A RECENT 7UP ad opens with a clean-cut man musing about the virtues of selling to a "captive audience." Then you hear a gate clank shut. For the next 30 seconds, he walks through a prison dispensing sodas to prisoners who throw food at him and snarl. At one point, the man drops a can of 7UP, starts to bend over — and stops. "I’m not picking that up!" he says, flashing a knowing grin. The ad ends with the clean-cut man sitting in a prison cell beside a menacing-looking prisoner, who drapes his arm suggestively around the first man’s shoulder and stares at him. The premise of the joke, such as it is, is that prisons are filled with men who rape other men.

The ad is tasteless. But it fits right in with our cultural infatuation with all things related to law and order. The enormously popular Law & Order series has produced two spin-offs. The surprise hit of the last TV season turned out to be Alias, yet another drama about fighting crime (albeit of the international-terror-ring sort). And then there are staples like Cops, NYPD Blue, Homicide (which lives on in syndication), and America’s Most Wanted. There’s little interest in knowing what actually happens to the guilty once they land behind bars (HBO’s series Oz offers the sole obvious exception to the rule). As the public eats up this stuff, it eagerly embraces tough-on-crime measures like mandatory sentencing and three-strikes-and-you’re-out rules. John and Jane Q. Public, it seems, really don’t care about what happens in their prisons, so long as those convicted of crimes stay behind bars. And neither, apparently, do the media.

Last month, the Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) unveiled a new media-access plan that would, for all intents and purposes, make it impossible to cover what happens in state prisons. Under the new guidelines, prison officials would be required to sit in on media interviews with inmates, thus eliminating confidential interviews. The use of cameras and tape recorders at all but seven of the state’s 22 correctional facilities would be prohibited. And press contact with prisoners housed in segregation units, or solitary confinement, including the 120 prisoners in MCI-Cedar Junction’s so-called Departmental Disciplinary Unit in Walpole (where prisoners must remain, sometimes for years, in all-steel-and-concrete cells 23 hours each day), would be banned.

You’d think the proposed guidelines would come under fire by those whom it will affect: the press. But at a June 14 DOC hearing on the new guidelines, not a single media outlet (including the Phoenix) sent a representative to argue for the public’s right to know what goes on behind prison walls. (Both the Phoenix and the Boston Globe have editorialized against the proposals, however.) Jamaica Plain journalist Cristina Rathbone, who is writing a book about women prisoners at MCI-Framingham, spoke out against the guidelines; and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, a national trade group, submitted a June 13 letter urging the DOC to reconsider its plan. That’s a pretty poor showing considering what’s at stake. Says Rathbone, "You would have thought that the media would be quite alarmed and would want to protect their own interests. Ultimately, I hope they will."

Will the media wake up to their own interests? Anything’s possible. Even the folks at 7UP got the message when prisoners-rights advocates protested the rape-themed ad. Indeed, the soft-drink giant pulled the offending spot just weeks after its release.

IT’S NOT as if the Boston press never reports what goes on behind the wall. In recent years, a couple of stories stand out as exceptional investigations into state prisons. In August 1996, the Globe’s Stephen Kurkjian wrote about the woeful state of mental-health services in the wake of rising suicides among prisoners at Bridgewater State Hospital, where the DOC houses the criminally insane. Three months later, in November 1996, Kurkjian took the department’s mental-health program to task in a three-part series, after John Salvi, incarcerated for the 1994 shooting deaths of two reproductive-health-clinic workers in Brookline, killed himself at the Walpole prison. Response to the coverage shows the power of journalism: it led to an outside evaluation of services and 25 policy changes.

Three years later, in December 2000, Jason Beaubien, then a WBUR reporter, exposed prisoner abuse at MCI-Shirley during a three-day "shakedown," or search of prison cells. In a 10-minute report based on interviews with prisoners and employees, he detailed allegations that prisoners had been burned, bruised, and bitten by dogs during the October 2000 lockdown. His reporting sparked an outcry from legislators, who paid a surprise visit to MCI-Shirley and pushed for an independent investigation. Beaubien’s work put the DOC on notice, and officials have prevented similar shakedowns by videotaping all contraband searches.

