How journalists can investigate prison discipline policies — and why these policies may be important for other stories

We offer questions for jumpstarting your reporting, suggestions for finding data, advice for communicating with incarcerated sources, and more.

by Wanda Bertram, January 28, 2025

This week, we released Bad Behavior: How prison disciplinary policies manufacture misconduct, the first 50-state analysis of prison disciplinary systems published in decades. Here, we discuss how journalists can dig deeper into disciplinary policies — a topic that touches many other aspects of life behind bars.

As the report explains, prison misconduct rules cover a vast range of behavior, making these systems ripe for abuse by corrections staff. The four dozen incarcerated people we corresponded with in developing our report described frequent charges for vague offenses like “not standing for count”; harsher punishments for accused people when they attempted to defend themselves against charges; and hearing officers finding people guilty on scant evidence rather than going against the word of another officer.

Our report is a high-level overview of how disciplinary systems work. But for journalists, there is a lot more room to explore how these systems are enforced in practice and how incarcerated people are impacted by the sanctions that follow a guilty plea.

Reporting on disciplinary policies

If you’re interested in investigating the prison disciplinary system in your state, our collection of state disciplinary policy documents should help you get started. Our 2024 briefing on disciplinary fines — covering 16 states where we know those fines are being imposed — might also be useful. We also have more national statistics in our 2022 briefing on discipline.

A good place to start is finding out how many misconduct cases were processed in your state’s prison system in the last 1-2 years. (That will require a public records request, as we explain more below.) The following questions about disciplinary action could also jumpstart your reporting:

• If your state DOC classifies different violations by severity, in how many recent cases was the most serious charge a minor or moderate one? (You may want to drill down on specific charges, and our report includes a table of common infractions.)
• How many disciplinary cases processed in recent years resulted in someone being sent to solitary confinement? How many resulted in lost visitation or communication “privileges”?
• How many days of good time were lost in recent years due to disciplinary action? (We suggest also asking what types of offenses are leading to people having time credits revoked.)
• How do women, and racial minorities, experience disciplinary action differently? (For instance, our report shows that women are slightly more likely to be written up than men and much more likely to receive “minor” violations.)

In addition to the sanctions imposed when someone is found guilty, misconduct records also carry collateral consequences. You might want to ask these questions to get a better sense of the impact of disciplinary action:

• Do misconduct records disqualify people in your state’s prisons from participating in any educational, job training, or behavioral programs?
• What kinds of disciplinary offenses impact parole decisions in your state? Does the parole board ever consider minor violations enough to deny someone early release?
• Does your state allow prisons to extend someone’s sentence past their original release date due to disciplinary infractions? (For example, in Wisconsin, being found guilty of infractions or being in solitary confinement can both lead to someone’s release being postponed.)

Talking to incarcerated people about disciplinary systems

Incarcerated people are essential sources for reporting on disciplinary policies, and are often eager to share their experiences and views. Be aware, though, that your sources are taking a risk in talking to you. (Ironically, unsanctioned communication with the media may be grounds for disciplinary charges.)

Anytime you’re working with incarcerated sources, setting clear expectations is key. Make sure to communicate the scope of your project and the terms of your conversations with your sources, as well as the risk of retaliation. Be clear about when you are planning to use their quotes and personal information in your story and make plans to protect their identities if necessary. For more guidance, read the Freedom of the Press Foundation’s guide to interviewing incarcerated people.

In talking to incarcerated sources about prison discipline, we suggest asking questions like:

• Do you feel that the discipline system in your prison is effective at maintaining order and keeping people safe?
• Are there any conduct rules (or categories of rules) that seem to be enforced more than others?
• Are people accused of disciplinary infractions in your prison able to meaningfully defend themselves, such as by interviewing witnesses at hearings and presenting evidence?
• How often are incarcerated people successful in defending themselves from disciplinary charges?
• How would you change the system, if you could?

We urge journalists to only share biographical information about incarcerated people that pertains to the story. An incarcerated individual’s crime of conviction, for example, might be relevant insofar as it explains how long they have been behind bars. But being judicious about including biographical details will help you build trust with your sources.

Finding data on prison disciplinary systems

The bad news for journalists is that we don’t know how much data departments of corrections maintain about disciplinary action. The good news is that every disciplinary case — whether or not it goes to a hearing — begins with a write-up, and you can file public records requests for these reports and analyze them yourself if necessary.

A sample disciplinary form.

In some states, the state government is supposed to conduct regular audits or analyses of prison disciplinary systems. The DOC’s official discipline policy should specify whether that is the case. If so, we recommend requesting any reports or audits of the disciplinary system from the last several years.

When requesting copies of actual disciplinary reports, you can ask the DOC to provide only reports from a certain time frame, where a certain charge was filed, where a certain type of penalty was imposed, and so on. If your investigation is looking at trends in prison discipline (rather than the treatment of a specific person), we suggest specifying in your records request that you are not seeking personally-identifiable information, and that the DOC can redact any details that could identify someone. This precaution can preempt records request denials based on privacy concerns.

For general advice on filing public records requests with criminal legal system agencies, check out our records request guide.

Using our report as a resource in other investigations

Disciplinary systems are relevant to many other aspects of the prison experience that journalists may find themselves reporting on. Our report may come in handy if you’re covering:

• Solitary confinement. As our report notes, 35% of people who reported receiving disciplinary action in a sample year said they were put in solitary confinement as punishment. The section of our report about disciplinary processes dives into how people can end up saddled with punishments like this, with little or no opportunity to defend themselves against the charges.
• Parole, “good time,” and other early release mechanisms. In nearly all states that use discretionary parole, release rates are declining. As news outlets like AL.com and Cleveland.com have reported, misconduct records play a significant role in release decisions. We also encourage reporters to dig deeper into how disciplinary action affects how much “good time” incarcerated people are able to accrue.
• Protests and strikes in prison. Disciplinary codes punish several forms of dissent against prison conditions and rules, and in some states, dissenting behaviors like refusing to go to one’s prison job are treated as serious offenses. Our table of common disciplinary offenses helps explain how prison authorities can turn nonviolent protests into punishable infractions.
• Prison programming. Reporters investigating the availability of educational, job training, or behavioral programs in prisons may want to find out whether misconduct records can exclude someone from participation. While we can’t say for sure, it’s possible that overactive disciplinary systems are effectively barring many people from rehabilitative programs — programs that can be a key part of securing early release.

Discipline systems are administrative processes in prisons that mimic criminal courts, and punishments for infractions are — in the words of corrections officials themselves — “the jail of the prison.” In other words, these systems are a black box within a larger, more well-known black box. Without investigative journalism, it is likely that these systems will remain largely obscure.

If you’re considering writing about prison discipline — or have any questions about our report or this guide — we encourage you to reach out to us through our contact page.