S2E13 The Crusader

I'm John Kiriak, welcome to Dead Drop, what makes us spy taking.

“This is part 13 in our series, doing time like a spy.”

And as always, we thank you, not just for listening,

but for making us a part of your whole podcasting experience. We really do believe that podcasting is a way to tell stories that otherwise would never get told. That's what this episode is about. Telling stories that would not get told otherwise,

but that need telling regardless. That same idea modulated Paul Wright long before podcasting was ever a gleam in anyone's eye. Back in 1987, as Paul tells it, he was a young army MP looking for a way to make some fast money.

Well, that translated to robbing and murdering a drug dealer about a week before he was due to get out of the army. That cost him 17 years in a state penitentiary. But as it does, prison changed Paul. As the Columbia Journalism Review headline in its story about Paul,

how a convicted murderer found his true calling

“as a jailhouse reporter and prisoner's rights crusader.”

Paul started a newspaper. The prison legal news with another inmate Ed Beed, a former member of the George Jackson Brigade, a violent radical weather underground type group. The Seattle Weekly described the publication's origin story

this way, quote, "The two men shared a revolutionary Marxist

perspective and a desire to put out on newspaper that did muck raking reporting on prison conditions and provided legal advice for inmates," unquote. What started in May 1990 as 10 photocopying pages distributed by hand grew into a 40 page monthly

with 3,600 subscribers throughout the US and many other countries. That makes PLN the longest running newspaper produced by and for current and former prisoners in US history. PLN covers all aspects of the criminal justice system, including court access, prison conditions, privatization,

disciplinary hearings, excessive force, male censorship, jails, wrongful convictions, crime labs, visitation, prison phone services, immigration detention, religious freedom, free speech, prison rape, abuse of women, retaliation, the prison litigation reform act,

medical treatment, HIV and hepatitis C, prison slave labor, disenfranchisement, the death penalty, and control units and supermax facilities.

The bottom line, however, the mainstay of PLN's coverage

over these many years has been the issue of conditions of confinement. Please meet my friend Paul Wright. When I first arrived at FCI, Loretto, the federal prison in Pennsylvania

that the Justice Department decided to send me to, I was lost and in shock, as you might imagine,

“I think I've fixed my way through it pretty well.”

But one of the things that snapped me out of that funk, that snapped me out of that depression, and that shock was a magazine that arrived in the male one day unexpectedly. And it was more like a newspaper

than a magazine in that there were no flashy color pictures. It was almost entirely text, a handful of ads, but mostly text. And even then it was mostly legalese cases that had been decided in a variety of state and federal courts,

a letter from the editor, Paul Wright. I was addicted instantly to prison legal news. In fact, I still subscribed to prison legal news and it's been 13 years now. I expect to subscribe to prison legal news

for the rest of my life. I learned so much from it and besides that, much of what I write is based on prison legal news and its own reporting. There are no other publications

like prison legal news except for its sister publication, criminal legal news, which is a lot of bit more geared toward defense attorneys, but still just as wonderful, just as eye-opening. We're very happy today to have with us Paul Wright,

the founder, the executive editor, and the publisher of both prison legal news and criminal legal news magazines. Paul, great for you to be with us. Thank you so much. - Hey, thanks for having me, John.

Paul, you and I have been present a long time. You and I didn't know each other. In 2012 or 2013, but you had followed my case, and you just took it upon yourself, out of the goodness of your heart,

to send me a subscription to prison legal news, it quite literally changed the course of my life. In that, like you, it made me an activist.

for prison legal news. I know what the story is and it's probably not what the general public expect to hear. So tell us about the conceptualization of such a magazine and how you actually did it.

“- I think basically, those story starts with the fact”

that I was a military policeman in the army when I got arrested in Washington State in 1987,

and I was arrested and ultimately convicted

of shooting and killing a drug dealer during an armed robbery, and I got a 25 year form on sentence. And I went to prison, I was 21 years old when I was arrested. I went to Spain, like 17 years in maximum security prisons

in Washington State, and I thought I was fairly well informed that well read about prisons in criminal justice, probably better informed than I think the average 21 year old in America was in 1987. And that said, while I got to prison,

it was very different than what I had expected. And I think probably most Americans, even the well informed ones, a lot of my perceptions or expectations or for whatever had been influenced by Hollywood movies,

by television and things like that.

