John Kiriakou's Dead Drop - S2E13 The Crusader

Episode Date: August 10, 2026

IN THIS EPISODE John was hardly the first person to point out corruption in America's penal system. Paul Wright was serving a 17 year sentence for murdering a drug dealer when, in May 1990, he started The Prison Legal News. Prison changes people; it changed Paul profoundly. He transformed from a rudderless young man into a veritable crusader for prison amd legal reform. SHOW NOTESLearn more about Paul Wright and The Prison Legal News here.If you're enjoying this podcast, please sample our other podcasts at Costard & Touchstone Productions. Your next podcast obsession is just a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production. I'm John Kirooku. Welcome to Dead Drop, What Makes a Spy Tick? 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 motivated 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 headlined in its story about Paul, how a convicted murderer found his true calling as a jailhouse reporter and

prisoners' rights crusader. Paul started a newspaper, the prison legal news, with another inmate, Ed Mead, 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. The two men shared a revolutionary Marxist perspective and a desire to put out a newspaper that did muck-raking reporting on prison conditions and provided legal advice for inmates, unquote.

What started in May 1990 as 10 photocopied pages distributed by hand grew into a 40-page monthly with 3,600 subscribers throughout the U.S. and many other countries. That makes PLN the longest running newspaper produced by and for current and former prisoners in U.S. 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, 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 faked 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 mail 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. 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 little 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 it happening, John. Paul, you and I've been friends 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. Tell us about how you came up with the idea 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 the story starts with the fact that I was military police 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, four-month sentence. And I went to prison.

I was 21 years old when I was arrested. I went to spending like 17 years in maximum security prisons in 1,000 prisons in 1,000. Washington State. And I thought I was fairly well-informed and well-read about prisons in criminal justice, probably better informed that I think the average 21-year-old in America was in 1987. And that said, when 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 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'd say that the reality was worse and more mundane than what I'd expected. It was also different. And one of the things I have to say is a stereotype that a lot of people have that all presiders 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, 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, prisoners don't have any rights. And I was 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. 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 B. And he was a political prisoner. He was a revolutionary

communist who had the founder of the George Jackson Brigade. And he was doing time for a botched bank robbery. and added published a number of magazines and newsletters while he was in prison. And the thing was, Washington is unique in that among state prison systems, prisoners in Washington have been publishing newsletters and magazines independently going back to the 1960s. So it wasn't in the context that we're writing on a blank slate or we're starting from scratch. We already had kind of like a blueprint or experience doing it. and added publish a number of magazines. And we're talking about the fact that we thought prisoners in Washington and their families really need to have a newsletter or a magazine to stay posted or be informed about what's happening in the criminal justice system in Washington.

And I think at the time, this was 1989 or so that we're having this discussion. And Washington had 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 times it's around five or six thousand. And so that was our goal. And the big thing about using about publishing prison legal news is the idea that we use it as a tool to organize around. 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, 40 years later now almost, not to date myself too badly. But after doing this for 36 years, I still think of it this way, is I think a lot of people have heard the term by Alexander Solzhenit of the Gulag Archipelago. And if you think about the 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 3,700 jails and 2,000 prisons across the length and breadth of 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, how do you do it?

And do it around the publication. And again, when we started, we were only focused on Washington. and state, which is a small state. And that's how we started. And that was in 1990. I was in a separate prison by the time we started publishing in 1990. I was in one prison. Ed was in 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 Kinko's back of the day. and have photocopied, and our initial mailing list was 7,500 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 Loretto, was how many people came up to me to warn me because I apparently didn't know that I lost all my rights when I came to prison. And I was like, what constitution have you been reading? They tell you that, and that's not actually true. Yeah. But sadly, a lot of the people that work in prisons think it is.

