This is How I Report from Solitary Confinement

Reporting from prison is a lot like reporting from a war zone. You try to document what is happening around you while staying in survival mode yourself. You know that a single mistake can have irreversible consequences at the hands of those in power—including death.

Those risks are not abstract to me. In July 2024, without warning, a team of guards came to my cell, handcuffed me, and transferred me to solitary confinement. I have been there ever since. I had faced retaliation for my journalism before, but this punishment was by far the most severe.

The transfer came after I published a series of stories about brutal conditions inside Texas prisons. I wrote for outlets including the Houston Chronicle, Prison Writers, and Project Censored. I also spoke with WFAA, an ABC News affiliate, about what it was like to be incarcerated during the pandemic and denied essential health supplies.

Solitary confinement is not the only tool at a prison’s disposal. You can be written up, transferred, or have your communications restricted—all of which have happened to me. Your property can be destroyed, and you can be denied basic necessities. You can become the target of a smear campaign, labeled a “snitch,” and harassed by guards.

The danger does not stop with you. Your sources can become targets, too, which discourages them from speaking freely. Most incarcerated people and prison staff do not want to share information that could put them in prison leadership’s crosshairs. Prison has a culture of “hear no evil, speak no evil.” As a result, much of the reporting has to be done off the record or on background. For many sources, the risk of being exposed outweighs whatever trust they may have in your reporting.

Behind bars, resources are scarce, and access to information is tightly controlled. Prison authorities monitor messages sent through prison communication systems and routinely flag or delete them without explanation, making even basic communication with the outside world difficult. Internet access is limited, phone calls can be expensive, and books, public records, and other research materials are often difficult to access.

During a lockdown—or whenever the prison shuts down its phone systems—you may lose all contact with the outside world. At those times, a prison journalist has no choice but to wait. The last thing you want to do is pass along information you have not been able to verify.

These restrictions make every stage of the reporting process difficult, from deciding what can realistically be reported to gathering the information needed to support a story. To show how these restrictions shape prison journalism, I’ll describe how they affected my reporting on deaths in custody at my facility in 2026.

In spring 2026, several men died of suspected overdoses at the Estelle Supermax Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. I overheard officers and peer-support specialists discussing men who had been found unresponsive in their cells. Many residents believed laced drugs were responsible.

My first task was to find out whether what I had heard was true. Inside, the rumor mill churns constantly, producing a dozen versions of the same story. When working with an outside collaborator to verify the deaths proved difficult, I fell back on old-school reporting—from my cell in solitary confinement.

I began looking for people who had direct knowledge of each death. It was slow, careful work, and my biggest challenge was staying off the radar. If prison officials discovered what I was doing, the consequences could be severe. As I’ve experienced time and time again, the institution has ways of making you stop pursuing the truth. 

Often, the people you speak with do not want to be involved in your reporting at all. Even assurances that you will not disclose a source’s identity can be futile. To investigate a rumor, I often have to begin with casual conversations—without identifying myself as a reporter or revealing exactly what I am trying to verify. Small details, pieced together over time, can become the foundation of a larger story.

That is what this process looked like in practice.

I took the opportunity, while at a medical appointment, to speak with an incarcerated janitor who worked in the department. I mentioned that I had heard several people had died recently and waited for his response. 

While I was being escorted out from my appointment, I asked a senior prison guard, “How many deaths are they expecting you to handle this week?” Later, through my cell, I called to a field minister who worked in the chapel and asked whether the chaplain had completed all the family death notifications. Then I followed up: “How many were there?” All three men spoke freely and confirmed what I had suspected.

Next, I tried to build on what I had learned from my background sources. A search for “wrongful death” in the LexisNexis app on my prison-issued tablet sometimes turns up lawsuit records that can be useful for reporting. This time, the search came back empty.

I contacted my outside collaborators again and asked them to run basic searches: How many overdose deaths had occurred at this facility? How many across Texas? How many nationwide? This time, the messages came through, and their responses gave me enough information to begin drafting.

