Incarceration doesn’t just impact the person behind bars—it affects entire families. In Part 1 of this powerful conversation, Mark Wilson shares the beginning of his journey through addiction, incarceration, and the ripple effects it had on his loved ones. As he faced the consequences of his actions and the reality of life in prison, Mark began to reflect deeply on the harm he caused and the changes he needed to make. He opens up about the personal and emotional toll of prison—not just for himself, but for his family, who served that “hidden sentence” right alongside him. This episode explores the reality of addiction, accountability, and the early seeds of transformation that would eventually lead him to a life of purpose and service. No matter your background, Mark’s story is a reminder that change is possible—and that healing often starts with honesty and connection.
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Listen to the podcast here
From Addiction To Accountability – Mark Wilson’s Prison Journey (Part 1)
We have another powerful story that reminds us that you are not the worst thing you’ve ever done, and people can change their lives. I’m speaking with Mark Wilson, a man whose journey is nothing short of inspiring. While incarcerated, Mark not only created and led transformative programs that help others grow, learn, and find purpose, but he also became a powerful legal advocate.
He began his path as a paralegal by helping fellow incarcerated individuals navigate the legal system, access the courts, and fight for their rights, including access to necessary medical care. He’s a paralegal working with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates for justice and systemic change. Mark is using his experience, knowledge, and heart to make a real difference on the outside as he did on the inside.
A big part of Mark’s transformation was his family. They stood by him from day one through every challenge, every setback, and even when he made it hard to stay connected. They served the sentence right alongside him. They lived the hidden sentence that so many families carry. After all those years, they’re still with him on the outside. They got to see the end of the chapter and the beginning of a new one.
This will be a two-part episode. In part one of this conversation, we’ll talk about the beginning of Mark’s journey, what brought him to prison, how it affected his family, and what those early years behind bars were like. In part two, we’ll explore the programs Mark created to support growth and change from within, his work with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, and how he continues to support people both inside and outside the prison walls. This is a story of redemption, resilience, and the power of staying connected. Stay with us. You won’t want to miss it.
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Thank you, Mark, for being here. How are you?
I’m good. Thank you. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Mark Wilson’s Early Life And Path To Prison
It’s so wonderful. We finally get to speak. Your story is so inspiring.
Thank you.
We have a lot to talk about in this two-part episode, but you have an incredible journey. Let’s start with what brought you to prison as such a young man.
I ended up in prison or the criminal justice system 100 days or so after my 18th birthday. My journey to that place started a lot earlier than that, unfortunately. I was raised in a good working-class family. There’s no criminality or drug use in my family. There was nothing like that. We’re your average middle-class family. When I look back on my life, things began to come undone for me largely because when I was seven, eight, and nine, I was sexually abused by a male neighbor. I kept that secret for a long time. It had a negative impact on me in ways that I didn’t understand.
The abuse stopped in my fifth-grade year. It stopped because we moved away from the abuser. In my sixth-grade year in school, I began using drugs and alcohol. I didn’t understand at the time that what I was doing in part with that was numbing and disconnecting from painful emotions. I began to isolate myself from everybody. I wasn’t going to let anybody hurt me ever again. That’s what my thinking was.
Throughout my teenage years, from 12 years old up until 18, as I grew up, my addiction to drugs and alcohol grew up with me. It got progressively worse and deeper. I was the kid who would try any drug that was available. I would try to outdrink everybody else. I was reckless in the extreme. When I was old enough, I started driving impaired all the time. I was reckless. That continued on for many years.
When I was seventeen, I moved to a new school. Somebody invited me to a party, and I went to that party. They introduced me to a drug called Crank or methamphetamine. It was like I’d always been at any other parties I went to. When somebody says, “Do you want to try this?” I never thought about what this is, what its impact on me would be, how dangerous it was, or anything like that. My response was immediately, “Sure.”
Methamphetamine, for my brain and my physiology, was unlike any other drug I’d ever done before. It made me initially feel like I had always wanted to feel my whole life. My drug use in that moment changed from being about image, peer acceptance, numbing emotions, and that kind of thing to being for the drug. That was in December of 1986 when I was 17 years old. I immediately began seeking methamphetamine pretty much on a daily basis, to give you a sense of the severity of the progression of my addiction to methamphetamine.
