A reporter who gained access to the nation's largest death row in California inadvertently discovered that she had captured pictures of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of murder more than seven years ago.

In a highly-publicized case, Peterson was sentenced to death in 2005 for the murder of his wife, Laci Peterson, and their unborn child in California. He is currently on death row at the San Quentin State Prison in California.

Nancy Mullane, an independent reporter and producer, told TODAY's Matt Lauer on Wednesday that she has been going inside the facility as a reporter since 2007.

"There have been no reporters on death row in California in almost a decade," Mullane said. "So it took me years to build a relationship with the California Department of Corrections where they actually trusted me to be the first reporter to go in."

While spending time inside death row doing interviews with prisoners serving life in the San Quentin facility, she was allowed to take photos as part of her reporting.

"It wasn't until two months later that I was actually reviewing the photographs and I realized, 'Oh, I think these are Scott Peterson,'" Mullane said.

She described Peterson's environment in death row as "confined" and said that 68 prisoners live in his section of the facility. He reportedly has his own cell and can spend a few hours per day outside exercising or playing basketball.

Mullane did not get a chance to speak with Peterson, but did get to interview inmates willing to talk from their cell doors. Her reporting and observations are documented in a new book, "Life After Murder: Five Men in Search of Redemption."

 Related: Can a convicted murderer find redemption after the verdict?

In the last five years, Mullane has been studying and reporting on prisoners who are serving life in prison with the possibility of parole.

"What I have found is this is a population we don't know in prisons," Mullane said. "We don't know what people who commit a murder really are like after they've done the time, after they've done everything we've asked them to do."

Peterson is not part of that population, having been sentenced to death. He still claims innocence, and in July filed an appeal of his murder conviction with the California Supreme Court. The appeal is expected to take years to resolve.

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The wife of Atlanta Braves relief pitcher Dave Shotkoski is reliving the anger and pain of her husband’s murder with news that the killer was released from prison in Florida on Tuesday, after serving just 15 years of his 27-year sentence.

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"We have to make the government accountable to me and everybody, explain how the justice system works," said Felicia Shotkoski, 46, now a business manager in Chicago, who was informed of the release by an automated message from the Florida Department of Corrections. "I don’t believe this person is reformed … He is now walking the streets with my daughter, friends, family … It’s just not safe."

Neal Evans, now 47, was convicted in 1997 of second-degree murder for killing the baseball player in a botched robbery in front of a West Palm Beach Hotel in 1995. His first trial on a charge of first-degree murder ended with a hung jury, with the jurors voting 11-1 in favor of conviction. The case resulted in a plea deal and a 27-year sentence.

Evans had been imprisoned at South Bay Correctional Facility in South Bay, Florida. Prison officials told Shotkoski that Evans was released early because he earned “gain time” for good behavior in prison. Evans is on probation, living with his girlfriend, and has a nighttime curfew, said Shotkoski, citing information from Florida corrections officials.

"Has to report once a month, and follow his guidelines, which are laughable," she said.

Video and story from WPTV in West Palm Beach

Florida prison records show that this was Evans’ seventh prison sentence. He was sentenced to serve one to three years for convictions for robbery, grand theft auto, cocaine possession, carrying a concealed weapon and other charges dating back to 1988. In five cases, Evans was released before serving his whole sentence.

"Our justice system doesn't make sense," said Shotkoski, who hoped her story would highlight the problem of repeat offenders cycling in and out of the prisons. "They're supposed to protect people like us, yet it seems to save the criminals' rights over the victims."

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WNYT-TV

Inmates at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, N.Y., staff a state Department of Motor Vehicles call center.

When you call a company or government agency for help, there's a good chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate.

The federal government calls it "the best-kept secret in outsourcing" — providing inmates to staff call centers and other services in both the private and public sectors.

The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show. The great majority of those contracts are with other federal agencies for services as diverse as laundry, construction, data conversion and manufacture of emergency equipment.

But the program also markets itself to businesses under a different name, Unicor, providing commercial market and product-related services. Unicor made about $10 million from "other agencies and customers" in the first six months of fiscal year 2011 (the most recent period for which official figures are available), according to an msnbc.com analysis of its sales records.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don't break down which companies they do business with. But Unicor said inmates provide private call center service, including data review and sales lead generation, for "some of the top companies in America" under a federal mandate to help companies repatriate jobs they have outsourced overseas.

In a fact sheet, Unicor asserts that prisoners in the program are less likely to re-offend and are better trained for full-time work upon release. All revenue goes back into the program, which "operates at no cost to the taxpayer," it says.

The idea has filtered down to some of the states, among them Georgia, Arizona and New York.

When New York residents call the Department of Motor Vehicles, for example, they might get an inmate at Greene Correctional Institution in Coxsackie, near Albany, or at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women near White Plains, on the border with Connecticut.

"Obviously, it saves taxpayer dollars," Brian Fischer, commissioner of the state Corrections and Community Supervision Department, told NBC station WNYT of Albany. "Number two, it provides what we call a transferable skill."

Besides saving the state money, said Elizabeth Glazer, the state's deputy secretary for public safety, the program is "an investment in our state's overall safety."

"When we help offenders build the workforce skills necessary to find viable employment after incarceration, we lessen the chances they will reoffend and end up back in the state's prison system," she said.

The corrections department acknowledged that callers aren't told they're talking to a state prisoner. But they stressed that callers are protected — no personal information is displayed to the prisoners, who don't have access to computers, officials said.

In the private sector, states usually partner with business-to-business firms to run the services — the companies provide the equipment and facilities, and the state provides the labor. One such firm is Televerde, a Phoenix company that partners with the Arizona prison system to provide marketing services for major companies that have included Hitachi and Microsoft.

In a marketing paper, Microsoft says companies like Televerde "can reduce the burden on corporate marketing and local marketing teams can have more meaningful interactions with their customers." (Msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC News.)

For inmates, the appeal isn't the pay, which can be as low as 50 cents an hour. It's the training and the opportunity: "A lot of times, we need to feel like we are appreciated, and it builds self-esteem," John Howard of Brooklyn, N.Y., an inmate at Greene, told WNYT.

"It allows me the opportunity to speak to different people of different nationalities, regardless of what ethnicity, and it makes me feel like 'Wow, I can do better,'" he said.

Read the original story at WNYT.com

But Danny Donohue president of the New York Civil Service Employees Association, criticized the program for prioritizing marketable skills for prisoners over providing jobs to "law-abiding citizens."

It's "a bad idea generally and even worse considering the current economy," Donohue said.

By M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com and Bill Lambdin of WNYT-TV in Albany, N.Y. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

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