In the 19th century, slave narratives from writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs played a critical role in spreading the abolitionist message and fighting slavery. Today, Joshua Edward Wright hopes to do much the same, but for prisoners.
Based in Portland, Wright launched a new podcast, “The Exiled Voice,” to give former prisoners a platform to share their experiences and bring awareness to the prison abolition movement.
Prison abolitionists believe the U.S. must dismantle its prison system and replace it with a system that invests in communities and addresses crime through other means.
“The long goal of (the podcast) would be to have an archive of people’s stories, the same way that there’s an archive of slave narratives,” Wright told Street Roots.
With the help of audio editor Bryan Miller, online marketer Jessica Lee and the podcast’s director of operations, Jeffrey Gosda, Wright has hosted five episodes, all available on “The Exiled Voice” website, theexiledvoice.com, and plans to release episodes weekly on Tuesday nights.
Wright, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, was inspired to make the podcast while in prison. From 2014 to 2018, they served 50 months at Portland’s Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) for burglary and unlawful use of a weapon. For the podcast, Wright largely interviews people who were incarcerated at the same time and prompts them to share their experiences with listeners.
One of Wright’s guests, Joe Cheadle, received a life sentence at age 17 with a minimum of 30 years. He ended up earning parole and serving just 23 years, and life in prison was onerous, especially as a juvenile, he explained on the podcast.
“I was actually the youngest guy in the prison at the time when I went there,” Cheadle said. “I was like a little guppy swimming with sharks.”
Cheadle heard other youths being sexually abused by older prisoners in neighboring cells. He was lucky to avoid such experiences, but he couldn’t avoid trauma. He said sometimes guards would purposely put young people in with older prisoners, known to be abusers.
Statements like “No human being belongs in a cage” ring throughout the podcast, and Wright said this hits on the main theme of the series.
“The underlying core message is that we’re all human, and humans are not designed for cages,” Wright said. “I just want to put forth that there are other alternatives and the immense damage that this is doing to everyone.”
Wright advocates for alternatives like Norway’s model, which emphasizes rehabilitation and restorative justice rather than punishment. The Norwegian prison system boasts a 20% recidivism rate, which is the rate of people who are sent back to prison for reoffending after their release, compared to a recidivism rate of over 70% in the U.S.
“The common question that I get — because I’m an abolitionist — is ‘What do I do with rapists?’ ‘What do I do with murderers?’” Wright said.
While they do not know the answer, Wright thinks that locking people up in cages is not helping the problem. They hope the U.S. will begin to address underlying causes of imprisonment, like mental illness, addiction and poverty.
“It’s like that mentality of solving the problem first where it arises, or its origin, rather than the effects of it,” Wright said. “A lot of services like mental health services and addiction services would go a long way towards preventing what we call ‘crime’ and also how we see property, especially in the United States.”
About 2.3 million people are incarcerated throughout the U.S. Less than 5% of the world’s population lives in the U.S, though 20% of the world’s incarcerated people are located here.
As of press time, there were 12,989 people incarcerated inside Oregon’s state prisons. Of those prisoners, 60% have mental health needs and 65% have a history of substance abuse, according to Oregon Department of Corrections’ data. With a cost of $116.89 per prisoner per day, the current prison population costs Oregon taxpayers about $1.5 million per day.
Once a radical idea championed by figures like Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore starting in the 1960s, prison abolition has made its way into more mainstream politics, and Wright has hope that radical changes to the prison system could happen in the coming decades. The idea is now being embraced by younger generations and was a core tenet in the recent protests against systemic racism and police brutality.
“The public is asking me for more information and resources, and it just seems easier to talk about this stuff,” Wright said. “(The recent uprising) also gave me a lot of hope that we can have changes in the laws and the system. I honestly thought the work that I was doing wouldn’t be felt or change our society until long after I was dead, but this seems like something that could possibly be done in my lifetime.”
Abolitionist ideas are also making their way into established criminal justice structures, with progressive prosecutors and judges taking steps toward reform. Wright took part in the campaign for Multnomah County’s new reform-minded district attorney, Mike Schmidt, who pledged to review claims of wrongful convictions and prioritize mental health and addiction treatment over prisons.
Wright also works toward prison abolition through means besides the podcast. While incarcerated, they co-founded Liberation Literacy, a nonprofit that helps former prisoners transition back into society once released, and they co-created All Rise magazine, which, like the podcast, gives current and former prisoners a platform to share their experiences.