Yeah. Work in 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 until I got 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 DOC made a big deal about having their intelligence officers read all my mail and photocopy it 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. At some point, you realize that I'm going to get dicked around and screwed over on every discretionary decision that they have to make about me. I'm going to get the short end of the stick on. But then I was, but then I guess the way I look at it is they're not treating me that well to

begin 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 these shitfold 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 shithole 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 cell rated. I was writing a book, which became my second book called Doing Time Like a Spy, How the CIA taught me to survive in Thurface. I was writing a book. I was writing a book, thrive in prison. Won two literary awards, one of the Penn First Amendment Award and the Forward Reviews

Memoir of the Year. But one of the semi-literate guards that rated 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 them. And they knew that there was no threat to the safety and security of an 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 misplaced 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. It 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 my cellmates and I. All they had to do is ask me and I would have told him.

I'm just mailing him to my attorney, which is perfectly legal and appropriate. But he had half a dozen staff 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 in an envelope and send it to the volunteer and then the volunteer was going to Kinko's? Yeah, that's exactly what we did. And again, like I say, I was having my mail opened by the intelligence officers and I used the term loosely. Yeah, they'd be reading my incoming and outgoing mail and perusing it. And, you know, that was like a big thing. They did that for years, if not decades. And again, I think that, one of those things where they have to have a very compelling reason to censor mail leaving the prison.

At one point in the mid-90s, by that point, prison legal news were pretty well established. They started trying to censor, 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, magazine articles, photocopies, things like that. So that liked another lawsuit that 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, starting in 1991, the first eight issues of prison legal days were hand typed. After 1991, we found a volunteer that was happy to desktop publish us.

put us into the early desktop publishing software, which made us look a lot better and improved our look and feel. And so we switched over to that. At that point, then I'm just sending the articles out. And 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'd send in corrections 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. Wow.

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David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast and you can find it wherever you you find your favorite podcasts or at costard and touchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at costard 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. Paul, one of the things that you and I have talked about and we've gotten a good chuckle out of it is in every issue of prison legal news in the last three or four pages, you've got little snippets that you pull from news 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 always focused on, we've also focused on reporting on the news that can help people help themselves. 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 prison and since I 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 stuff that's interesting, but it's not really newsworthy and that it doesn't really merit a full article of its own. But there's something to it that would merit by more coverage or more people finding 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. Prisoners being raped by staff. Yeah.

This is something that it's so common that we have published a magazine. seen nothing other than that every month. And so some of the things that's happened is for years, I'd compile the news in brief, and I just have a pile of news articles, and then when it comes time to write it, I'd go through them. And my editorial process is I need stuff that's geographically diverse. We need some from all 50 states. We want to have subject matter diversity. We don't want it to be all prison rapes, for example. We want to mix. And there's also stuff that we don't really have 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 newsworthy. And so what is that happened is with the prison rapes by staff,

it'd be like, I have so many of them. They just keep building up. It's like, okay, we'll run three or four of them this month. I'll do the other one 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, I don't know, this was probably around 25 years ago or something. I thought, wow, we've got a whole bunch of these prison rape articles. Let me see how many we got. And wow, this is without searching for stuff. This is 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

monotonous 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 yes, some people may be paying attention, but no, it hasn't gotten any better. So we're doing all that. But that's just one of the things of how the news of briefs, some of these articles just spin off into creating their own big type articles is 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 not us going out of our way to look for it. Like, wow, we've got like, you know,

50 or 60 incidents here. You know what, let's just do a big article, kind of like, let's do a roundup article with all with all these rapes by staff and the fact that it's happening all over the country. It's happening with monotonous 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 no, 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 of briefs, some of these articles just spin off into creating their own big type articles. It's just the fact that a lot of this 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. I think this also fits into the thing about when they say you can't make this stuff up. There's just a lot of the 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, are things really getting better? Not that I can see, I'd say, if anything, things are worse now than when we started. The prison legal news in 1990. I look at the key things. The prisoners have any individual enforceable rights, or do they have more of them?

