Prison is usually seen as an almost hell-like experience that criminals deserve to go through. But what is it really like to be part of the prison pipeline? What are the stories of these so-called “criminals”? In this episode, radio personality, journalist, and producer Emma Lugo educates people about the criminal justice system. She has interviewed formerly incarcerated and currently incarcerated individuals, family members, judges, law enforcement, attorneys, and more. She shares everything she knows about prison life from her enlightening conversations and how the system affects everyone in the pipeline. Listen to Emma’s story, experiences, and advocacy on this podcast and tune in to her interviews on Prison Pipeline on KBOO radio.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Prison Pipeline: Real Stories Of Incarceration And The Justice System With Emma Lugo
I’m here with Emma Lugo, who is a producer for community radio and a volunteer in the women’s prison in Oregon. She’s also the President of the radio station, KBOO, and President of her synagogue. Emma is going to share the stories that she’s been privileged to hear during the years of interviewing people in custody.
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Emma, it’s always good to see you. I’m looking forward to hearing the stories that you’re going to share with us on this show. Could you tell us about Community Radio and how you got started?
Thanks so much for that introduction, Julia. It’s such an honor to be here. I’m a big fan of your show. I’ve listened to half of your shows. I admire the work that you do. I’m a Producer for Community Radio. Community Radio is a bit different from doing a show, but in some ways, it’s similar. Community Radio started here in the 1960s. It got started by activists who wanted to give a voice to people who were marginalized and on the fringes of society. The radio station that we’re at here in Oregon has gotten big over the years.
We have 14 staff people and a $1 million budget. We have the same mission, and that’s to serve the voices of underserved people in our community. One of the most underserved people in all of society is people who are incarcerated and formerly incarcerated. In addition to those people, the stories of their families are marginalized and made invisible by our culture. We get into telling those stories with Prison Pipeline, which is the name of the program that our collective produces.
Thank you for explaining Community Radio. It’s important to have it out there. Thank you for the nice things that you said about me. I also wanted to know how you got started, and then we’ll go into this by sharing the stories.
The way that I got started was I met some people from The Prison Pipeline Collective. I was in Portland. I was new to Portland, looking around for something to do. I went to this community space and there was a woman, and her brother was incarcerated. She was on the other side of the country, and he was incarcerated in New York State. He was incarcerated for felony drug possession and he had to serve ten years.
He had never experienced lengthy incarceration before this sentence. The woman who was giving this talk was talking about the show Prison Pipeline. She was talking about her own story. She started participating in the show as a way of trying to understand something about her brother and what he was going through because he was having a hard time.
It was hard for him to be in prison. He had never been in prison before. He didn’t understand what it was like to be in prison. He had a few problems in his life, but nothing like this. To suddenly find herself with a ten-year sentence was overwhelming for her entire family. They’re a close family, and she was close to her brother. She told the story of her brother and what he had to go through. It was moving to me, and then she talked about Prison Pipeline, which is the radio program. It got started in a lot of ways that maybe the Prisoner’s Family Conference and even the way your show got started. It got started by people who had experienced incarceration or had loved ones who had, and they were concerned.
They were also people who were activists and wanted to do something about the system. They thought one of the things they could do was educate people. She told me this story, and I was so moved by that story. I happen to be volunteering at the prison at that time. In the small town that I’m in, they have a book group that meets over at the prison. People on the outside read a book with the people on the inside, and we all get together once a month we talk about the book. If you’re an adult in custody, this is at a medium-security or maximum-security prison.
In order to participate in something like that, you have to have good behavior. You can’t be in solitary or have a lot of disciplinary infractions. You have to have a clean record and good standing. The people who were participating were motivated and wanted to have that engagement and interaction with people from the outside. I was doing that at the same time. When I heard about this show, Prison Pipeline, I thought, “I’ve got to get involved in this.”
Prison is something that I personally don’t know much about. I was raised without that knowledge and without that understanding. I became someone who wanted to be involved as an advocate and as a storyteller. Not for me to tell my story but for me to use what I already had knowledge of, which is radio, television, and media. I let the people who are incarcerated tell their stories, as well as their family members. That’s what we tried to do.