“But I think like a lot of things though,”

Hollywood doesn't prepare you for reality. And in some respects, I'll say that the reality was worse and more mundane than what I'd expected. And it was also different. And one thing I have to say is the stereotype

that a lot of people have that all prisoners do what prison is rape, and get raped, and stab each other is, that's the part that, okay, this isn't really true, this doesn't really happen. But for me, it was more, I was more surprised

about the dehumanization, the casual brutality, and things like that. And what kind of came about for me was the idea of having staff tell me, the prisoners don't have any rights. And that's kind of like, okay, now that can't be.

Because I didn't know anything about the law or about legal rights or civil rights or anything like that at the time, but it's like, okay, this isn't sounding right. And so then I started, I started talking to the prisoners, jailhouse lawyers, learning more about the law,

but the publishing thing came, I met a prisoner named Ed Meep, and he was a political prisoner,

he was a revolutionary communist,

who'd bet the founder of the George Jackson Brigade. And he was doing time for a botched bank robbery. And Ed had published a number of magazines and newsletters, while he wasn't prison. And the thing was, Washington has unique

that among state prison systems, prisoners in Washington have been publishing newsletters and magazines that he practically going back to the 1960s, so he wasn't in the context that we're writing out of blank slate

or we're starting from scratch, but we already had kind of like a blueprint or experience doing it. And Ed had published a number of magazines. And we were talking about the fact that

we thought prisoners in Washington and their families really doubt a newsletter or a magazine to state post it or be informed about what's happening in the criminal justice system in Washington. And at the time, this was 1989 or so

that we're having this discussion and watch out a small prison system at the time. It was around five or six thousand prisoners in the context that today it's around 18 or 19,000. So it's quadrupled in size over the past 30 years,

but at the time it's around five or six thousand. And so that was our goal. And the big thing I use about publishing prison legal news is the idea that we use it as a tool to organize a rail.

“And I think that if you want to think about”

about the prison system, and this is how we conceptualize at the time and 30 years later, now almost, about to date myself too badly. But after doing this for 36 years,

I still think of it this way. Here's a lot of people for the term by Alexander Solution, Heads and of the Gulagarka Polago. And if you think about America's prison and jail population,

it's 2.3 million people on any given day.

Which if this were a city, it'd be a city of the size of Houston, the difference is the city is not. These 2.3 million people aren't all in one geographical location.

They're scattered among 3700 jails and 2,000 prisons across the length of bread to the United States, which, as we know, is a really big country. So the question is, if you're trying to organize this population or do anything around it,

And again, when we started, we were only focused on Washington State, which is a small state. And that's how we started. And that was in 1990.

I was in a separate prison, but it's how we started publishing in 1990. I was in one prison and it was another.

And basically, he hand typed five pages of the magazine

in his cell. I hand typed five pages in my cell. And we sent it to an outside volunteer to take two kinkos back of the day and have photocopied and garnish a mailing list

was 7500 people. And that's how we got started. - One of the things that surprised me when I got to prison and started writing my own blog, letters from the Redo, was how many people came up to me

to warn me, because I apparently did know that I lost all my rights when I came to prison.

“And I was like, what concentration have you been reading?”

- They tell you that, and that's not actually true. - Yeah. - But sadly, a lot of the people, the working persons they get in, yeah, working prisons, exactly. Yeah, it's not just idiot prisoners.

It's the guards and they want to know who do you think you are that you can just write these blogs from prison. So yeah, but you knew from the get-go that this was something that you were allowed to do. This was your constitutional right.

- I knew that on the one hand, on the other hand, I'll say

is for basically, I edited prison legal news for 13 years,

from 1990 to like, out in 2003. And, but that said, our magazine was censored, I've had my book censored, I've had prison legal news censored. For years, the Washington D.O.C. made a big deal about having their television officers read all my mail

and photocopy ed, and everything else. And I got put in segregation on a regular basis, including specifically for articles that I'd written. And I think it just comes down.

