An Anonymous Prison Watchdog Steps Forward Written by
RYAN KRULL This story was sponsored in part by a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant.
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n December 2019, Lori Curry’s boyfriend, who has been incarcerated for almost two decades, sought medical treatment from prison medical staff. The health-care workers told him his condition wasn’t serious and that he risked being written up for a disciplinary infraction if he sought help again. When Curry, 39, of Joplin heard what happened she was incensed. Wanting to vent her frustration at the Missouri Department of Corrections but worried her criticism might blow back on her boyfriend, she created a new twitter handle @MissouriPrison and tweeted anonymously about the ordeal. She didn’t know the project would dominate her life in 2020 and become a bona fide advocacy organization in 2021. In those first weeks, Curry tweeted mostly about her boyfriend’s issues with Corizon Health, the health-care provider for prisons in the state. She soon began hearing from others with incarcerated loved ones dealing with similar issues. She tried to spread awareness of what she saw as inadequate health care for prisoners, hoping the right people would become aware of the problem and fix it. Then something unexpected happened. She started getting messages from current and former MODOC employees, corrections officers in particular, who
Navy Reservist Charged with Abusing Girls Written by
DOYLE MURPHY
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Navy reservist from St. Louis County sexually abused three young girls multiple times over a decade, prosecutors say. Ephriam Granderson, 52, of Berkeley was arrested last week in Atlanta as he returned to the United States from a deployment in South Korea. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell said at a news conference his staff began investigating Granderson after receiving a letter describing allegations against the longtime sailor. Granderson is accused of abusing girls between the ages of nine and six-
Lori Curry has become a conduit of inside info on Missouri prisons. | COURTESY LORI CURRY had their own gripes with the department but were wary of airing them publicly. “I remember the very first message I got from an employee,” Curry says. “I thought, ‘Is this some practical joke?’ I was very taken aback. I just, I did not expect them to want to work with me or give me information.” Curry found herself to be a rare pipeline for inmates and corrections officers to get information to the public without fear of retribution. She quickly discovered the interests of the two groups were not always as opposed as they might seem. Inmates who contacted Curry often complained of a lack of access to resources and programs. The COs complained of being understaffed, stretched thin and continuously asked to do more with less. The information Curry makes public is often of the sort that may not be newsworthy to the general public but is hugely important to incarcerated people and their families. For instance, last week
teen. The charges detail a period of time from 1993 to 2003. He is charged with twelve crimes, including rape, statutory rape and sodomy. The victims are identified only by their initials in court papers, and Bell would only say that the girls were familiar with Granderson. Bell said the case was handled within the prosecutor’s office by chief investigator Ron Goldstein and Maureen Baker. Some of the allegations against Granderson previously had been reviewed by prosecutors years before Bell’s tenure, but no charges were filed at the time, Bell added. He said that wasn’t necessarily the wrong call back then, given a variety of factors, possibly including the challenges faced by young victims. Once prosecutors were ready to charge Granderson, they worked with the U.S. Marshals and the St. Louis County Police Department’s intelligence unit to bring him into custody. The charges were originally filed on March 1, but authorities waited for his return to the U.S. to unseal them and
Curry posted a story to the Missouri Prison Reform website about inmates not having access to grievance forms, the primary means by which an inmate can seek redress for mistreatment. Much of what she currently posts about is COVID-related. She’s made public numerous messages from inmates who say they’ve been in close quarters with those who have tested positive or are showing symptoms of COVID. Earlier this month, she posted a letter from a person who until recently worked for the MODOC claiming that the department was not following its own viral containment plan. The @MissouriPrison account has also become one of the most accessible ways to track the daily changes in COVID cases in the system. Curry says she’s able, to some extent, to vet the sources of information she receives because public employee and inmate identities are publicly available. If she does pass along something that’s shown to be inaccurate, she posts a correction immediately. Journalists from Kaiser Health News, the Kansas City Star and the RFT have used information posted by Curry as a basis for further reporting. Earlier this year, the St. Louis-based civil rights attorney Chelsea Merta gave Curry a crash course in submitting Sunshine requests, which Curry now does regularly for information on inmate deaths. “She is such a force of nature,” Merta says. “I can show her how to do something, give her a tool, and she just runs with it.” Curry has also recently connected with Sami Abdel-Salam, a Bolivar, Missouri, native and professor of criminal justice at Westchester University in Pennsylvania. He offered Curry his help after coming across her account on social media. “I’m more likely to run into somebody who’s been incarcerated that has come out that’s trying to do something to change the system,” Abdel-Salam says. “I don’t
Ephriam Granderson. | COURTESY ST. LOUIS COUNTY PROSECUTING ATTORNEY make the arrest. A St. Louis County judge set Granderson’s bail at $200,000. Bell asked anyone who may be a victim or know about a crime to contact their local prosecutor’s office. n
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think I’ve ever encountered anybody, personally, who has not been incarcerated that has gone as far as [Curry] has, in terms of advocacy for people who are. I’m sure they exist. But she’s the first I’ve met.” Curry previously worked a series of caretaking jobs including with adults who have developmental disabilities and children with autism. She made a career change to medical coding and billing but experienced seizures and had to stop working. Around the same time, a friend whose boyfriend was in prison said her boyfriend knew a guy on the inside looking for a pen pal. Would Curry be interested? Newly out of work and with some free time, she said, sure. Why not? She didn’t know how old he was or what he was in prison for. They exchanged letters, then talked on the phone. “He was so positive,” she says. “I think about that and to this day, I’m always like, ‘How are you so positive in your environment that you’re in?’ I get down, and I’m out here.” She met him a little more than a month after they started communicating. Curry adds, “He was really handsome.” Curry asked for his name to be kept out of this piece but did say that he’s been in prison almost twenty years for an armed robbery committed as a young man. And he has almost twenty years left on his sentence. Neither he nor Curry make any excuses for his crime but, she says, “I don’t know what good it’s doing to keep him in that environment. He’s long ago a changed man.” In recent weeks, Curry faced the dilemma of her anonymity. It had allowed her to post freely, but it also limited her in growing her work. As more journalists, activists and academics reach out to her, she envisions a more formal role for her advocacy. But that’s nearly impossible while operating as a faceless Twitter account. Even simple exchanges are tricky. She recently found herself at a very modern crossroads: She had scheduled a Zoom meeting with a lawyer and had to decide if she was going to turn her camera on or not. She chose to turn it on. Curry has decided to make Missouri Prison Reform into a 501c3 nonprofit, enabling it to seek donations and grants. She hopes to use the money to set up a pen pal program for inmates and help families of incarcerated people with small expenses, among other goals. But registering a nonprofit also means putting her name in the public record. So she is stepping out from behind the shield of anonymity in hopes of advancing the work she began more than a year ago. “In order for us to move forward and do the things we want to do, it’s just going to happen,” she says. “People are going to find out who I am. I’m ready to be able to do more. And not hide.” Ryan Krull is a freelance journalist and assistant teaching professor in the department of communication and media at University of Missouri-St. Louis.
MARCH 17-23, 2021
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