WITNESS
Author and reporter Alan Elsner has a distinguished 28-year career in journalism. His 2004 book, Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America's Prisons, has been widely praised as a hard-hitting look at a major problem. Sen. Edward Kennedy called it "a wake up call" for America. The book was short-listed for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Currently National Correspondent for Reuters News Service based in Washington, D.C., he also served as that agency's Chief Political Correspondent from 1994 to 2000, during which time he covered two presidential campaigns and interviewed Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush several times.
From 1989 to 1994, Mr. Elsner was Reuters State Department Correspondent. He traveled the world with Secretary of State James Baker, covering the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and the first Gulf War. Mr. Elsner was also one of the first reporters to draw attention to the Rwandan genocide and helped forced the U.S. government to change its policy.
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STATEMENT
"I have been a reporter for 28 years and covering the U.S. prison system in some ways takes me back to the early days of my career as a foreign correspondent when the Cold War was at its height. It reminds me a little of what it used to be like trying to cover the former Eastern Bloc, where one's access was limited and movements were strictly monitored. This is not a healthy state for a democratic society.
"…I still believe we know painfully little about what is happening in our prisons. We still don't know how many men are raped in our prisons and we are anxiously awaiting a forthcoming report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. We don't know how many people commit suicide and how they do so. We don't know how many women allege abuse and how many such complaints are sustained. We don't know how many people have hepatitis B or C; we don't know how many tested positive for tuberculosis of STDs. We don't know how many suffer from diabetes or hypertension and how many die from these conditions. We don't know the total number of people who die in our prisons each year, how old they are when they die and what they die from. We don't know how often correctional officers use Tasers and stun guns, how many times they carry out cell extractions."
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
Download the complete written statement
Note: Some witnesses submitted documents in addition to the written statement they prepared for the hearing. In most cases, those documents are not available on the Commission's web site.
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