I started in December of ‘86, and by February 10th of ‘87, my high school English teacher looked up from the overhead projector to see me snorting lines of meth off my desk in the classroom. I was suspended from school for doing that. To get back into school, I had to agree to see a counselor. I said yes, but then continued to dodge him throughout the rest of my school year, because at that point, I was addicted. I didn’t want to quit. Nobody was going to tell me what to do.
I was in a bad place, where I was making a lot of bad decisions driven by addiction. Within about a month of that, I began carrying a loaded firearm. I told myself it was for my own protection, which was a bunch of baloney. I didn’t need protection. Carrying firearms is pretty common with meth addiction. It’s another power thing. You feel invincible. It’s not for protection. It is very dangerous.
Childhood Trauma, Addiction, And Missed Chances For Change
I wanted to touch on the drugs and the addiction for people who are reading before we move on. I want to thank you for your vulnerability and honesty. It’s important to talk about this. For people that are reading who have children, there are signs that they can look for, like your withdrawal and different things that you are doing. They can dig deeper.
I wanted to say that I appreciate that because people don’t realize what the addiction journey is. You’re numbing. A lot of us do that when things happen in our lives. That’s pretty common. However, for some people, because of their physiology or whatever, we don’t know which drug is going to affect us or make us addicted to something. It’s like the opioid epidemic.
I wanted to stop and thank you for sharing that. It’s so important to be able to talk to our kids and impress upon them not to experiment and turn them in a different direction. You had a great family growing up. Kids don’t want to share. These are signs that adults or parents need to look out for. I wanted to stop and thank you for that. Is there anything else you want to share about addiction? I know you were talking about guns. I know that’s what led to what we talked about as your arrest.
I should probably say more about that whole journey. It wasn’t just me going into addiction. I didn’t tell anybody initially when I was seven, eight, nine, and ten, but I did tell my family when I was fourteen. That was hard for my family. It wasn’t a family member that did this, but it still was hard for them to hear. They didn’t know what to do. I was the oldest. I was the firstborn. My parents were figuring out being parents along the way. They thought that they were doing the right thing when they said, “Let’s put it behind us. Let’s move on. That’s something in the past.” Sadly, in my brain, that translated to everything I felt internally to being, “You don’t matter. This doesn’t matter. We’re not going to do anything about this. We don’t care,” which is not what they intended at all.
At the same time, I did have the opportunity to get counseling at fourteen years old. I made the decision not to get counseling, largely because I was afraid. I was told, “There’s a group that you can participate in. It’s going to be mainly girls that are in the group.” I was terrified. I didn’t want to talk about this with anybody, especially a bunch of girls that I didn’t know. I said, “No,” and didn’t do it. That was the first step along my journey where I could have gotten help, and I didn’t. I wish I had. I regret that I didn’t. That was when I was fourteen.
The Role Of Mental Health And Addiction In Criminality
This was in the ‘80s. I wanted to make a note that there is so much more support now for people. Unfortunately, in the ‘80s, things were a little bit different.
That was the first point where there could have been an intervention, but sadly, there wasn’t. In my junior year in high school, about six months before I began using methamphetamine, I had been struggling so much in school and having anger outbursts. I had a lot of problems to the point that they had a psychologist come to the school and do an evaluation of me.
That doctor found me to be severely depressed and to have anger control issues. Interestingly, at that point, because of the shame attached to it, I didn’t tell them about the abuse. My parents didn’t tell them about the abuse. We all hid that, so he didn’t know what was driving the depression, the anger, and all of this. All he could do was recommend, “You should get counseling for depression and anger.” Sadly, once again, I didn’t. Instead of that, I added this lighter fluid of methamphetamine to that toxic mix six months later. As I suggested a minute ago, within a few months of that, I added firearms to that toxic mix.
Another teenager and I started doing armed residential burglaries when we were high on meth. You’d do meth, and you’d be bored. He was like, “What do you want to do?” We did reckless things. That was my first involvement in criminality other than drug use, driving impaired, and that kind of thing. I told myself, “It’s a harmless property crime. It’s not hurting anybody. It’s no worse than trespassing. If I don’t keep the property, I’m not doing anything wrong.” I told myself all these justifications, which were a bunch of baloney.
I started doing that in March of 1987. That went on through April and May of 1987. It culminated in a double homicide that I participated in, where I shot one person. Another teenager shot another person in their home in June of 1987. In fact, June 29th, 2025, is the 38th anniversary of that crime. That’s how I ended up in prison. I was arrested a week later. I ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two life sentences with the possibility of parole.
