S2E13 The Crusader

Summary

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Podcast Summary: John Kiriakou’s Dead Drop

Episode: S2E13 "The Crusader"

Date: August 10, 2026
Hosts: John Kiriakou & Alan Katz
Guest: Paul Wright (Prison Legal News)

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Overview

This deeply personal episode explores the transformative story of Paul Wright—a former Army MP who, after being convicted of murder and spending 17 years in prison, became a crusading jailhouse journalist and the founder of the influential publication Prison Legal News (PLN). Host John Kiriakou, himself a whistleblower and former CIA officer who spent 23 months in federal prison, draws parallels between their experiences, focusing on the importance of exposing conditions inside the American carceral system, the struggle for prisoners' rights, and the obstacles faced by prison reformers.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background: Who is Paul Wright?

• Arrest & Incarceration:
  • Wright introduces himself as a former Army MP who was arrested at 21 for robbing and killing a drug dealer. He served 17 years in maximum-security prisons in Washington State ([07:07]).
• Transformation in Prison:
  • Upon entering prison, Wright’s expectations—shaped by movies and TV—were quickly replaced by the harsh reality of dehumanization and casual brutality, contrasted by the myth of constant violence among inmates ([07:58]).
  • "Hollywood doesn't prepare you for reality. And in some respects...the reality was worse and more mundane than what I'd expected." (Paul Wright, [08:09])

2. The Birth of Prison Legal News

• Inspiration & Blueprints:
  • Wright describes partnering with Ed Meade, a revolutionary communist and experienced prison publisher, to create a legal and advocacy newsletter for prisoners and their families ([09:57]).
  • Washington State’s unique history of prisoner-run publications inspired their efforts ([09:57]).
• First Issue:
  • Launched in 1990, initial issues were hand-typed in two separate prisons, mailed out, and photocopied for distribution. Their very first circulation was only 7,500 ([11:43]).
• Purpose:
  • The key was to use the publication as a tool to organize and inform a “gulag archipelago” of 2.3 million incarcerated Americans ([10:48]).

3. Fighting for Free Speech—and Facing Censorship

• Struggles with Prison Administration:
  • Both Wright and Kiriakou shared stories of being told prisoners “don’t have rights”—by staff and even fellow inmates ([12:33]).
  • "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." (Paul Wright, [12:54])
• Retaliation for Journalism:
  • Wright was regularly placed in segregation for his writing; his mail was monitored and censored by “intelligence officers” ([13:21]).
  • "Janis Joplin says freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose...you're in kind of these shithole prisons, you really don't have a lot left to lose telling the world about what a shithole prison you’re in." (Paul Wright, [13:41])
  • Kiriakou experienced guards confiscating his book chapters (for Doing Time Like a Spy), leading him to mail drafts to his attorney as legal mail ([14:30]).

4. Content and Impact of Prison Legal News

• Reporting Focus:
  • PLN covers prison conditions, legal cases, wrongful convictions, disciplinary hearings, and abuses in U.S. prisons and jails ([03:25]).
• ‘News in Brief’ Section:
  • Wright talks about PLN’s section compiling short news items about criminality and misconduct by prison staff—a favorite among readers for its “news of the insane and bizarre” ([22:05]):
    • "There's just a lot of this stuff that, yeah, you can't make this stuff up." ([26:34])
    • On staff sexual abuse: "We could publish a magazine on nothing other than that every month." ([23:07])
• Wright’s Editorial Process:
  • Seeks geographical and subject diversity for short snippets; the frequency of staff abuses is so high that roundup investigative reports become necessary ([24:00]).

5. Evaluating Prison Reform and Systemic Failure

• On Reforms:
  • Little real improvement: "Not that I can see. I'd say if anything, things are worse now than when we started Prison Legal News in 1990." (Paul Wright, [27:52])
  • The Prison Litigation Reform Act made it far harder for prisoners to access legal help ([28:03]).
  • Landmark legislation, like the First Step Act or Prison Rape Elimination Act, is undermined or largely symbolic ([29:55]).
  • Medical neglect and “deliberate indifference” prevail: "They really don't care if the people in their custody live or die. And if you do, that's fine, and if you don't, that's fine too." (Paul Wright, [30:49])
• Anecdote on Corruption:
  • Kiriakou recounts a surreal call with the Director of the BOP, who asked him to serve on a reform advisory panel but never followed up ([31:11]).
  • The problem is systemic: “The entire system is corrupt.…” ([32:28])
  • Wright argues functional design, not just corruption: "I would say the system is functionally exactly as intended." ([33:41])
  • Pyrrhic defeat: The system fails so consistently that it paradoxically succeeds in its true (punitive) objectives ([34:09]).