No, they don't. The Prison Litigation Reform Act has really made it much harder for prisoners to get relief in any challenges that are conditions of confinement. It's also deliberately restricted the ability of prisoners and get lawyers to help them on a 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 rate form. But for the most part, it remains to be just that. When we talk about the issue of prison rate, a lot of fanfare is the 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. It doesn't actually do anything to reduce or lessen the likelihood 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 rapes of their custody. And we already know that there's huge discrepancies in their data reporting. A lot of it's just wrong. Some of it's 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. I think people have been optimistic when President Trump passed the first step back in 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 prisoner rights or criminal defendant legislation in, 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 prisons, actively thwart it and not actively enforce 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 in America that I would say, if I were sick, I would want to be there. And that was one of those things I thought about before we started the interview, I mentioned that, yeah, I'd had some health issues. Ben Wellings I thought about was if I've been having these health issues while I was still in prison, I would likely have died. Yes.

Yes. I watched people die in prison. There were three people died. Three prisoners who died while I was in prison. And one guard committed suicide in the parking 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.

The legal term is deliberate indifference. And I think when you really think about it, it really accurately describes the fact that for the most of the people, most of the people, sadly, including the medical staff, they really don't care of the people in their custody live or die. No. And if you do, that's fine. And if you don't, that's fine, too. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I got a 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 a call and 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 Kariaku. 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 tasked 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 every. 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, Paul, you and I've known each other, 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've 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 carceral system is broken and corrupt. You follow 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. I would say the system is functionally exactly as intended. And I guess one of the, I think everyone's heard the term, I think everyone served the term, a Puric victory for the King Pirees would win these battles, but the processing decimated his army and ultimately lost everything because every victory depleted his forces. And a professor named Jeffrey Reimann is one who coined the term Purik defeat to describe the criminal justice system, which is it 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, sometime in the 90s. And I thought, wow, that actually sums it up. And I think that's the problem here is that. That, But everyone that I think that you talk to that has half a brain will tell you that the criminal justice system is, quote, broken, that it's dysfunctional. It makes things worse, both in terms of the people, both in terms of crime victims, in terms of the taxpayer, in terms of the people in mesh of the criminal system as defendants or prisoners or whatever. And yet it truggles on. And not only does it turn along, it keeps growing. When I started prison legal news in 1990, there were a million people locked up. And with 10 years, there was 2 million people locked up.

So the size of the prison system doubled in a decade, and everyone's totally fine with it. So that's why I think, though, and if you look at the thing, at the whole thing about any efforts at reform, which have been few and far between, they're just basically no one, 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 and forcible rights, that's crazy talk in this country. And I think, but it also is not just prisoners. When a Bougaray broke in the news, I didn't want to sound too jaded, but I just shruged my shoulders and said, I haven't heard about anything happening in a Bougaray 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 everyone but prison legal news readers is the fact that a lot of the guards at Abu Ghraib that were accused and 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. That's right.

It wasn't like these guys were working in restaurants at the drive-thru or something and then they're torturing prisoners in Iraq. It's like, no, these guys are actually prison guards here in the U.S. And they're going over to Iraq to apply their trade. 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 Deland from Utah, Ron Angelone from Virginia, John Armstrong from Connecticut, and a couple of the other guys. These were the guys that set up the Iraqi prison system. And no one are saying about, hey, why do we have a lot of?

a bunch of cashiered. And these 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 started looking at, for example, members of Congress, whether it's members of the Senate or the House, I would say this, for almost 40 years of following and reporting on prisons and jails, the only elected politician at the federal level that I could think of that's ever shown any action. 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's it. How many people have passed through the ranks of Congress and the Senate in, let's just say,

the last 60 years? So we've got that. And I remember when Justice Ginsburg died and a reporter called me up and said, do you have any comment about her passing? And 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 prisoner rights. At 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 about criminal justice reform, we don't have anyone that's pro-prisoner rights. But then if we want to start talking about politicians that openly campaign on platforms of outright torture of prisoners, of the mistreatment of people, we can, we don't have enough time to talk about them. There are so many of them. And starting from almost the city council level up to the presidential level, government. governors, senators, and everyone else. 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 prisoners. That's one of the things about the United States has never signed the Convention Against Torture,

for example. And that's a, and I would like to. think that's a fairly non-controvertual 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. And the thing is, when 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 on crime and punishment, whatever your views are on sentencing, whatever your views are, on anything related to this. You know, to use some examples like Admiral Leema, 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 or 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. Oregon, his liver was lacerated, everything. Yes, this type of horrific.