“And at some point, you realize that I'm going to get”

kicked around and screwed over on every discretionary decision that they have to make about. I'm going to get the short end of the stick on. But then I guess the way I look at it is, they're not treating me that well to be given with.

And then I think Janice Joplin says, freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose. And I think that by the point, you're in kind of the shifold prisons. You really don't have a lot.

But you really don't have a lot left to lose, telling the world about what a shifold prison you're in. Yeah, you can say that again. I have to agree with you about sort of the subtle cruelty. I once had my head, my cell raided.

I was writing a book, which became my second book, called The Doing Time Like A Spide, how the CIA taught me to survive in thriving prison. One, two literary awards. One, the pen first amendment award

“and the forward reviews memoir of the year.”

But one of the semi-literate guards that raided the cell, he was able to read a couple of the words on the page and after spelling them out slowly, he determined that my book was a threat to the safety and security of the institution.

And so I was called to the Lieutenant's Office. And I wouldn't talk to them about the book because the book was not their business. I said they could be heroes of the book or they can be assholes in the book.

It was totally up to there. And they knew that there was no threat to the safety and security of the institution. And so they just handed the text back to me. What they did do, though, was to start

taking individual chapters after I would write them. And I had to write this book in longhand. They would take individual chapters and confiscate them and then accidentally misplace them

so that they were never returned to me.

And so what I ended up doing was as soon as I would finish writing at the end of the day, I would seal it up in an envelope, address it to my attorney, write legal mail on it, which meant they weren't allowed to intercept it.

And just send it to my attorney. And she just held the envelopes for me and ended up being something like 27 or 28 envelopes. The warden in his infinite wisdom ordered an investigation on how in the world

I was able to smuggle out the chapters of this book because they were being published one chapter at a time at the Huffington Post. And we laughed and laughed myself and made tonight. All he had to do was ask me it, I would have told him.

I'm just mail him to my attorney, which is perfectly legal and appropriate. But he had half a dozen stack members investigating me to see how in the world I was getting these contraband chapters out. How did you get prison legal news out?

Did you just stick it in an envelope

And then the volunteer was going to kinkos? - Yep, that's exactly what we did. And again, like I say, I was having my mail opened by the television officers. And I used to turn loosely.

Yeah, they'd be reading my incoming and outgoing mail at perusing it. And yeah, that was like a big thing. They did that for years if not decades.

“And again, I think that was one of those things”

where they had to have a very compelling reason to censure mail leaving the prison. At one point in the mid-90s, by that point, the prison legal news were pretty well-established. They started trying to censure.

They started enacting regulations

for basically wholesale censorship

of the information coming into the prison. So they were going after, they were going after basically all the sources of information that we had newspaper clippings back as seen articles, photocopies, things like that.

So that liked another lawsuit that we won. But yeah, they were basically trying to cut off the flow of information to keep me from getting information that I could publish. And then they were trying to keep us

from basically being able to disseminate things. But as far as the outgoing, after 1991, the first eight issues of prison legal news were hand-tight. After 1991, we found a volunteer that was happy to desktop publish us.

“And put us into the early desktop publishing software,”

which made us look a lot better and improved our look at field. And so we switched over to that. At that point, then I'm just sending the articles out. So that was, we typed the articles up, send them out,

and that our volunteer would do the layout and design, send us a draft of the magazine to do a proof read on, and then we send directions, and then get that, and then that was the magazine that was going to our subscribers.

And we did that. I did that for basically around 12 years. If you're enjoying dead drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast

from the cost-art and touchstone family. Just the photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism, what dead drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson

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what it felt like being in all those dangerous places, like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the photographer will put you right there

on the ground, right next to David. Inside is head, in fact, it's a hell of a podcast, and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts, or at cost-artandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes.

