Breaking the code of silence
By Sukey Lewis & Julie Small, KQED
This investigation began with a striking data finding. In analyzing newly accessible records obtained through California’s landmark police transparency law, our reporting team discovered that correctional officers at California State Prison, Sacramento — also known as New Folsom — were using serious force at three times the rate of officers at any other prison in the state. And then we learned another startling detail: two officers at the prison who’d been part of an elite investigative unit both died unexpectedly in the span of less than a year.
Something was clearly going on at New Folsom.
And as we began tracing the footsteps of those men — Officer Valentino Rodriguez and Sgt. Kevin Steele — it became clear that their deaths were connected to the shocking levels of institutional violence at this high security prison, and their own efforts to expose it.
“On Our Watch: New Folsom” tells the story of this place through the lives — and deaths — of those whistleblowers. It is the result of dogged public records work, dozens of interviews, deeply personal collaborations with grieving families, and the courage of insiders who broke the department’s corrosive and strictly-enforced code of silence.
The fight for records
The passage of California’s new police transparency law in 2019 opened up officers’ use of force and egregious misconduct records to the public for the first time in more than 40 years. In response, KQED launched a massive public records effort to get these documents from all 700 law enforcement agencies in the state, including the largest: the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Yet, from the beginning, CDCR failed to devote the necessary resources to respond to public records requests under the new law. This effectively obstructed and delayed our reporting on officer misconduct. In one of the most ludicrous and surreal exchanges with the agency’s public records department, they provided KQED with a printed photograph of a CD in response to our request for an audio interrogation.
When we asked them to provide data on prison-level population and use of force they refused to send it in a machine readable format, insisting that they would only provide the information via thousands of pages of PDFs, citing amorphous security concerns. But eventually, our data researchers were able to use open source tools to extract years of data from those documents.
In 2022, KQED sued the department after it became clear that at the current rate of disclosure, it would take more than 25 years for the agency to comply with the news agency’s outstanding requests for newly public disciplinary and use-of-force records. In April 2024, a judge ruled in KQED’s favor that CDCR must release those records in a timely fashion.
Ultimately, we were able to obtain never-before-seen records — thousands of pages of disciplinary documents, internal memos, interrogation tapes, and surveillance footage — that allowed us to build a detailed picture of officer misconduct and use of force across the state’s 31 prisons. UC Berkeley graduate students painstakingly reviewed and cataloged this material, building databases to track patterns and outliers.
Understanding the whistleblowers
While we pursued the data, we also began reporting out the lives and deaths of the two whistleblowers. The families of Officer Valentino Rodriguez Jr. and Sgt. Kevin Steele shared digital records – text messages, emails, handwritten notes – that revealed how each man had tried to report abuse, only to be met with retaliation and indifference that ultimately fueled their despair.
We also requested and obtained Steele’s death investigation files from Missouri — where he secretly moved from California — that confirmed his death by suicide and revealed a lot about his mindset in his final moments. His suicide note accused his colleagues of being complicit in Rodriguez’s death. Meanwhile, Rodriguez’s father was poring through his son’s digital archive and seeking accountability from the agency that employed him.
From these two personal stories we uncovered something larger: a deeply embedded culture of violence and silence at New Folsom.
Over more than two years, we cultivated relationships with correctional officers who had been close to the men at the heart of this story. In many cases, they had seen first hand what happens when you go against the code of silence —and yet they risked their careers and personal safety to speak to us.
By combing through thousands of pages of use-of-force reports, lawsuits and settlement documents, we also were able to identify a dozen people who were still incarcerated that had experienced or witnessed abuse by officers at New Folsom. Despite the threat of ongoing retaliation, these men agreed to share their stories with us — giving voice to a pattern of unreasonable force and cover-up that was either endorsed or ignored by prison leaders.
A last-minute leak
Then, just as we were launching the podcast series in January 2024, we heard from an anonymous source. This person shared a cache of confidential documents, audio and video recordings about a 2019 murder inside the prison that may have been facilitated—– or at least allowed — by officers. Up until this point, we had had to triangulate the details of this incident from multiple sources — including the murderers — who often told contradictory stories and had clear motivations to lie to us.
This last-minute leak allowed us to finally analyze video of the murder and the events leading up to it firsthand. We were able to provide listeners with a much clearer sense of how officers violated their own policies, allowing the incident to take place.
But it also meant a two-week turnaround for an entirely new hourlong episode we had not built into our already-punishing production schedule. Our team worked around the clock to meticulously script, edit, sound design and fact-check what became episode seven of the series.
Along with the incredible practical demands of this series—– from the lawsuits to the long nights — was the emotional toll it took. Most of the sources for this story were people who’d gone through traumatic experiences. We spent hours sitting with people who were still in the throes of shock and grief. We answered calls from prison late at night and on holidays when all we wanted was to spend time with our own loved ones. We knocked on dozens of doors, not knowing who would answer or what their reaction to us would be. And we navigated conversations with people in positions of power who didn’t want to tell us the truth.
The result was a story that revealed the staggering human toll of unchecked power inside California’s prison system—– on both sides of the bars.
“On Our Watch: New Folsom” transcends the binaries of conservative vs. liberal or correctional officer safety vs. incarcerated people’s rights. Instead, it shows that in a system that fails to hold people accountable, no one is safe.