For the most part, however, media coverage of the state’s prison system can be characterized as minimal and superficial. In the last year, the Globe published eight stories on prison issues (two of which were about the new guidelines), while the Boston Herald published three. Almost all were short, cursory reports. Prisoners-rights advocates argue that most coverage simply accepts the DOC’s version of events at face value, as when the press simply reported the DOC’s March 2001 findings that guards committed no wrongdoing during the three-day lockdown in October 2000, despite credible evidence to the contrary unearthed by Beaubien. "Other than a handful of reporters," concludes Jamie Suarez, who heads the criminal-justice program at American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), in Cambridge, "there isn’t much commitment to covering what goes on in these facilities."

It’s not as if there’s nothing to write about. Throughout the 1990s, the DOC budget grew five percent per year to its current allocation of $430 million — a rate of growth more than twice that of the overall budget, which has grown at 2.4 percent. Earlier this year, the DOC announced that it will shut down three of its minimum-security prisons by July 1. The move marks the first time in at least 10 years that a prison will close its doors, affecting 900 prisoners and 550 guards. But since January, there have been only 15 media requests for interviews with prisoners or prison officials, according to DOC spokesman Justin Latini. (And none of those requests dealt with any of the issues inevitably raised when a prison is shuttered, such as inmate overcrowding.) Since the number of DOC prisoners has doubled since 1985, and more than 60 percent of prisoners are released straight to the street, statistics alone suggest that there’s plenty of fodder for journalists who want to go beyond the advocates-say-this-the-DOC-says-that story.

But prisoners-rights advocates say it’s nearly impossible to drum up media interest in prison issues. Suarez, of the AFSC, can reel off a list of moments when she’s peddled ideas to the press — to no avail. Just last April, she and other prisoners-rights advocates tipped off a half-dozen reporters from print, radio, and TV outlets to the fact that the DOC shut down three sections of its multi-million-dollar solitary-confinement facility because of faulty cell doors. As a result, dozens of prisoners were moved to cellblocks nine and 10 in the old portion of the Walpole prison, which had been closed after Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court ruled that conditions in the cells were so bad that housing prisoners there constituted cruel and unusual punishment. "Here, these prisoners are crowded into a place declared unfit for human habitation," she says. To date, according to Suarez, none of the outlets — which she declines to name — has bothered to report the story.

Even more dramatic news of brutality fails to capture interest. Last November, right after Thanksgiving, word got out that seven prisoners held in the solitary-confinement facility at MCI-Cedar Junction had been assaulted by guards after refusing to hand over their food trays. On December 5, Suarez and 35 or so colleagues from civil-rights and prison-reform groups in and around Boston staged a press conference on the prison’s front lawn to draw attention to the incident. Advocates came with statements and written accounts from prisoners, all of whom said they were beaten after refusing to eat rotten food. They even had chilling photographs of prisoners with black eyes and bruises around their necks. But only three reporters — from the Bay State Banner, the Patriot Ledger, and a cable-access station — showed up.

Up until the 1980s, most papers maintained a prison beat that covered prison-policy issues and newsworthy incidents inside correctional facilities. Through much of the 1990s, former Globe reporter Zachary Dowdy wrote regularly on the DOC until he left the paper in April 1999. (He now writes a "Crimes and Courts" weekly column about criminal-justice issues for Newsday.) Today, most local media cover the criminal-justice system largely by covering crime — reporting arrests, trials, and convictions. Observes Robert Keough, editor of CommonWealth magazine, which has published articles on prison-policy issues in recent years, "It’s no one’s job to worry about what goes on in the prisons anymore. There is little coverage of what happens to offenders once they’ve been put behind bars."