In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts that cost-art and touchstone, like the donor, a DNA horror story, the Hall closet, sage wellness within, and the how not to make a movie podcast. Who knows, your next favorite podcast

might be just a click away. Now back to Dead Drop. Oh, one of the things that you and I have talked about we've gotten a good chuckle out of it is, in every issue of President Lincoln is, in the last three or four pages,

you've got little snippets that you pull from new services, local newspapers, local TV and radio stations,

and it's almost always about wrongdoing

on the part of prison authorities. Guards smuggling in drugs and phones and operating drones to drop in packages of drugs into the yard and cops getting fired and prosecuted and crooked wardens taking bribes.

How did that start? And when you first started PLN,

“is that the kind of thing that you were focusing on?”

- We've also focused on, we've also focused on reporting on the news that can help people help themselves. And because the reality is that for the vast majority of prisoners, there's no cavalry coming to help them,

there's no one to help them. If they can't help themselves, they're not getting any. And so that's the type of information we focus on. But what happens is, both in presidents, it's like got out of prison,

there's just such a vast amount of information that flows through about prisons. And so the content of the news and brief is basically, what's up that's interesting? But it's not really newsworthy

and that it doesn't really bear it a full article of its own, but there's something to it that would merit by more coverage and more people fighting out about it. The other thing, too, is I'm really sad to say

is that some items are so common. I'll just give one example.

- Yeah.

- This is something that it's so common

that we publish a magazine, nothing other than that every month.

“And so some of the things that's happened”

is for years I could pile the news and breathe. And I just have a pile of news articles and then when it comes time to write it, I'd go through on. And my tutorial process is I need stuff

that geographically diverse when you send from all 50 states. We want to have subject matter diversity. We don't want to be all prison rapes, for example. We want to mix. And it's also stuff that we don't really have

and either we don't have enough information to do a full length article on, or it just doesn't merit it because it's not that he's worthy. And so while he said, "Happen is with the prison rapes by staff,

it'd be like, "I have so many of 'em."

They just keep building up. It's like, "Okay, we'll run three or four of 'em this month. I'll do the other next month." At the meantime, we've got another 10 to pick from. So the pile would just keep getting bigger.

And so one day I think this was gosh.

“This was probably around 25 years ago or something.”

I thought, "Wow, we've got a whole bunch of these prison rap articles. "Let me see how many we've got." And as well, this is without searching for stuff. This is why not us going out of our way to look for it. Like, "Wow, we've got 50 or 60 incidents here."

You know what, let's just do a big article. Let's do a roundup article with all these rapes by staff and the fact that it's happening all over the country, it's happening with modernness, regularity. That'll shed some attention to this problem

and people will start paying attention. And so anyways, every couple of years, we do that. And yes, some people may be paying attention, but know it hasn't gotten any better. So we're doing all that.

But that's just one of the things of how the news have briefed some of these articles just been off into creating their own big type articles. So it's just the fact that a lot of the stuff is just really common, repetitive, and everything else.

So it merits its own. But other than that, it's stuff that is, yes, it's newsworthy, but not that newsworthy. The other thing I found is that for stuff, this is why not us going out of our way to look for it.

Like, "Wow, we've got like, you know, 50 or 60 incidents here." Well, let's just do a, just let's do a big article, kind of like, let's do a roundup article with all these rapes by staff and the fact that it's happening all over the country,

it's happening with bananas, regularity, maybe. That'll shed some attention to this problem and people will start paying attention. And so anyways, every couple of years, we do that. And, you know, yes, some people may be paying attention,

but know it hasn't gotten any better. So, you know, so we're doing all that. But that's just one of the things of how the news have briefed some of these articles just been often to creating their own big type articles.

So, it's just the fact that a lot of the stuff is just really common, repetitive and everything else so it merits its own. But other than that, it's stuff that is, yes, it's newsworthy, but not that newsworthy.

The other thing I found is that for a lot of people, this is like the favorite part of the magazine and I kind of called the news of the insane and bizarre too.

“So I think this also fits into the thing about,”

or they say you can't make this stuff up. There's just a lot of this stuff that, yeah, you can't make this stuff up. - Have you seen anything that makes you optimistic? Have you seen any changes over the years?

We've had passage of the second chance act.

The first step act, we've got at least lip service from political figures trying to make things better, saying that they want things to get better. I think it's really getting better. - Not that I can see I'd say anything.