6. Political and Legal Obstacles

• Lack of Political Will:
  • "Almost 40 years of following and reporting on prisons and jails, the only elected politician at the federal level that I can think of that's ever shown any actual interest...was Ted Kennedy and John Ossoff." (Paul Wright, [36:00])
  • Even progressive icons like Ruth Bader Ginsburg were not defenders of prisoner rights ([37:19]).
• Both Political Parties Oppose Prisoner Rights:
  • Democrats and Republicans alike have championed punitive legislation, often with near-unanimous support ([43:32], [45:08]).
  • Example: The Prison Litigation Reform Act and Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, both signed by Bill Clinton ([43:32]).

7. Barriers to Change—At Federal and State Levels

• Political Patronage and Inertia:
  • Leadership positions in corrections filled by “political hacks,” not reformers ([45:52]).
  • Leadership aims: Keep prisons quiet, avoid escapes, limit headlines about deaths ([46:40]).
  • The U.S., a rich country, actively undermines rehabilitation by eliminating programs like Pell Grants for inmate education, despite research showing reduced recidivism ([47:15], [48:21]).
  • "We actually do stuff that we actually know is going to make things worse." (Paul Wright, [48:21])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the reality of prison:
  • “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.” (Paul Wright, [08:09])
• On censorship and resistance:
  • “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.” (Paul Wright quoting Janis Joplin, [13:41])
• On systemic inertia:
  • “The system is functionally exactly as intended.” (Paul Wright, [33:41])
• On political indifference:
  • "Cruelty and torture are almost ingrained in the American political system." (Paul Wright, [37:44])
• On endemic staff abuse:
  • “We could publish a magazine on nothing other than [staff sexual abuse] every month.” (Paul Wright, [23:07])
• On bipartisan neglect:
  • "If we want to start talking about politicians that openly campaign on platforms of outright torture of prisoners, of the mistreatment of people, we don't have enough time to talk about them... It almost seems like the idea of cruelty and like cruelty and torture are almost ingrained in the American political system." (Paul Wright, [37:44])
• On American hypocrisy:
  • “We wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and then the Senate wouldn't ratify it.” (John Kiriakou, [39:31])
• On "diesel therapy":
  • The practice of making prisoners “disappear” by shuffling them through the federal transportation system for up to 18 months, effectively erasing their communication with the outside world ([41:03]).
• On what could change:
  • “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.” (Paul Wright, [43:32])
• On prison budgets:
  • “Prison budgets, they've ballooned up. They consume more money than they ever do. They're huge parts of state budgets in particular these days. And what are they doing to reduce recidivism, improve conditions and things like that? And the answer is not much.” (Paul Wright, [48:21])

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Important Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |------------|------------------------------------------------------| | 01:56 | John introduces the episode and Paul Wright | | 06:23 | John welcomes Wright; origins of Prison Legal News | | 07:07 | Wright’s background and prison experience | | 09:57 | Publishing history of prisoners in Washington | | 11:43 | First issue of PLN, nuts-and-bolts of creation | | 13:21 | Retaliation, censorship inside prison | | 14:30 | Kiriakou’s tactics writing “Doing Time Like a Spy” | | 16:53 | How PLN was produced, sent out from prison | | 22:05 | “News in Brief,” staff abuses in PLN | | 27:52 | No real progress in reform; PLN’s skepticism | | 30:49 | Medical neglect, “deliberate indifference” | | 31:11 | BOP Director’s call, the inertia of reform | | 33:41 | The “pyrrhic defeat” theorem; intentional dysfunction| | 36:00 | No true federal advocates for prisoner rights | | 39:31 | U.S. hypocrisy—UN Convention Against Torture | | 41:03 | Diesel therapy explained, “disappearing” prisoners | | 43:32 | Bipartisan legislative “anti-prisoner” consensus | | 45:52 | Patronage in corrections, lack of progressive leadership | | 47:15 | Ending of Pell Grants in prison, effects on recidivism | | 49:01 | Closing remarks, promise to revisit issues with Wright |

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Conclusion & Takeaways

This candid, sometimes bleak conversation exposes the entrenched barriers facing anyone who challenges or seeks to reform America’s carceral system. Paul Wright’s experience and activism, echoed by John’s own story, illustrate how the struggle for prisoners’ rights is met with bureaucratic resistance, political indifference, and—too often—public apathy. Despite decades of reporting, advocacy, legal victories, and the publication of crucial stories rarely told elsewhere, little has changed at scale. Prison Legal News continues to document abuses and systemic failures, standing as a testament to both necessity and the immense challenge of reform.

