David, a volunteer at Prison Visitation and Support, talks about his experience in a minimum-security facility while incarcerated. He also talks about his experience visiting incarcerated people.

Larry recalls his volunteer visitor work at the Lompoc Federal Correctional Institute. He talks about his family’s history with the prison system, how he got introduced to the field of volunteer work, the stories he has gathered about the dynamics on the inside of a medium or minimum security institution, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of the work he does.

The interviewee describes his experiences visiting incarcerated folks with the non-profit Prisoner Visitation & Support.

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript

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.

Transcript