Things are worse now than when we started. Prison legal is in 1990. Now look at the key things. The prisoners have any individual and forcible rights or do they have more of them?

No, they don't. The prison litigation reform act is really made a lot much harder for prisoners to get relief in any challenges or conditions of confinement. It's also deliberately restricted

the ability of prisoners to get lawyers to help them. On number of fronts, so there's that. And one of the things I've talked about a lot over the years is the fact that there's some half-hearted talk about prison reform.

But for the most part, it means we just that. But when you talk about the issue of prison rape, a lot of fanfare is a prison rape elimination act. But what people don't realize is that all the prison rape elimination act does.

It's a data collection statute. It doesn't give rape survivors any independent rights.

or possibility of prisoners being raped.

“And when it's a self-reporting data act, it's just that.”

So we're relying on prison and jail officials to accurately report the incidents of rape and their custody. And we already know that there's huge discrepancies in their data reporting.

A lot of us just wrong, some of us actual lies. And everyone knows it. But yeah, they aren't even auditing the accuracy of the data. And there's no real downside to any of it.

So I think that's one of the things-- and I think people were in an optimistic when a president Trump passed the first step back than his first term. And that said, it was by American criminal justice standards,

it was almost revolutionary in terms of--

this is the first progressive piece of prison rights of criminal defundant legislation. And if not in American history, certainly in the last 50 or 60 years, certainly in my lifetime. And but then we've also seen the bureaucracy

of the BOP, the Federal Bureau of Presence, actively thwart it, and not actively and force it, or give it the full force of law that it was meant to. So I'm not sure that I would call that a lot of-- I'm not sure that I would be overly optimistic about that.

“I think that when you start looking at the key issues”

of life and death, there's not a single prison system or jail of an America that I would say, if I were sick, I would want to be there. And that was one of the things I thought about before we started the interview, I mentioned that yeah,

I'd had some health issues.

But in the drawings I thought about was, if I've been having

these health issues while I was still at prison, I would likely have died. Yes. Yes, so I watched people die in prison. There were three people in the eye.

Three prisoners who died while I was in prison, one guard committed suicide in the parking lot and from the prison. But yeah, people die in prison. You're not getting medical care there.

And I think that's one of the things that-- the legal term is the liberty difference. And I think when you really think about it, it really accurately describes the fact that for the most poem, most of the people working there sadly,

including the medical staff, they really don't care if the people are their custody liver die. And if you do, that's fine. And if you don't, that's fine, too. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

I've got to call a few-- it's about a month ago now. A month and a half ago, I was driving in Washington early one Saturday morning about 7.30 in the morning. And I got to call in my phone just said, Chicago, Illinois.

I don't know anybody really in Chicago. Whose name I don't have in the phone. So I was curious, and I answered the phone. And the voice says, hello, John Kerry Ocho, I said, yes. He said, this is William Marshall.

And I was thinking, William Marshall, I know that name. Why do I know that name? And he says, I'm the director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. And I said, yes, you are. I said, to what do I have the pleasure of a call

from the director of the Bureau of Prisons? And he said, you have been talking shit about the BOP for 10 years. And I said, correction, I've been talking shit about the BOP for 13 years.

And he says, thus, the purpose of my call. He said, the president has asked me with reorganizing the BOP and fixing it. And I said, yeah, good luck with that. I said, your problem is everybody's corrupt.

And the place is so corrupt, you're never

going to be able to change it unless you break the union and replace everybody. And that's never going to happen, especially not in the two years that the president has left in this term. And he said, be that as it may?

Would you be willing to serve on an informal panel to advise me on how to restructure the BOP? I said, absolutely yes. And I never heard from him again. So it just pull you and I'm going to show that like I said,

for a long time. And I'm one of these guys that's always accused of being overly optimistic. I've been overly optimistic when I'd thought about the potential for positive changes

in the prison system. But the entire system is corrupt. It's not just that it's at the federal level or just at the state level or even just at the local level. The entire car serial system is broken and corrupt.

You've followed these issues, though, more closely than I do.

“Is there anything out there that makes you hopeful?”