Understanding The Addict’s Mind: Compassion And Rehabilitation
At nineteen, I had to see the Oregon Parole Board for the first time. At that point, they told me, “You will die in prison.” There’s a process where the prisoner has to demonstrate that they are capable of rehabilitation after serving a period of twenty years in prison. If they do, then they can be released at some point. Even though that existed in law, the parole board told me, “You’re going to die in prison.”
I always go to people who are reading that may not be as involved or as impacted, and are saying, “He killed somebody. He should die in prison.” That’s a mindset that’s out there. Talking about driving impaired, robberies, and taking drugs, that’s all illegal. What I want people to understand is the mind of an addict. I’m not an addict, so I do not know. I do not understand that feeling. However, I can have compassion for it because I know that it’s real, and I know people with addiction.
If there are people out there doing things and are doing it because they’re under the influence, that’s what we need to address. We should not just lock people up and throw away the key because there is rehabilitation. There are things that we’ll talk about that people can do to better themselves once they are out of that addiction.
I wanted to make it clear that it’s what you did, not who you are. You’re a good person. People reading are like, “If you killed somebody, it’s an eye for an eye.” However, things happen in life. There is rehabilitation. A lot of times, people who have been through things are now helping other people. We don’t know why things happen in life. My heart goes out to the people affected. I’m sure you think of that every day. We’ve got to understand the mind of an addict and look at ways to support that and support people so that they can move out of their addiction.
Personal Responsibility And The Power Of Redemption
I agree. Initially, I wanted to blame the drugs. I wanted to say, “If not for methamphetamine, I wouldn’t have done this.” There’s quite a bit of truth in that, but there’s a lot of stuff that was going on with me, combined with the methamphetamine, that led to the crime. It’s not just the drugs. I have a responsibility for that.
When someone is using a drug like methamphetamine, those drugs are powerful drugs that change how people interact with their world, their families, and everybody around them in ways that they wouldn’t interact with them that way if they weren’t under the influence of the drug. Addiction is a powerful thing. People do need help overcoming. Sadly, almost 80% of our prison population is in prison for a drug and alcohol-related offense, and there’s very little help for overcoming that addiction. There was much more help when I entered the system.
Almost 80% of our prison population is incarcerated for a drug and alcohol-related offense, and there's very little help for overcoming that addiction today. Share on XBryan Stevenson runs the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. He’s the one who did the book and movie, Just Mercy. In his work, he says that he learned that the people he works with are not the worst thing they’ve ever done in their lives. Nobody is, but in the prison context and the criminal justice context, there is a large segment of society that wants to say, “You are the worst thing you’ve ever done.” That’s hard for the people who did something wrong. It’s hard for our families to feel that from society as well. It’s not true.
A lot of people think that prison is full of evil and bad people. In my experience, very few people I met in prison would be somebody I would call evil. There are a lot of broken people. The adage that I find to be true is that hurt people hurt people. Heal people heal people, too. There’s a path into criminality, and there’s a path out of criminality. There’s a path to hurting people, and there’s a path out of hurting people and helping people. I found those to be true in my life.
Hurt people hurt people, but healed people heal people too. Share on XI entered the prison system after my 18th birthday with 2 life sentences, being told I’m going to die in prison and feeling like my life was over, whether I was told that or not. At that age, when you’ve got two life sentences, you feel like your life is over. I had never been in prison before. I had never been in any juvenile detention, jails, or anything like that, so I only had my imagination of what prison was.
It was a pretty frightening place in my mind. Like everybody else, you have your ideas based on the media, our culture, and all that kind of stuff. I was pleasantly surprised. When I arrived at the prison they sent me to, it felt to me more like what I would imagine a college would be like than a prison. At that point, we still had college in prisons. We still had Pell Grants. Those weren’t abolished by Congress until 1994. I entered the system in ‘87. There was the ability to get a 2-year college degree or a 4-year college degree. There were all kinds of vocational training programs in many different industries.
More importantly, there was counseling readily available to people. When you entered the prison system, you went to what was called A&O, Admission and Orientation. It’s the first week of prison, where you’re in a room and people from the prison come and tell you about the services that are available to you in the prison system, and they help you get signed up for different things.
When I went through A&O, I learned that there was drug and alcohol counseling available to me, both individual and group counseling. There was mental health counseling available to me, both individual and group. There was anger management. There was sex offender treatment available to sex offenders. There was a wide range. Those are the basic ones. General mental health, anger management, drug and alcohol, and sex offenders. There may have been 1 or 2 other types of treatment available as well.
