A journalist for Business Insider is crediting the University of Virginia School of Law First Amendment Clinic with helping her obtain public records that powered the news outlet’s investigation into U.S. prisons’ use of attack-trained dogs on inmates — reporting that recently won awards and sparked significant legislative reforms in Virginia.
In 2023, Business Insider published a three-part series and an accompanying documentary cataloging hundreds of incidents in which patrol dogs have bitten or mauled inmates inside U.S. prisons, including in Virginia, where the state Department of Corrections has deployed dogs 18 times more often than any other state.
Using public records, court documents, medical records, and interviews, Hannah Beckler, a senior investigations editor for Business Insider, took readers from facilities in Europe, where patrol dogs are bred, brutalized, and trained for violence, to prison cells in the United States, where, per Beckler’s reporting, they are used “to attack and intimidate” inmates. Her reporting found that memories of the attacks can torture people for years after the bite wounds heal.
One former Virginia inmate, a Black man, told Beckler he was brutally attacked after prison officers tried to disperse a fight. A dog ripped into skin and muscle on his calf while its handler shouted racial slurs, he said. Beckler reported that he now has lasting nerve damage as a result and haunting memories of the incident.
The investigative series was made possible after Beckler and Business Insider fought for the release of hundreds of Virginia Department of Corrections records about its use of attack-trained dogs with free legal support from the UVA First Amendment Clinic, which is run by attorneys from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
Beckler’s investigation prompted Virginia lawmakers to introduce legislation aimed at banning or restricting the use of attack-trained dogs inside state prisons. Last March, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed into law a bill that dramatically limits the use of attack-trained dogs and imposes transparency requirements surrounding their use, including mandating that the VADOC publish all reports of canine use of force on its website.
Beckler’s reporting later won two prestigious awards: the 2024 Hillman Prize for Newspaper Journalism and a 2024 National Magazine Award, which recognized the documentary.
“This is an important and monumental series — one that forces us to look at a world that we work so hard not to see,” writer and Hillman judge Ta-Nehisi Coates said as he presented the award to Beckler. “And [it] actually managed to force other people who didn’t want to see it to act on it.”
The legal fight for prison records
Beckler started reporting the series in 2022. As part of her reporting, she filed a Virginia Freedom of Information Act request with the VADOC seeking access to bite reports that chronicled incidents where prison dogs attacked inmates. After the department denied the request, Beckler and Business Insider connected with the UVA First Amendment Clinic for help contesting the denial.
“There’s very little public oversight of how prisons are operated, so the documents are really one of our few avenues to understand what’s going on in the prison in the way that it’s documented by the staff,” Beckler said. “That was really key for me.”
Lin Weeks, co-director of the UVA First Amendment Clinic and a senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee, said Clinic students wrote a letter on Beckler’s behalf that asked the VADOC to release the records, but it still refused to turn them over. That’s when the Clinic students and attorneys representing Beckler and Business Insider told the VADOC that they would sue for the records.
The VADOC relented, releasing nearly 150 bite reports to Beckler. Those documents not only revealed the frequency and types of incidents in which guards deployed attack dogs, Beckler said they also showed that, at times, the dogs were used on people who were in shackles.
Beckler combined those records with the rest of her extensive reporting to publish the investigative series in July 2023. And a few months later, Business Insider produced the documentary.
But Beckler wanted more records: specifically, surveillance footage of bite incidents in Virginia’s super-maximum security Red Onion State Prison, which recorded the most bites of any prison in her investigation.
“It’s one thing to have documents; It’s another thing to have video,” Beckler said. “Video is very, very humanizing.”
After the VADOC refused to release the surveillance footage, Beckler and Business Insider, represented by the UVA First Amendment Clinic, sued the department to compel the release of that footage. A third-year student argued on behalf of the requesters in the Charlottesville trial court.
“A main goal of the clinic is to get students experience both drafting legal filings and standing up in court when they can,” Weeks said. “Virginia FOIA cases are well suited, because they move pretty fast — you can get into court quickly on a VFOIA hearing compared to other cases — and the impact of the cases is significant.”
Last fall, the Charlottesville trial court ordered the release of the records, subject to some redactions. VADOC has appealed the decision, delaying the requesters’ receipt of those records while the case is still pending.
Beckler said she enjoyed working with the First Amendment Clinic students and Reporters Committee attorneys who helped make the series possible.
“I think it’s just such an incredible resource to have a First Amendment Clinic and be able to interact with future lawyers who are excited about the First Amendment,” Beckler said. “I’m so grateful for their work and their effort on this, and we really couldn’t have done it without them.”
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