I would say the problem. I'm not sure how you're using the term corrupt. But I wouldn't say that they're necessarily corrupt.

as intended. And I guess one of the-- I think everyone's heard the term--

“I think everyone's heard the term a purest victory”

for the King Piries would win these battles,

but the processing, decimated, disarming, and ultimately

lost everything. Does every victory depleted his forces? And a professor named Jeffrey Ryanman is wondering who coined the term purest, purest D.C. to describe the criminal justice system,

which is basically it's such a massive failure at every level that it actually succeeds. And I first heard this, I don't know, 30 years ago, some time in the 90s. And I saw it, wow, that actually sums it up.

And I think that's the problem. Here is that everyone that I think that you talk to that has half a brain will tell you that the criminal justice system is broken, that it's his functional. It makes things worse, both in terms of the people,

in terms of prime victims, in terms of the taxpayer, in terms of the people that measure the criminal system as defendants or prisoners, or whatever. And yet it troubles on. And not only does it trouble on, it keeps growing.

When I started prison legal, there was in 1990,

there were a million people locked up.

And when 10 years, there was 2 million people locked up. So the prison system doubled at a decade. And everyone's totally fine with it.

“So that's why I think-- and if you look at the thing”

at the whole thing about any efforts at reform, which have been fueled far between, there are just basically no one's really doing anything about it or has done anything about it. And I think when you look at the idea of prisoners

having rights, individual enforceable rights, that's crazy talk in this country. And I think-- but it also is not just prisoners when a book or a break of the news. I didn't want to sound too jaded.

But I just shrug my shoulders and said, I haven't heard about anything happening in a book or a day that hasn't happened. That isn't happening on a daily basis to American prisoners here in the United States.

And a point that was lost on almost every one, but prison legal news readers is the fact that a lot of the guards had a book or a grave that were accused in some cases convicted of torturing Iraqi prisoners,

they were the Pennsylvania National Guard Reserves, and their day jobs back in America was they were prison guards. It wasn't like these guys were working in restaurants at the drive-through or something.

And then they're torturing prisoners in Iraq. It's like, now these guys are actually prison guards here at the US, and they're going over to Iraq to apply their trade. But one of the things that didn't get a lot of attention

is the fact that it was American prison officials at the DOC director and commissioner-level, guys, like Gary DeLan from Utah, Ronnie Angelo from Virginia, John Armstrong from Connecticut, and a couple of these guys, these were the guys that set up the Iraqi prison system.

And no one is aiming about, "Hey, why do we have a bunch of cash here?" And at least guys all had checkered histories in America long before they left our shores. And so they're going to other countries

to set up the same thing. So, but when you start looking at, for example, members of Congress, whether it's members of the Senate or the House, I would say this, almost 40 years of following and reporting off prisons and jails,

the only elected politician at the federal level that I can think of that's ever shown any actual interest

“in prisons or prisoners, I think, from a progressive,”

or even a human rights perspective, I think, was Ted Kennedy and John Ossoff. And like that, how many people have passed through the ranks of Congress in the Senate and let's just say in the last 60 years?

So, we've got that. And I remember when Justice Ginsburg died and a reporter called me up that said, "Do you have any comment about her passing?" I said, "Not really."

I was like, was she a defender of prisoners' rights? And I said, "No, not especially."

And I said, "We've never had anyone on the Supreme Court

that I would call a defender of prisoners' rights." The best we have some, we've had some justices that are less hostile to the idea of prisoners' rights, but we haven't had anyone that I would say is a crusader or a visionary or anything like that.

And I think that's one of the things that, you know, when you look at the rubric or whatever, a criminal justice reform, we don't have anyone that's pro-pricier rights, but then if we wanna start talking about politicians

that openly campaigned out platforms of outright torture of prisoners of the mistreatment of people, we don't have enough time to talk about them.

And starting from almost the city council level,

up to the presidential level, governor, senators, and everyone else. But it almost seems like the idea of cruelty and like cruelty and torture are almost ingrained in the American political system.

