A commitment to keeping the public in the dark about what’s happening in Georgia’s prisons has earned the Georgia Department of Corrections the 2024 Golden Padlock Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE). The award honors the most secretive government agencies in the U.S. IRE said the agency was selected for shielding details about deaths, riots and drug overdoses in the state's prisons from the public, journalists, legislators and even investigators from the Department of Justice. The department heavily redacted incident reports, rarely announced worker arrests linked to contraband and withheld video footage after the Atlanta Journal-Constitution began reporting on failures in the corrections system. After DOJ opened an investigation, the state agency failed to comply with a federal subpoena for incident reports, internal investigations and audits until the court intervened. The award was announced Saturday at the IRE24 conference in Anaheim, Calif. IRE invited Georgia Department of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver to accept the award, but received no response.
IRE awarded the 2024 Don Bolles Medal to the Marion County Record for refusing to be silenced after police raided the Marion, Kans., newsroom and the home of its publisher in August 2023. Police confiscated the news organization’s computers, hard drives and server, as well as reporters’ personal cell phones. IRE says the raid was an extraordinary act by a law enforcement agency days after a reporter at the paper questioned the local police chief about potential misconduct at his previous job. It was quickly condemned by news organizations as intimidation of the press and a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments. The Don Bolles Medal recognizes investigative journalists who have exhibited extraordinary courage in standing up against intimidation or efforts to suppress the truth about matters of public importance. The Kansas newspaper's 98-year-old co-owner, Joan Meyer, died the day after police searched her home. Her son, publisher Eric Meyer, and the staff of the 4,000-circulation weekly newspaper cobbled together the equipment they needed to continue publishing that week’s issue.
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