New Jersey Slams the Prison Door on the Media

According to the Star-Ledger, The New Jersey Department of Corrections has instituted one of the nation's tightest restrictions on media access to state prisons, including a complete ban on interviews with inmates.

Inmates have long used such interviews to protest their innocence, decry prison conditions or just tell their life stories, not always a welcome prospect for law enforcement officials and victims of crime.

In interviews, press organizations, inmate advocates, constitutional lawyers and the American Civil Liberties Union condemned the new policy, saying it represented an erosion of the public's right to know what is going on inside a public institution.  More. . . [Mark Godsey]