When I entered the system, I had the shame of having done this. I saw the impact on my family through that process. I saw the impact on the victim’s family through that process. I felt like I needed to change my life or die. At that point, I still wanted to blame methamphetamine solely for what I did, so when I was offered drug and alcohol treatment, I immediately signed up for it. I am so pleased that I did that.
A Journey Of Healing: Addressing Shame And Finding Forgiveness
We were talking earlier. Did you do that solely for yourself, for your family, or both?
Initially, the things I was doing to change my life were for my family first, and then for the victim’s family second. At that point in time, the victim’s family was understandably not in a good place, where I’m concerned. I didn’t learn a lot of the things that they were going through other than what I heard in court, which was devastating. For my family, I had a closer connection to seeing the impact I had on them. I felt shame for all of it for both families.
I felt like the only way I could ever hope to truly say I’m sorry is to change my life. If I don’t change my life, that’s the clearest way of saying I’m not sorry. I began changing my life as an expression of hopefully saying I’m sorry to my family and to their family. I hope that their family can hear it one day. I don’t know if they ever did or not. I don’t know that they could believe that the change is sincere, real, or any of that stuff. I hope that they could hear it. I hope that they could believe that I am sorry and that the things I did were intended to be an expression of that. Initially, it was for them.
The only true apology is a changed life. Share on XI was fortunate to receive 42 months of drug and alcohol treatment, both individual and group therapy, on a weekly basis. I say I was fortunate to receive that because I could never have understood or overcome my addiction without that. I feel like I needed every second of that treatment, but not necessarily for understanding and overcoming the addiction. It was for understanding and overcoming the things underneath the addiction that were driving and fueling the addiction. It’s all the things that grew out of that sexual abuse when I was a kid.
When I came to prison, I had no language for emotions. I couldn’t tell you what I was feeling other than rage and despair, and I couldn’t understand why I was feeling those things. Fortunately, the people who were working with me, both through the drug and alcohol counseling and the general mental health counseling, were helping reconnect me with my emotions and, by extension, the emotions of other people that I was disconnected from at the time I committed my crime. It became easy to do crimes that I was doing because I didn’t feel things for other people.
I did a lot of work in that counseling to understand the whole abuse dynamic, what that did to impact me, and how I disconnected and isolated myself to protect myself, and how I used drugs and alcohol to numb the pain and develop other strategies for dealing with painful emotions and processing through all that. I did 37 and a half years in prison. When I look back on what was most impactful in making my change, I would have to say maybe it wasn’t the most, but one of the most significant things in my journey was getting that initial drug and alcohol treatment.
I wanted to point out that this was in the ‘80s when they had these programs in prison to help rehabilitate people, help people succeed, and help people thrive, because we know that a majority of the people who are incarcerated are coming into our communities.
I was going to comment on that. My drug and alcohol treatment went from 1988 until about 1992. It only ended because all the programs ended. I would’ve stayed in drug and alcohol treatment for quite a while longer, most likely. It saddens me. Here in Oregon, we’ve had a couple of Secretary of State Audits, both in 2013 and then again in 2023. Both audits recognized that approximately 80% of our prison population has drug and alcohol problems.
The 2023 audit recognized that only 4% get any treatment in prison. It’s sad. I see myself in a lot of the young prisoners that come in who don’t get any help for their drug and alcohol addictions. At best, they are using in prison. Sadly, some are. They are locked in a cage for the duration of their sentence and then released, and we wonder why they immediately return to drug and alcohol addiction when nothing was done to help them understand. Nothing was done to allow them to see another way of life.
Approximately 80% of our prison population has drug and alcohol problems, yet the 2023 audit recognized that only 4% get any treatment. Share on XThis is a time when that addiction could have been intervened in. They could have learned, like I learned, about addiction cycles and how drugs impact your life. They also could have gotten the help I got to what was causing me to use drugs and alcohol. The very small number of people who get drug and alcohol treatment in prison get it within about six months of release. In Oregon, it is a small number of people who get that. As a recovering addict, because addiction recovery remains, I’ve been clean since 1990. My recovery is not a thing of the past. It is a today thing, too.
From Punitive To Rehabilitative: The Shift In Prison Programs
I don’t want to touch on that 1990, but I do want to touch on when the programs did end. What were you thinking that encouraged you to start programs? Let’s talk about the beginning of the programs that you started, and we’ll go into more details in the next section. The programs were gone. Did you wake up one day and say, “I’m going to start a program.” How did that get started? Where was your mind at that time?