Next episode preview: The Senate takes up Kiriakou’s own torture whistleblowing case. Will the system do the right thing?

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Transcript

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[John Kiriakou]

I'm John Kiriakou. Welcome to 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 Prisoner's Rights crusader Paul started a newspaper, the Prison Legal News, with another inmate, Ed Meade, 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 the two men shared a revolutionary Marxist perspective and a desire to put out a newspaper that did muckraking, reporting on prison conditions and provided legal advice for inmates. What started in May 1990 as 10 photocopied pages distributed by hand grew into a 40 page monthly with 3,600 subscribers throughout the US and many other countries. The 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, mail 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.

[Interviewer]

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 subscribe 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 little bit more geared toward defense attorneys, but still just as wonderful, just as eye openening. 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.

[Paul Wright]

Hey, thanks for having me.

[Interviewer]

John Paul, you and I have 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.

[Paul Wright]

I think basically the 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 4 month sentence and I went to prison. I was 21 years old when I was arrested. I wound up spending the next 17 years in maximum security prisons in Washington state. And I thought I was fairly well informed and well read about prisons and criminal justice. Probably better informed than I think the average 21 year old in America was. And 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'll say that the reality was worse and more mundane than what I'd expected. And it was all. It was also different. And one of the things I have to say is the stereotype that a lot of people have that all prisoners do at present as 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 prisoners don't have any rights. And I was kind of like, okay, now that can't be. Yes, 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 other Prisoners, jailhouse lawyers, learning more about the law. But the publishing thing came. I met a prisoner named Ed Meade, and he was a political prisoner. He was a revolutionary communist who'd been 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 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 Ed had published a number of magazines. And we were 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 the thing is, at the time, this is 1989 or so that we're having this discussion, and Washington had a small prison system at the time, it was around 5 or 6,000 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 was around 5 or 6,000. 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 the prison system, and this is how we conceptualize at the time, and 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 Solzhenitsyn of the Gulag Archipelago. 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 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 you do it around a publication. And again, when we started, we were only focused on Washington State, which it's 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 to Kinko's back in the day and have photocopied. And our initial mailing list was 7,500 people. And that's how we got started.

[Interviewer]

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?

[Paul Wright]

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.

[Interviewer]

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.

[Paul Wright]

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 till 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, they 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. The makeup bounty 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 Janis 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 shithole prisons, you really don't have a lot. You really don't have a lot left to lose telling the world about what a shithole prison you're in.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, you can say that again. I have to agree with you about sort of the subtle cruelty. I once had my cell raided. I was writing a book, which became my second book, called Doing Time Like a Spy. How the CIA Taught Me to Survive and Thrive in Prison. Won two literary awards, won 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 none of 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 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 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 he 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. These contraband chapters out. How did you get Prison Legal News out? Did you just stick in an envelope and send it to the. To the volunteer? And then the volunteer was going to Kinko's.

[Paul Wright]

Yeah, that's exactly what we did. And again, like I say, I was having my mail opened by the. The intelligence officers, and I use the term loosely. Yeah, they'd be reading my incoming and outgoing mail, perusing it, and, yeah, that was Like a big thing. They did that for years, if not decades. And again, I think that it was 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 led to 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 1990, starting in 1991, the first eight issues of Prison Legal News were hand typed. 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 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 then our volunteer would do the layout and design, send us a draft of the magazine to do a proofread on, and then we 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.

[Interviewer]

Wow. Hear ye, hear ye.

[John Kiriakou]

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[John Kiriakou]

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[Interviewer]

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[Interviewer]

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?

[Paul Wright]

We've always focused on. We've always 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 concept of the news in 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. This is something that it's so common that we could publish a magazine on 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 stuff 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 one of the things 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 ones next month. In 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 without us going out of our way to look for it. It's like, wow, we've got 50 or 60 incidents here. You know what, let's just do a. Just let's 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 one hasn't gotten any better. So we're doing all that. But that's just one of the things of how the news and brief 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, 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. 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 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 one hasn't gotten any better. So, you know, so we're doing all that. But, but that's just one of the things of how the news and brief some of these articles just spin off into. Into creating their own big type articles is just the fact that, 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, it's stuff that is, you know, 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 call it 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 this stuff that, yeah, you can't make this stuff up.