And I think getting back to that when I say about Americans, not having individual enforceable rights. And it's not just prister. That's one of the things about the United States

is to ever sign the convention against torture, for example. And I would like to think that's a fairly non-controversial thing that most people would agree, especially since we wrote it,

we wrote the United Nations Convention against torture, and then the Senate wouldn't ratify it. - And they won't ratify it, they have a thing in it,

so people are tortured by the police.

And I use the term quite literally.

“And I think this is one of those things.”

Whatever your views are, crime and punishment, whatever your views are, sentence it, whatever your views are, anything related to this. You know, to use some examples,

like I'm gonna leave, I don't people remember him. But he was a security guard. He got hauled into a police station. I think it was at the Bronx at Brooklyn,

whichever it was. And he got raped in those police station bathroom, was a toilet plunger. And he literally had a toilet plunger, shoved up his ass,

and not just shoved up his ass,

but it ruptured his balls and ruptured his internal organs.

His liver was lacerating everything. - Yes, this type of horrific, no one is gonna dispute that this was torture. And I think it was, he wasn't even accused of a crime. But even he had been accused of a crime.

You've been convicted of a crime. There's no justification on the planet that says the government should be allowed to shoved a toilet plunger of someone's butt and injure them. And this is why we need laws

like the convention against torture. And the fact that in the United States, they won't sign it or pass it. And I think this is just, I guess he was this as an example

that I think is,

“I think emblematic is part of the problem”

of just the overall human rights situation in America. - There are around 130 of us. We're on the right track. The biggest advantage of Choppy-Fi for me is, that we don't need any technical information for the world.

We can all go back to the front end and the front end. And so it was like in the front end of the online shop. If Choppy-Fi is on the right track, then we'll get the platform to the real advantage. It's just the basic thing.

Our whole business is on the right track. Now let's start a constant test on Choppy-Fi.com. (upbeat music) Paul, a couple of weeks ago, Senator Mike Lee of very conservative Republican from Utah,

posted a series of tweets on X, in which he said that a constituent from Utah had called his office to say that they had a relative who was incarcerated, who just vanished one day. And when the Senator himself called the prison,

he identified himself as a sitting U.S. Senator and the response which turned out to be from the assistant warden was,

“"You have a lot of fucking nerve calling here”

and hung up on him." So he tweeted that he was flabbergasted that somebody would talk to a sitting U.S. Senator this way. But more importantly, he said his constituent was just missing, just gone.

So I tweeted at him and I said, Senator, I think I can help you. Your constituent is probably in something called decil therapy. I then got a call from his chief of staff.

I went up to the, to the hill, capital hill, to meet with the chief of staff. And we determined that this person was in what is called decil therapy, where in the federal system,

if they want to disappear you, they will just put you on a bus and the bus takes you from the prison to a different prison. And from that prison to a transportation center.

And then they put you on con air. And then from con air, you go to the central prison, whatever it's called in Oklahoma City. And from Oklahoma City, the act in South Dakota, and then onto Lampoca, California, et cetera, et cetera.

With the idea being while here in what they call transportation status, you may not have access to a telephone or to a computer or to a pen and paper. And they can keep you in this no man's land

for as long as 18 months. Senator Lee is furious about it. Not to say that he could necessarily do anything about it, but I'm wondering if we eventually see changes to these kinds of roles, this kind of corruption

If it might come from the political right,

relief might come from the political right rather than from the left. We're not seeing, for example, the Congressional Black Caucus taken a position on this stuff. - Democrats have been charitable on these issues.

“And the worst thing is happen to American prisoners”

with the prison with the East Reform Act, which was signed in the law by Bill Clinton in the East. - Anti-terrorism, an effective death penalty act, also signed in the law by Bill Clinton. So now, Democrats have been generally charitable

on these issues. But I'm the guy that thinks that the human rights defense that are about five-founder, we've all spent non-partisan. And I've also looked at it that the issue of human rights shouldn't have a political party

and that all right thinking people should be opposed to mistreatment and abuse,

regardless of whatever your political views are,

whether you have a bunch or non, or wherever you consider yourself to be on the political spectrum. He is the Amner Lee, my example. If you think it's okay for police officials

to ram a toilet plunge up someone's butt, nothing, if you think that's okay, nothing I have to say is gonna change your mind. - That's right.