Texas prisons often classify deaths associated with overdoses as “accidental deaths.” According to custodial reports filed by prison officials with the Texas attorney general, at least sixteen people died at the Estelle Unit between March 1 and June 30, 2026. Several of those deaths were classified as “accidental.”

I knew the figures might be incomplete. State officials sometimes exclude people who are transported during a medical emergency and die at another location. And because autopsies can remain pending, the official cause of death may not become public for up to a year. In those cases, the cause is listed as “pending autopsy results.”

(At the time of writing this article, records obtained by my Inquest editor under the Texas Public Information Act showed that the figures I had initially found were indeed incomplete. Nineteen men had died at Estelle during the four-month period described above. Five of those deaths were listed as “accidental alcohol/drug intoxication.”) 

I began organizing the information into an outline, including the facts I had been able to verify and the larger frame for the story. I knew the overdose crisis at Estelle was not an isolated problem. It was part of a broader crisis affecting the entire prison system—and the country as a whole—one that should concern the public.

My final obstacle was getting the draft out of the prison. 

I usually send my work to editors through Securus, the e-messaging system used by about half a million (maybe more) incarcerated people in the United States. At my facility, there is a character count, so I can send only a few paragraphs at a time. I cannot edit or format the text on the platform; I can send only plain messages.

When writing, I try to avoid trigger words—terms that can automatically flag a message for review or lead to its rejection. Even then, there are no guarantees, especially when prison officials already know I am a reporter.

I was able to submit the reporting to several editors. But because incidental deaths are so common in Texas prisons, the story was difficult to sell. The issue had already received extensive coverage, and I could not find an editor willing to take it on.

Even when incarcerated journalists manage to gather information, many lack the connections they need to get their work published. Few have relationships with editors or media outlets, which limits their ability to pitch stories. Those who do make those connections are often held to a higher standard than outside journalists—sometimes an impossible one. Our reporting is met with skepticism that can be difficult to overcome. And even when we do overcome it, media organizations may still question whether our stories are newsworthy.

We are also rarely compensated fairly, even though reporting from prison is expensive. In Texas, we do not receive free phone calls, and each e-message costs 50 cents. By my estimate, each story I write costs between $10 and $40 in phone and messaging fees. These financial, physical, and interpersonal obstacles discourage many incarcerated journalists from reporting at all.

Still, reporting from prison is immensely rewarding. Even when a story is not published, I learn a great deal in the process, and the people who read my work learn something, too. 

Reporting on the overdose deaths also made me think about the restrictive measures prison officials use to stop the flow of drugs, including book bans and limits on digital mail. Yet there has been little effort to address the demand for drugs or to help people overcome substance use. If security measures have failed, perhaps addressing the root causes of drug use is worth trying. That realization led me to consider new reporting projects focused on the lack of investment in substance-use treatment behind bars.

Publication and fair compensation matter, but the effort to report the news is valuable in itself—especially behind bars, where conditions are almost completely opaque to the public. Like our colleagues on the outside, incarcerated journalists continue this work because it gives voice to people who are often ignored, brings hidden abuses to light, and helps hold authorities accountable. 

It also allows the public to enter a world designed to keep it out. As a former warden once told me, “It allows the public to breach the perimeter’s double-barbed-wire fence, which is actually placed there to keep them out—not incarcerated individuals in.”

Incarcerated journalists keep going because the work matters—and because once you know a story is there, it demands to be told.

^{Image Credit: Piet Mondrian, Composition No. 10: Pier and Ocean (1915) / digitally enhanced by rawpixel / Flickr}

Contributors

Jeremy Busby Jeremy Busby is a prison writer and activist who has served nearly twenty-five years of a seventy-five-year sentence in Texas. In addition to being the first Black staff writer in the history of Texas prison newspaper the ECHO, Busby has published writings with the Houston Chronicle, Crime Report, Marshall Project, Minutes Before Six, and Solitary Watch.

Topics

• Institutions & Practices

Tags

• Defending Prison Journalism
• incarcerated and formerly incarcerated authors
• original reporting