The Marshall Project-Cleveland, The Columbus Dispatch and other Ohio-based outlets investigated the prevalence of illicit drugs known as K2 inside Ohio prisons, naming their multi-story series “SMUGGLED.”
Doug Livingston, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and Laura Bischoff, a journalist at the USA TODAY Network Ohio, told the Reynolds Center the year-long investigation was a combination of persistent records requests and interviews with those in the prison system.
Their story won the Bronze Award for the Regional/Local category of the 2026 Barlett & Steele Awards, and led to state lawmakers proposing stronger drug smuggling penalties and a prosecutor dropping criminal charges against an incarcerated whistleblower.
The investigation found the Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (ODRC) put millions of taxpayer dollars into security measures, while both employees and contractors continued to sneak drugs into facilities. Their investigation also found employees who got caught smuggling rarely faced consequences, and were able to resign without facing charges.
“The depth of the problem, the pervasiveness, the availability of the drugs, the power dynamics, the money, the black market money, and the danger and chaos that these drugs bring into these facilities is really stunning,” Bischoff said.
The beginning
The investigation started when Livingston was working on an entirely different story about legal mail in prisons, when he noticed in a deposition by a chief policy director at the ODRC that the department had been tracking illicit drugs in state prisons.
He chose to request the data and invited Bischoff to collaborate on the story. They specifically looked at the prevalence of K2, a liquid synthetic cannabinoid that can be easily distributed using ordinary absorbent paper. But the drug, also known as Spice, can be incredibly dangerous and sometimes even fatal.
“We found that they’re probably not counting half of the deaths as overdoses that they should in Ohio prisons, and we don’t think that’s abnormal for other systems that are struggling to control this,” Livingston said.
The wait for records
The reporting duo found more than 56,000 drug seizures inside state prisons going back to 2020. They reviewed autopsy, police and court records, as well as hours of prison surveillance footage. They used both state and Freedom of Information Act requests to assemble their reportage. But some requests are still left pending, Bischoff said.
“I hate to admit that as a journalist that your product is impacted by bureaucratic delays, but that’s the cold hard truth here is that the story has to be told, and at some point you have to make a decision on what hills are worth dying on,” Livingston said.
An issue, Livingston said, is that records may take too long for reporters who can’t sit on stories to confirm an ongoing problem in the prison system.
“It’s a community that often gets overlooked in reporting, and their voice isn’t heard,” he said. “Trying to confirm their stories is the hard part because you need to get those records, and they’re not going to come in time by the time you have to publish if you’re working at a daily paper.”
When they did receive records, Livingston said it would in turn lead to more ideas for what to request, and in turn learn more about the people connected to the issue.
“Each one of those rounds adds a couple months to your project,” he said. “We really had to be judicious at some point in the project and say, what do we absolutely need to know?”
The dangers of conversation
Bischoff and Livingston also interviewed smugglers, prison employees, incarcerated people, families, and coroners, among others. Some of those interviews posed significant risks for their sources, considering they were discussing illegal activity.
For example, Livingston interviewed a former corrections officer, Barbara Devine, who gave an account of attempting to smuggle methamphetamine into a correctional institution in 2022. She’s serving a three-year sentence.
“We had conversations for weeks, really, because I wanted to make sure that she understood the risk that she might take by talking to us about this,” Livingston said. “Whether it has to do with her early release from prison or how people perceive her, inside (and) outside of prison and the staff, because she was really talking candidly as others were about how porous the front door can be at these facilities.”
Livingston said there’s a “power dynamic in drug dealing” where someone can be coerced into doing things just to survive, and are often pressured into keeping quiet for fear of retaliation from other inmates.
Livingston also said while the voices of incarcerated people were essential to the story, every detail they related about the conditions behind bars had to be confirmed with documents.
Luckily, he said, it’s fairly easy to contact people in prison by finding their name and number in public documents and putting their information into a service used by the state to allow direct communication with the incarcerated population.
While these services are usually a paid method of communication, Bischoff said “10 cents goes a long way” in getting messages to incarcerated sources.
Her recommendation for other journalists attempting to use these services is to reach out through the email system rather than the texting platform, as it’s more cost-efficient and allows a reporter to send out more words.
“A morale boost”
After they published their investigation, a Montgomery County prosecutor dropped charges against a woman who was central to their investigation, which Livingston said was a “morale boost at the end of the tunnel.”
“It’s a drop in the bucket when you consider all the women that were impacted in that case, some of whom have already been convicted of smuggling drugs,” Livingston said. “I think it comes with a job after a while, and you compartmentalize that stuff, and you just program yourself to make sure that you’re never doing harm.”
The investigation had a legislative impact as well. A bill is pending in Ohio called “Andy’s Law,” named after a corrections officer who was beaten to death in 2024. The proposed legislation calls for stronger penalties for smuggling drugs, Bischoff said.
Tips for future investigative journalists
Both Livingston and Bischoff stressed the importance of organization in their reporting. Bischoff uses a spreadsheet with multiple taps for records requests, sources, useful studies and previous news coverage.
“All of that is super crucial to staying organized,” she said.
Livingston said he finds using software really helpful when sorting through data or for transcribing, but journalists should exercise caution when handling sensitive information. He recommends saving files on local hard drives, or encrypting to make sure it doesn’t get leaked and put a target on sources’ backs.
“You don’t want that information leaked out there, so you really have to be extra careful and make sure that you’re encrypting,” he said.