“- And that's sad, I think to their credit,”

most Americans don't think things like that are okay. - That's right. - But the big thing is we don't have no-one on political class at a leadership level is willing to codify individual enforceable rights.

And that's where I think the big problem kind of shirt-clatted tubes and stuff like that. And yeah, to your point, yeah, the congressional black caucus, they have not been anywhere on these some rights issues.

And when you look at a lot of these bills and statutes that are anti-prisitor, they're anti-human rights, they don't just pass Congress. It passes unanimously.

- You can huge majorities. - Yes. - That's one of those things for hey, the supreme Soviet, the he day of the Soviet Union under Stalin had more descent and differences in opinion.

Then Congress and state legislatures have on criminal justice legislation these days, and they're, and none of the stuff is passing, like I say, my narrow origins of the passing with enormous margins and no descent.

- Paul, you've been doing this for a very long time. Do you have any calls for hope? Are you seeing any good developments on the state level? Are you aware of any particular talent in any of the state to departments of corrections?

Is something that might translate to the federal system? - Not really. Generally the people that get the jobs of the state and federal level for the most part, they're a bunch of political hacks.

I got a lot of conferences, I talked to people. And that's, yes, there, there are what I would call, yeah, there's prison administrators that I think they fancy themselves progressive. But I think one guy at these retired now,

but AJ Wall, he was the DOC director for Rhode Island. He wants me to comment of, look, we're pointed by the governor. So can tell people are demanding the governor or so appoint better commissioners or do more,

you're gonna get what you're gonna get. And I think that's also one of those things is that these are inherently political patronage positions. And there's no push to have to actually have for lack of a better term, better prison conditions

or better prisons. And I think that at the end of the day, the mission of most of these prison officials is the literally, keep their heads down, keep the prisons out of the headlines and make sure no one escapes.

And that's about it. And hopefully not too many people die on their watch. And I think that kind of sums it up. But if you start saying that the prisons anywhere or laboratories are pretty full arm or hotbeds

of making people better or anything like that,

“that's what really distinguishes the United States”

on the rest of the world. You go to countries like whether it's diverse as Columbia or Bangladesh or wherever in the third world, they'll tell you, you know what, we're poor countries, we don't have a lot of resources,

but we're doing the best we can. The United States is different in that. We're a rich country.

We spend at least a hundred billion dollars

if not who are caging to an half million people a year. But we actually do stuff that we actually know is gonna make things worse. And I'll give you one example by the mid-90s, but what President Clinton and Congress repealed

the Hell Grants in prison for prisoners. By the end of the 90s, every state except for Texas to their credit had repealed all higher education in prisons for prisoners. And we know that as long as they've had studying

the education prison going back to the 1920s, literally, at that point, for at least almost a century, at that point over a century now,

the more education people at prison get,

the lower their recidivism rate. And so what are they consistently taking away education in prison? So I think that kind of tells you everything

“you need to know how the legislative agenda is.”

And also the more the president objectives are, the president of prison budgets, they ballooned up, they consume more money than they ever do. They're huge parts of state budgets of particular these days.

And what are they doing to reduce recidivism and prove conditions and things like that?

And the answer is not much.

Nothing at all.

“Thank you again for talking to us today, Paul.”

As I hope you appreciate our conversation just barely scratched the surface. We'll be talking to Paul again, that's a promise.

And as always, we thank you for listening

and for doing all those proactive things that go beyond listening. Thank you for liking, subscribing, rating,

“reviewing and commenting on the podcast wherever you listen.”

It really does make a difference. In the next episode, the ripple effects of the torture story that put me in prison begin to ripple bigger. Awareness produces outrage,

which slowly begins to produce results. The U.S. Senate takes up the cause, but will they do the right thing? The expedient thing or something else entirely. That's next time.

See you then, I'm John Kiryaku. Dead drop is written by John Kiryaku and Alan Katz, cost art and touched on productions, produces the podcast and John Kiryaku, Alan Katz and Nick McCannick are its executive producers.

(upbeat music)