No one is going to dispute that this was torture. And the thing was, he wasn't even accused of a crime. But even if he had been accused of a crime, he'd been convicted of a crime. There's no justification on the planet that says the government should be allowed to shove a toilet plunder 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 passing. And I think this is just, I just use 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. Paul, a couple of weeks ago, Senator Mike Lee, a 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 diesel therapy. I then got a call from his chief of staff. I went up to the hill, Capitol Hill, to meet with the chief of staff. And we determined that this person was in what is called diesel 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 Conair.

And then from Conair, you go to the central prison, whatever it's called in Oklahoma City. and from Oklahoma City to Yankton, South Dakota, and then on to Lompoc, California, et cetera, et cetera. With the idea being, while you're 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 can necessarily do anything about it, But I'm wondering if we eventually see changes to these kinds of rules, this kind of corruption and quiet cruelty, as we said, 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 Hawk has taken a position on this stuff. Democrats have been terrible on these issues. The worst thing has happened to American prisoners is that the Prisselaity Age Reform Act, which was signed in the law. by Bill Clinton. Indeed. The Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act also signed into law by Bill Clinton. So now, Democrats have been generally terrible on these issues. But I'm the guy that thinks that the human rights defense in which I found, are we've also been nonpartisan.

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 none or wherever you consider yourself beyond the political spectrum, to use the Admiral Leuma example, if you think it's okay for police officials to ram a toilet plunger up someone's butt, if you think that's okay, nothing I have to say is going to change your mind. That's right. And that said, 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 known in our political class at a

level is willing to codify individual enforceable rights. And that's where I think the big problem comes to sure platitudes and stuff like that. And yeah, to your point, yeah, the Congressional Black Caucus, they have not been anywhere on these civil rights issues. And when you look at a lot of these bills and statutes that are anti-prisoner, that are anti-human rights, they don't just pass Congress. They pass unanimously. Huge, huge majorities, yes. That's one of those things for, hey, the Supreme Soviet, the heyday of the Soviet Union under Stalin, had more dissent and differences of opinion than Congress and state legislatures have on criminal justice legislation these days. And none of this stuff is passing, like I say, my narrow margins. It's passing with enormous margins and no dissent.

Paul, you've been doing this for a very long time. Do you have any cause for hope? Are you seeing any good developments on the state level? Are you aware of any particular talent in any of the state departments of corrections, something that might translate to the federal system? Not really. Generally, the people that get the jobs at the state and federal level, for the most parts, there are a bunch of political hacks.

I got a lot of conferences. I talk to people. And that's not. Yes, there are what I would call. Yeah, there's prison administrator. that I think they fancy themselves progressive. But I think that one guy, I think he's retired now, but A.J. Wall, he was the DOC director for Rhode Island. You know, he once made a comment of, look, we're appointed by the governor.

So until people are demanding the governors to appoint better commissioners or to do more, you're going to get what you're going to 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 to 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 that kind of sums it up. But if you start saying that prisons anywhere are laboratories of reform or hotbeds of making people better or anything like that,

that's what really distinguishes the United States from the rest of the world. You go to countries like whether it's diverse as Colombia 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 $100 billion, if not more, caging two and a half million people a year. But we actually do stuff that we actually know is going to make things worse. And I'll give you one example. By the mid-90s, when President Clinton in Congress repealed hell grants in prison for prisoners, by the end of the

90s, every state, except for Texas, to their credit, had repealed all high. higher education in prisons for prisoners. And we know that as long as they've been studying education in prison going back to the 1920s, literally at that point for at least almost a century, at that point, over a century now, we know there's a general rule. The more education people in prison get, the lower their recidivism rate. And so what are they consistently taken away? education in prison. So I think that kind of tells you everything you need to know about the legislative agendas and also where the prison agendas are. The prison agenda or prison budgets, they've 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, improve 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 Kirooku. Dead Drop is written by John Kirooku and Alan Katz, cost art and touchstone production, produces the podcast, and John Kariaku, Alan Katz, and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers. This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.