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Wright is also the president of Phoenix Rising Transitions, which provides mentorship and leadership programs at CRCI, and works with the Metropolitan Alliance for the Common Good, where they push forward policies surrounding social and environmental justice.
Wright got involved with these organizations and projects while in prison because they thought they would die there. Wright, 32, has cystic fibrosis and has a life expectancy of 45 to 60 years old due to a new medication they received upon release.
But while incarcerated, Wright understood their life expectancy to be 32 to 35 years old.
“That’s why I tried to do so much while I was in prison, because I thought that that’s the place where I would spend the rest of my life,” Wright said.
Wright created the first gender and sexuality class in the Oregon Department of Corrections system when they realized they were nonbinary.
“I was doing anything I could to facilitate education or safe spaces for people,” they said.
Though former prisoners often struggle upon release, Wright said being involved with various organizations and projects helped them successfully reintegrate into society.
“(These organizations) helped me have a community when I got out,” Wright said. “That is one thing that I think prisoners need the most (upon release), safe people to be around and talk with.”
Through “The Exiled Voice” podcast, All Rise magazine and other efforts, Wright hopes to provide that sense of community to other former prisoners, all while educating the public and fighting to fundamentally change the country’s prison system.
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Guests on the show share story after story of correctional staff abusing their power and dehumanizing prisoners. Juan Parra, who served 11 months at CRCI, said, “Whenever you give somebody power over somebody else, it takes a very certain kind of person to not abuse that power.” He added, however, that “there were staff that honestly did care, and they were trying to do their best in their role.”
Several of Wright’s guests shared similar sentiments about particular correctional staff they remembered fondly while on the podcast.
“I can remember correctional officers that literally made my time easier and made me feel safe when they were on shift. And that’s, that’s not like a healthy mindset because their job is to keep you in a cage,” Wright said. “And so it’s this very strange psychological thing to think back on some of them and have positive memories.”
Guests also share stories about camaraderie among fellow prisoners. Cody Connel, who served six years at several Oregon prisons, said that oftentimes even the prisoners with life sentences knew how to make people laugh.
“Some of those friendships are definitely more genuine than any friendship I had before that,” Connel said.
Wright’s podcast guests learned to form a community in prison and use their time to participate in programs, educate themselves and educate others.
“You get a deeper understanding for how society fails so many people, but also how powerless you are in a lot of situations and how power corrupts absolutely,” Parra said on the show. “You get a deep understanding of time that most people won’t ever understand. It’s a finite resource. You’ll never have more than you have right now.”
Upon release, former prisoners have a whole new set of challenges to deal with. Though several of the interviewees mentioned it was helpful to lose contact with negative influences, many left prison with little support from family or friends.
Even if a person does have family support upon release, as Parra said, while in prison “you become a memory in their life” and it can be difficult to find a place to fit back in.
Connel said the hardest part of going to prison was losing time with his grandparents, who he had taken care of prior to his sentence.
“I felt a lot of guilt about those six years I lost with them,” Connel said. “When I did leave for my prison sentence, I lost them. That was the hardest thing.”
Families of prisoners are often referred to as the “hidden victims” of the incarceration system. A 2018 report from FWD.us, a bipartisan political organization, found that approximately half of all adults in the U.S. — about 113 million people — have had an immediate family member incarcerated for at least one year, and one in 34 adults has had an immediate family member incarcerated for 10 years or longer. As of December 2018, an estimated 6.5 million people had an immediate family member in jail or prison.
The impact of prisons is disproportionately felt by communities of color and low-income families, along with women and children. The criminal justice system does little to support these families who have loved ones behind bars, imposing additional barriers like excessive fines and bail amounts and high visitation costs. These families often lose household income, and children with parents in prison are six times more likely to be incarcerated than the overall population.
When prisoners are released, they often struggle to find viable income sources and provide for their families.
“Once you are a felon, no matter what you do, there’s so many limitations,” Connel said.
Another interviewee, Ben Stiller, who served 26 months at CRCI, discussed the challenges he faced finding work upon release a year and half ago.
“Three weeks of putting out 40 resumes a week, and nothing,” Stiller said on the podcast. “It’s heartbreaking. It kills your spirit. It kills your hope. And I can see why people go back to crime because you’re released with nothing, with no aid. …You just left us in a cage for however many years, and you expect us to come out and be happy go lucky.”