TO OUR READERS: Why The Jailbook is being discontinued
The Courier Herald has published the Jailbook — a weekly collection of local booking photos on our website — for years. On May 1, this feature will be discontinued.
The Courier Herald has published the Jailbook — a weekly collection of local booking photos on our website — for years.
On May 1, this feature will be discontinued.
This was not a quick or easy decision. We know the Jailbook has loyal readers, and we know some of you will disagree with us. We want to explain our thinking.
What the Jailbook was…
Each Wednesday, we compiled booking photos and arrest information from the Laurens County jail and published them as a weekly PDF. It was one of our most popular online offerings.
The reasons newspapers started publishing mugshot roundups were practical: arrest records are public documents, the information was easy to produce and readers clicked on it. All of that is still true.
But ease and legality are not the same as sound journalism. Over time, we have had to ask harder questions about whether this content serves our community the way good journalism should.
Why we’re stopping…
Our ethics policy — shared across all newsrooms in the Georgia Trust for Local News network — is clear: we should not publish mugshot galleries with no reporting context. That is what the Jailbook was.
A booking photo is taken at the moment of arrest, before any charges are proven, before a court has heard a word of evidence and sometimes before a person fully understands what they are accused of.
The Jailbook published those photos week after week, in bulk, with no context, for anyone with an internet connection to find for years afterward.
Arrest is not conviction. Many people booked into the jail are never charged. Many are charged and acquitted. Some are wrongfully arrested. The Jailbook treated all of them the same, attaching their faces to the word “jail” in perpetuity.
We are also mindful of who disproportionately ends up in booking photo roundups: people charged with minor offenses, people experiencing poverty or addiction or mental health crises, people who have the fewest resources to push back. Publishing their photos at scale, stripped of context, is not the kind of journalism we want to do.
This decision, like many we will make in a continuous process of crafting our vision for the future, is driven by the belief that we exist to do more than simply reproduce information, but to add the perspective, clarity, insight and depth that make it truthful, and trustworthy.
That conviction will continue to guide our publication’s content strategy as we work to find the best ways to serve you, and cover this community in a way that no one else can.
What we will do instead…
Ending the Jailbook does not mean we will stop covering crime and public safety. Going forward, we will continue to do the following:
• Cover felony arrests and cases of significant public concern with full reporting, not just a photo.
• Follow cases to their conclusion, including verdicts, plea agreements and dismissals.
• Publish mugshots in specific circumstances: when public safety is at risk, when a suspect is prominent, or when the public value clearly outweighs the potential harm to the individual.
• Report on crime trends and data that help readers understand public safety in Laurens County.
A photo in a weekly grid tells you someone was arrested. A reported story tells you what happened, what it means and what comes next.
What happens to the archive?
We will remove the Jailbook archive from our website. Booking photos that appeared only in the Jailbook will no longer be searchable on our site. This reflects our commitment to weighing the long-term consequences of online permanence.
Arrest records remain public. They are available through the Laurens County Sheriff’s Office. We are not erasing history; we are deciding to no longer host a searchable mugshot index.
If you have questions about a specific past Jailbook entry, feel free to contact us at newsroom@courierheraldtoday.com.
A word to readers who disagree…
We expect pushback. Some of you rely on the Jailbook. Some believe public records should simply be public. We understand that.
Our answer: Public records and responsible journalism are not the same thing. We have always had the legal right to publish these photos. The question we kept returning to was whether it was the right thing to do. We no longer believe it is.
If you want to tell us we got this wrong, we are listening.
Write to us at newsroom@courierheraldtoday.com or use the Tell It! form on our site.
– The Courier Herald