Oregon was probably a little behind the rest of the nation in fully embracing the tough-on-crime, lock them up and throw away the key mindset, and criminal justice policies. We got up to full speed on that around 1995 or so. Between 1992 and 1995, we were heading in that direction. We were shifting into a punitive mindset from a rehabilitative mindset. Money was shifted out of programs into building prisons and locking people in cages. The rehabilitation programs went away as a result of that.
I’m six years into my sentence, and my counselor is telling me, “There’s nothing for you to do. You’ve exhausted all available programs. Now, you’re just doing time. Stay out of trouble and keep a job. That’s all you’re required to do.” That wasn’t enough for me. I still wanted to grow, learn, develop as a human being, and change my life.
For me, in developing programs, I didn’t intend to do it. In 1994, I had seen some things about some restorative justice-type programs that were offered in other prisons. I was wishing we had something like that here, and there wasn’t. Different things happened along the way that connected me to people who got me close to that. Ultimately, long story short, I began creating programs to make them available to myself and other prisoners. I can explain briefly how that first thing came to be.
I was a part of a youth crime prevention program of teenagers on probation who were at risk of committing what we called a Major 11 offense in Oregon, which was a mandatory minimum sentence law. Teenagers in a gang who were on supervision were brought into the prison once a month for nine months during the school year for our curriculum.
It wasn’t a scared-straight program. It was more of a program of us sharing our choices and consequences with these kids and saying, “You guys are doing the same things we were doing. You’re on the same path we were doing. This is what it got us. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, but this is the reality that you’re looking at.” We had different topics that we covered during the nine months. One would be choices and consequences. One would be gangs. One would be victim awareness. There was education and goals. There was culture and heritage. There were different things we would talk to the kids about.
One night, we had a victim awareness presentation. There was a gal that we brought in from the district attorney’s office. She was a victim advocate. She brought in someone who had lost someone to homicide. She also brought in the mother of twins who had committed homicides as teenagers and were in prison for it to talk about the impact on her and the family’s life as well. None of us had ever experienced anything like that. It was profoundly impactful to the youth, but also to the prisoners. I reached out to her and said, “Would you be willing to do something like this for prisoners as well?” She said, “Yes, but I want to do more than that.” I said, “What do you want to do?”
Her and I spent the next year or so, maybe a little longer, developing a curriculum for a group that we created that would allow us to explore the impact of crime, who is impacted by crime, how they’re impacted by crime, and a much more expansive understanding of who a victim of crime is to include the families and others than what most people in prison initially think. I’d hear things like, “My victim’s dead, so I don’t have a victim.” It’s like, “What do you mean? You have a lot of victims.” It’s getting people to understand the far-reaching ripple effect of crime.
There are a lot of different things we covered in that. There’s a big chunk of the program that was on that subject. The next part of the program was on how we got to that place and how we gave ourselves permission to do the things we did. That was the first group that I helped create. That was a restorative justice type of program.
The Power Of Connection: Family Support And Restorative Justice
Restorative justice is so important. I’m glad you touched on it. You were bringing people together. I’ve heard such powerful stories. People come into our lives at the right time, like you meeting the person who helped you develop this curriculum. We’ll go into a lot more detail because I want to learn more about it. I’ve only heard the highlights of it. We’ll talk about that, the people that it has helped, and also the people that not only went through the program while they were incarcerated, but how it’s still helping them in their lives outside of prison.
We have a few more minutes. I wanted to touch on your family. I know this might take a little longer, but what was it like? How did you communicate with them back in the ‘80s? We didn’t have texting. We didn’t have all of that. How did you stay in communication with them? How were they able to visit? How did you keep that connection during the time that you were incarcerated?
Back then, we had the collect phone calls. It wasn’t even direct dial phone calls where the prisoner could pay for them themselves. Our family would have to travel the distance from our homes to the prisons to come visit. My family wanted me to call at least once a week. That was their thing. They wanted to know I was okay, and they wanted to make sure that I felt their support. We had an agreement that I would call home once a week. I called my parents once a week. I called my grandparents once a week.
