshot of the accused—no context, no real questioning of the narrative. Forget innocent until proven guilty.

DISCLAIMER: This isn’t a knock against any particular TV station. My observations are based on 20 years in the industry, working at 6 different stations around the country.

But in 2012, I tapped into some personal mojo when I began covering the shit show inside the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), a system of prisons so overcrowded and violent that the U.S. Department of Justice (under President Trump!) sued the state, calling the conditions cruel and unusual punishment. Part of my reporting included cultivating sources inside the prisons, after I quickly realized that the people in charge were not telling the truth.

Then-ADOC Commissioner Kim Thomas told me the sexual abuse of women incarcerated at Tutwiler Prison was the result of a few “bad apples,” but the DOJ concluded that women had been raped and terrorized inside Tutwiler for a decade, with up to 30 percent of staff involved. Hardly a few bad apples. More like a giant tree of rotting fruit.

I began meeting with women who had served time at Tutwiler, the first time in my life I was proximate to justice-involved people. I went to the apartment of a woman named Summer who served several years for drug-related convictions. She described a horrifying environment in which women couldn’t say no to guards who made aggressive sexual advances.

“If you tell them no, you're just going to make your life a living hell,” she said.

(Interviewing Amy in 2014, who served time at Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women.)

I began to understand the power that state actors hold over incarcerated people, and how this dynamic is ripe for abuse. Summer struggled with substance use, but instead of providing help, the system took her away from her kids and put her in a dungeon where women were routinely abused and exploited. One woman named Amy told me prison staff routinely referred to the incarcerated population as “sluts and whores.” Another woman described getting groped in the shower by a leering officer, who then threatened to hurt her if she told. All of this reporting helped me explicitly recognize that the system harms people, then works to protect itself and bury that harm.

I began hearing from people inside the 14 prisons for men, and filing stories about surging deaths from suicide, overdose and violence. I remember the early letters I received from one man who wrote about his worries that the prison mail room would intercept his letters to me (they did), then retaliate against him for blowing the whistle on the administration’s corruption and ineptness (they didn’t, thank God). “I have to decide whether I can write to you without ruining my life,” he wrote.

I read those words, briefly baffled that this would be a concern for a man serving life in prison. Isn’t your life already ruined? I naively thought. Thankfully, he continued to write, sharing his story of growing up in prison, trying to be the best person he could be, despite his circumstances. I learned that he had built a life of purpose in prison— living in a faith/honor dorm that he helped launch and tirelessly advocating for prison libraries and literacy programs. He made me realize that a whole world was unfolding behind the walls of prison, entire lives completely outside the public view. And they aren’t ruined lives, many are beautiful examples of grace and redemption. They are all lives worth saving.

I had to get to know him and other incarcerated people before I truly recognized the great risk in communicating with me, a reporter who was exposing a system collapsing into chaos. I felt an incredible kinship with these fellow citizens who shared my goal of getting the truth out. I may have been powerless to protect them from the iron fist of the prison, but the work began to feel like a collaboration. One source named Greg left encouraging voice mails on my newsroom phone every time I filed a new prison story. “Beth Shelburne, you’re a mean woman,” he said (as a compliment) after a particularly contentious interview with a prison official. “Keep up the good work,” he said. “We appreciate you,” and I heard him.

I was on assignment to cover an educational program at the William E. Donaldson prison in 2015 when I had a *WTF moment in the parking lot. A sign posted on the prison’s exterior fence said DO NOT STOP AND TALK TO THE INMATES (it’s still there, btw). The message struck me as ridiculous and offensive, with a zoo-like connotation, as in “Do not feed the animals.” Journalists, lawyers, clergy, volunteers—lots of people go inside prisons to talk to incarcerated people. Why wouldn’t they want us to stop and talk to them? I squinted at the sign under the blazing sun, the prison yard behind it empty and still.

Screw that. I’m talking to them, I thought.

*WTF moments consist of dehumanizing, objectifying or infantilizing messages or actions made normal by the carceral state. I experience them every time I visit a prison, no matter the circumstances.

When I went inside I did, in fact, talk to several people who were trapped inside. One of them was Ronald McKeithen, who at the time had spent over 30-years in prison for a robbery and a handful of property crimes. The warden allowed me to interview Ronald, who goes by Ron, about the educational program, and we later struck up a correspondence. It was through Ron that I became obsessed with learning more about Alabama’s habitual felony offender law that imposed a mandatory life without parole sentence on Ron and hundreds of others for crimes that left no one physically injured.

Ron became the subject of my master’s thesis in creative writing, and I did a deep dive into this policy, trying to figure out how many people were impacted and why the state refused to let them go. When I defended my thesis in front of a faculty committee at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham), one of the committee members, Alison Chapman, suggested that my writing would be stronger if I included my own thoughts and feelings about the issues. “It seems like you’re holding back,” she said. “And I think you need to give yourself permission to write what you need to say.”

Five days later, I had a heart attack. In the months following that event, I became intimate with the teeth-chattering fear of a possible early death, the slow plodding of physical recovery and the piercing ache of recognizing my own impermanence. But Dr. Chapman’s words stood out like a beam lighting my way to the place I needed to go. And looking back, I know my proximity to people in prison helped me break out of my own cage.

I left WBRC and my career in traditional media the following year, and began regularly publishing reported opinion pieces and essays on the subject of mass incarceration. I also decided to engage in some advocacy, sharing my findings on Alabama’s habitual offender law with Carla Crowder at Alabama Appleseed. She began representing Ron McKeithen, who walked out of prison in 2020 and is now living his best life. Helping connect Ron to legal relief remains one of the best things I’ve ever done. If I stayed in the rut of my former career, I don’t think I would have felt it possible to involve myself in making such good trouble.

(Me & Ron at an event in 2022.)

By the time I understood that the criminal punishment system was a toxic harm machine, I’d been anchoring and reporting the news for 14 years. My privilege allowed me to exist in the world without any justice-involved friends and family, and my job amplified stories about the world that didn’t include perspectives of people in jail or prison. These two factors greatly impacted my attention, curiosity, thoughts and beliefs, but all were disrupted when I was confronted with the crisis inside Alabama prisons.

But this was less an intellectual process and more a deep dive into my own heart. My existential angst about a career I’d long outgrown needed more than new ideas, I needed to be gutted. My brain knew I needed to change, but the path only clearly presented itself while healing my broken heart.

I know the reporting I’ve done has allowed men and women in prison to feel seen and heard, but there is reciprocity, I also feel seen and heard by them. After years of feeling lost in the media machine, I found purpose and meaning in reporting these stories. And the people helping me inside the prisons quietly cheered me on, not pushing me to become someone else, but reminding me of who I have always been—a curious and compassionate human being with a big heart, searching for the truth.