Ronald is a formerly incarcerated person who defended himself in prison, succesfully advocated for his own release, and now works as a nationally recognized activist for prison reform. The interview goes over Simpson-Bey’s experience as an incarcerated person, and as a leader within his prison family. In this, we hear stories of dehumanization, found family, and the barriers to education within the prison system. Simpson-Bey also describes life after prison and his vision for the future of incarceration through the decarceration movement. Simpson-Bey calls for an end to the systemic injustice of mass incarceration as it exists today.

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Kevin shares the story of his crime, incarceration, and reintigration process. When Boyd was 16, he gave his mother the keys to his abusive father’s residence. Although she had previously spoken about murdering Kevin’s father, her ex-husband, Kevin did not take her seriously. He wishes he had, because his mother murdered his father that night and framed him for the crime. After over 25 years of incarceration, Kevin was finally released when his case was re-tried with new laws and new evidence. He attributes his relative success reintegrating to his profession as a tradesman and his optimism. Boyd calls us to attend more to law and less to politics when it comes to performing and assessing legal proceedings. Otherwise, he says, “we play chess matches with people’s lives and we don’t think there’s consequences to that.”

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The interviewee shares his experiences with the abuse and trauma that he faced as a juvenile serving a cumulative 13 year sentence in New York State prison. Now, he is a community organizer who helps in the re-entry process for others who have recently been released from prison.

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The interviewee spoke to their experiences working as a social worker providing mental health services in the criminal justice system. She described different approaches to working with clients, whether more restrictive or ones that offer more autonomy. Additionally, she offers her experiences in confronting the hierarchies and “rules” that govern mental health in the criminal justice system and the ways mental health professionals become overshadowed by correctional officers, police officers, and judges. Overall, she expresses her affinity for restorative approaches in working with incarcerated individuals.

Chaplain Muhammad decided to follow the steps of others in his family by becoming a chaplain of correctional facilities to pursue a mission of helping and bringing hope to those who are less fortunate than him. In this interview, he discusses how fulfilling this purpose is sometimes challenging partially because of the inhumane conditions and mistreatment in the prison system. He also talks about the importance of the spiritual support that chaplains like him offer to people in prisons.

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In this interview, Imam Encarnación narrates his experiences of serving as a chaplain of maximum and medium-security correctional facilities for twelve years. In his work in the prisons, he witnessed continuous violence against incarcerated people, from verbal abuse to rampant negligence to physical torture. He is highly critical of the structural conditions that bring people to prisons and subject them to “brutality,” in his words, once they are there. “The system is built to destroy Black and Brown men,” he concludes. As a warning, this interview contains detailed descriptions of physical violence, verbal abuse, overt racism, and torture that may be disturbing to some.

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Chaplain Coate’s first contact with incarcerated people happened when he was in college and started writing letters to people in prisons. He continued developing meaningful bonds with incarcerated people as a volunteer vising correctional facilities every week for over six years. Finding his purpose in serving incarcerated people as a faith-based leader, he decided to leave the Ph.D. program he attended and become a chaplain of correctional facilities. In this journey, he has encountered many challenges but has remained inspired by his service’s contribution to the lives of people he has reached. In this interview, he discusses how his position allows him to see many angles of prisons’ apparatus. These angles include the slow bureaucracy involved in implementing educational programs for incarcerated people, the “wall of silence” among staff to cover their abuses and wrongdoings, and the overrepresentation of African Americans in the carceral population of Wisconsin. Chaplain Coate also reflects on the stigma against incarcerated people that he sees in his Muslim communities in Wisconsin and the conversations that he has with fellow Muslims to dismantle these stereotypes.

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