[Interviewer]

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?

[Paul Wright]

Not that I can see. I'd say if anything, things are worse now than when we started Prison Legal News in 1990. I look at the key things. Do 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 to 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 reform. But for the most part it remains to be just that. When you talk about the issue of prison rape, a lot of fanfares 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 in 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 were had been optimistic when President Trump passed the First Step act 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 act, 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. And one of the things I thought about was if I've been having these health issues while I was still in prison, I would likely have died.

[Interviewer]

Yes. Yes. I watched people die in prison. There were three people, three prisoners who died while I was in prison.

[John Kiriakou]

One.

[Interviewer]

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.

[Paul Wright]

And I think that's one of the things that the legal term is deliberate indifference. And I think when you really think about really accurately describes the fact that for the most part, most of the people working there, sadly, including the medical staff, they really don't care if the people in their custody live or die. And if you do, that's fine, and if you don't, that's fine too.

[Interviewer]

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. In the phone. So I was curious, and I answered the phone and the voice says, hello, John Kiriakou? 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 owe 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 pop 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 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. Paul, you and I have 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?

[Paul Wright]

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's heard the term a Pyrrhic victory where the King Pyres would win these battles, but the process, he decimated his army and ultimately lost everything because every victory depleted his forces. And a professor named Jeffrey Ryman is one who coined the term pyrrhic 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, is that 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 enmeshed in the criminal system as defendants or prisoners or whatever. And yet it trundles on. And not only does it trundle on, it keeps growing. When I started Prison legal news In 1990, there were a million people locked up. And in 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, enforceable rights, that's crazy talk in this country. And I think. But it also is not just prisoners. When a Bukare broke in the news, I didn't want to sound too jaded, but I just shrugged my shoulders and said I haven't heard about anything happening in Abu Garay 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.

[Interviewer]

That's right.

[Paul Wright]

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, no, these guys are actually prison guards here in the US and they're going over to Iraq to ply 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 is saying about, hey, why do we have 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 start 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 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'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, 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 prisoner's right? 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 prisoner's 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, 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 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, Governor, 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 controversial thing that most people would agree, especially since we wrote

[Interviewer]

it, we wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and then the Senate wouldn't

[Paul Wright]

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 Abner Louima, 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 the 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 bowels, it ruptured

[Interviewer]

his internal organ, his liver was lacerated, everything.

[Paul Wright]

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, if 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 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 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.

[Interviewer]

Paul A couple of weeks ago, Senator Mike Lee, a very conservative Republican from Utah, posted a series of. 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. 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.

[Paul Wright]

Democrats have been terrible on these issues. And the worst thing that's happened to American prisoners has been the Prison Litigation Reform act, which was signed into 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 center, which I founded, we've always been nonpartisan and I've always 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 to be on the political spectrum, to use the Amner Louima 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.

[Interviewer]

That's right.

[Paul Wright]

And that said, I think to their credit, most Americans don't think things like that are okay.

[Interviewer]

That's right.

[Paul Wright]

But the big thing is we don't have known in our political class at a leadership level is willing to codify individual enforceable rights. And that's where I think the big problem comes, 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.

[Interviewer]

Huge, huge majorities.

[Paul Wright]

Yes, that's one of those things for, hey, the Supreme Soviet in 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. None of this stuff is passing, like I say, my narrow margins. It's passing with enormous margins and no dissent.

[Interviewer]

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?

[Paul Wright]

Not really. Generally, the people that get the jobs at the state and federal level, for the most part, they're a bunch of political hacks. I go to a lot of conferences. I talk 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 that one guy, I think he's retired now, but AJ 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. And make sure no one escapes. Yeah. 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 as 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 to 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 Pell 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 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 that as a general rule, the more education people in 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 about the legislative agendas and also where the prison agendas are. Prison budgets, they've ballooned up. They consume more money than they ever do. They're huge parts of state budgets in particular these days. And what are they doing to reduce recidivism, improve conditions and things like that? And the answer is not much.

[Interviewer]

Nothing at all.

[John Kiriakou]

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 wonderful, 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 US 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 Kiriakou. Dead Drop is written by John Kiriakou and Alan Katz. Kostart and Touchstone Productions produces the podcast, and John Kiriakou, Alan Katz and Nick Mechanic are its executive producers.

[Costard and Touchstone Announcer]

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