EL RENO, Okla. – As we made our way through the heavy metal door of Cell Block B, someone called out.
“Don’t let that door shut,” the voice said. No one had a key.
Good advice. One place where you do not want to be on the wrong side of a locked door would be the El Reno federal prison.
One of the most interesting aspects of being a White House correspondent is following the president to all sorts of places around the country and the world. Presidents visit factories, farms, schools, theaters, sports arenas, science labs, space centers, military bases, foreign palaces and, from time to time, even a war zone. President Bill Clinton once took us in his motorcade for a lap around the Daytona International Speedway. President George W. Bush took us via helicopter onto the deck of an aircraft carrier.
But until this week, none had ever taken us inside the concertina wire fences of a federal prison.
President Obama’s visit to the Federal Correctional Institution, El Reno, posed certain challenges for both the prison and the White House press pool. Home to 1,300 inmates, El Reno is not accustomed to a pack of reporters, photographers and camera operators roaming its halls.
We were not allowed to bring in telephones, and our laptops had to be configured to use the secure Internet in a break room and then reconfigured when we left.
We were not allowed to interview any inmates. In fact, we never saw a single inmate, since those in Cell Block B were moved elsewhere for the president’s tour and those in other buildings were kept out of sight. Walking across the prison yard was a spooky, silent experience with virtually no sign of human life, like something out of an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
Clearly we were an anomaly. The prison authorities were not thrilled about us accompanying the president inside the wire in the first place. Ultimately they agreed and accommodations were made for us. Since the White House press pool is “swept” by the Secret Service anytime it travels with the president, no additional security screening was needed as we passed through the imposing prison gates. Prison authorities dropped talk of requiring a review of all our video footage shot on the property.
As prisons go El Reno seemed in good shape: clean and well maintained. In nearly 30 years as a reporter, I’ve seen some horrific lockups, including a dungeon-like prison in Uzbekistan, a dark and overcrowded prison in Afghanistan, and the infamous apartheid-era prison on Robben Island in South Africa – the last during a tour given for the visiting American first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton by its most prominent former inmate, Nelson Mandela.
And yet prison is prison. Invariably what goes through your mind is what life there must be like, sleeping two to a cell, getting up when told to get up, eating when told to eat, moving where told to move, sleeping when told to sleep, and then doing it again the next day and the day after that, for 10 years, or 20, or more. And that’s without any of the possible horrors the president describes, the gang violence and prison rape.
Like Mrs. Clinton on Robben Island, Mr. Obama was shown a cramped cell and briefed by officials. Then he came over to a group of us, kept in place by yellow police tape, to talk about overhauling the criminal justice system. It was basically a recitation of the same policy points he had made in a speech a couple of days earlier. But when he started to walk away, my colleague Darlene Superville of the Associated Press, called after him, asking what struck him about the prison.
He paused, almost as if considering whether to actually say what he was thinking. Then he turned to come back. What struck him, he said, was that it could have been him in one of those cells. He, too, had made mistakes, he said. And were it not for the advantages of life that he had – advantages the El Reno residents did not have – he might have been a prisoner and not a president. “There but for the grace of God,” he said.
It was a strikingly personal observation, one that would be hard to imagine any other president making, even if any of them had taken the time to go to a federal prison.
A few minutes later, it was time for us to leave. The prison officials were focused not on the history of the moment but on the prospect of accidental contraband.
“Make sure nothing got dropped,” one of them said.
And with that, we were led out, past the razor wire and back into the world again.