A 15-year-old law, signed by former Governor Pete Wilson, restricts the press’s access to California’s prison inmate population. According to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, it’s time that law was repealed.
At the time the Wilson administration insisted that doing away with in–person inmate interviews was necessary because too many prisoners were using the media to promote themselves, becoming celebrities in their own right.
Since then, the law may have had some unintended consequences. Prison inmates are no longer calling radio shows and touting book and movie deals, but there’s also not a lot of sunlight being shed on what happens inside the prison system...
LINK - SCPR.org