Due to the distance to the prison, I probably had visits from my family every three months or so. They came in and endured everything the families had to endure from the prison system. They come into the visiting room and deal with being treated like they’re prisoners as well, and all the negativity that comes with entering the prison system. They did that for 37 years. They’ve been there ever since. They were there when I made it hard to love me. They were there no matter what from day one. I owe a lot of my success in life to them not giving up on me when it would’ve been easy to give up on me.
It was probably 10 or 11 years into my sentence before I was able to help them heal. They were there for me during the early years. I mentioned the youth crime prevention program. In that program, half the night, the kids would listen to 1 or 2 prisoners speak on the subject of the night, and then they would break into small groups afterwards.
I gave a presentation in 1998 on the victim awareness night. I talked about what I understood the impact of my crime was on my family and on the victim’s family. That was recorded on video. I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to send that home to my family, and I did. That became something very healing for our family because they said that before seeing that video, they didn’t know that I understood or that I cared because we never talked about it. It was a subject that wasn’t something that anybody wanted to deal with in our daily conversations when they were trying to be supportive.
They always had this question of whether I got it, whether I understood, or whether it meant something to me. They were afraid to ask me. That helped my family begin to see that I did care, that I was trying to get back on a positive path largely for them, they didn’t lose me, and that I was the kid that they grew up believing I was. I didn’t know that. In prison, I assumed, “I know where I’m at. They must know where I’m at, too.” They didn’t. If people have the opportunity to engage in those hard conversations, it’s worth doing in some way.
It’s a tough thing to talk about. They had to watch that video in their own time and way. I remember my grandmother saying that she made the whole family sit down and watch it. I could imagine what that must have been like. I don’t know how they were able to engage with that. That’s not something anybody has ever told me. My aunt wrote me a letter afterwards and was like, “I’m glad to see you get it.” In her letter, she went into a lot of details about ways that she was impacted that I had no idea of.
That letter became a valuable tool that I then used in the group that I was talking to you about. I shared it with other prisoners. I read that letter aloud in the group, and that caused other prisoners to go, “I’m going to write to my family and ask them to tell me what they went through.” Some families did, and some families felt like they didn’t want to go there because it was so painful. It was a real catalyst for helping other people find a way to get there. I shared that letter with the kids in the youth crime prevention group. That helped make these things real.
Even for prisoners, but for the kids as well, if you can attach the impact of the crime to a sister, a mom, or something like that, and you find the connection to somebody in prison, then they get it more than they might get it otherwise. It’s a general, “How do you think this person you don’t know was impacted by this crime?”
It’s easier to have these defense mechanisms and push that away than it is to say, “How do you think your mom, your sister, or your grandma was impacted by this?” Opportunities to do that are rare, unfortunately. We need more of those in the prison system. I’ve seen so many people heal from that process, both the prisoner and the family in a relationship together, coming out of that.
Concluding Part One: Reflecting On Hard Conversations And The Journey Ahead
That’s a perfect place to end part one of this episode. You’ve got to have those hard conversations. You’ve got to do it when the time is right. Your heart’s got to be in it. I have to say your ability to provide dates is amazing. I know you’ve had to think about it. I know you speak about it. I know that’s helped you on your journey. I can’t even remember what I did in 2024. Thank you for painting that picture for us and for taking us on this journey. We’ll conclude. Thank you, everybody, for tuning in. We will continue the journey in part two and learn all about those programs, your release, and the great work that you’re doing. Thank you so much for spending time with me.
Thank you. My pleasure.
Important Links
- Oregon Justice Resource Center
- Oregon to Free Legal Advocate Mark Wilson
- Wrongfully Convicted Man Freed for Murder of Oregon DOC Director, But State Wants Him Back In Prison
- How Oregon’s Prison System Retaliated Against Its Most Effective Jailhouse Lawyer
- Connecting 4 Justice International
- Equal Justice Initiative
- Prison Families Alliance
- Just Mercy
- Prison: The Hidden Sentence™: WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR LOVED ONE IS ARRESTED AND INCARCERATED
About Mark Wilson
Paralegal & Policy Associate, Oregon Justice Resource Center – Oregon, USA
Mark Wilson spent 37½ years incarcerated for crimes committed as a teenager, teaching himself the law and becoming a nationally known jailhouse lawyer. He helped peers challenge convictions, sentences, and conditions; co-facilitated rehabilitation programs; and brought major lawsuits—including a federal class action compelling Oregon to treat 5,000 incarcerated people for hepatitis C.
A longtime contributor to Prison Legal News and Criminal Legal News (1998–2025), he continues his advocacy with OJRC following his 2025 release.
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