Last month, one of our writers at Prison Journalism Project (PJP) sent us a breaking news story about an electrical fire at her prison in Georgia. Fortunately no one had been hurt, but she reported an alarming fact: It took more than a half hour after the fire alarm went off for corrections officers to arrive. The women used a broken fan blade to break a window to attempt to evacuate. She attributed the long response time to her observation that the prison was chronically short-staffed. Our intrepid reporter put her name at the top.
When I saw this story, several concerns occurred to me about the ramifications of publishing it. My first concern was for her safety.