That’s interesting because that’s where I started. I wanted people to tell their stories, and I started Prison, The Hidden Sentence with a blog and moved into a show. It’s interesting how you started and the similarities. I have personal experience and I know what it’s like. That’s why I call it The Hidden Sentence because the families on the outside are serving the sentence with their loved ones on the inside. Thank you for sharing that and for your big heart for wanting to help people.
Half the people in our collective have loved ones who are incarcerated or who have been incarcerated. Our lead for the collective is Karen. You’ve met Karen before because she was my co-host at the Prison’s Family Conference. She told the story of her son at the Prisoner’s Family Conference. Her son was arrested in Oregon. I can’t remember the name of the measure but there’s a particular measure that was passed by the state legislature, which provides for mandatory minimum sentences for certain crimes. Her son committed one of those Measure 11 crimes, and got sentenced to seven years in prison even though he’s mentally ill. She got thrown right away into the criminal justice system in Oregon.
Her son is out now. He’s houseless and struggles with mental illness, but she became an amazing advocate. It was all because of her loved one who was incarcerated. Ruthie was one of the first people who started the show years ago. Prison Pipelines has been running on KBOO for many years. I got involved in it a few years ago. I’m 1 of 20 or 25 people who have produced this show over the years. A lot of those people had loved ones who were incarcerated. There are a few of us, like myself, who are privileged enough to be able to work with those people and to learn from them as well as from the adults in custody.
It’s important that you open your heart because a lot of people don’t see people or the families of the incarcerated as acceptable. I can’t think of another word because there’s a stigma. People don’t want to be near them. They think they’re bad people and people are people. We need to humanize them. Bravo to the collective.
It’s intimidating at first. When I first went into prison, I had all of those biases. In spite of my liberal education, getting a good, elite liberal education, which is supposed to make me sensitive to all of these social issues, and my years as an activist on the left, I had an extreme bias against people who were incarcerated. I had to learn to think through everything. I thought about all of the negative things that I had been taught about people who were in custody. They completely deserved it, the prison was a good punishment, and there was something fair about it.
I didn’t know anything about how they spent their time in prison. I didn’t know about the resources. I was completely naive and scared. I was intimidated and stupid because I didn’t know anything. I had been brainwashed with all of that stuff from the media and everything from all the cop shows. They ran in the 90s and the 2000s, and all the stuff they tell you on television makes you afraid. I had all of that bias.
I can relate because it was scary the first time that I went to visit my brother, and then I got used to it. It’s a whole new world and the new normal. It’s so different. My friend says, “It’s like you open the curtain. You could see behind it this whole of the world that you never knew existed. It’s shocking.” I know that you’ve spoken to a lot of people. Are there any stories that you can share from people that you’ve spoken to?
In the couple of years that I’ve produced for Prison Pipeline, I’ve interviewed 120 people. Every single story is amazingly touching. The stories that get you right away are the stories of people who are on death row and have been exonerated or from someone who is on death row. Those are the hardest ones. They’re the most challenging too. In some ways, interviewing someone who’s been on death row and was exonerated is the most challenging kind of interview. You’re talking to someone like Juan Melendez, who spent over 35 years on death row and then was exonerated.
Interviewing people who are on death row and learning about what it’s like to be on death row and the kind of culture that people have to live with when they’re in that environment. It’s touching and challenging to. I’ve interviewed people who had loved ones who were murdered and then, over time, came to forgive the person who murdered their family member. Hector Black is someone I know personally, who I interviewed, and his daughter was murdered. Over the course of about twenty years, he befriended the man who murdered his daughter and now has ongoing correspondence and a relationship with that person. All of these stories, especially the ones that I’m talking about, are a bit extreme.
That’s not like your average person who gets sent to prison. What I’ve learned is that, in almost every story, especially if it involves someone who’s committed a capital offense, there’s always a mitigating factor. There’s a story of abuse, childhood trauma, and neglect. Not just one, but there are multiple sources of trauma that inform the child before they’re even old enough to know what happened to them. That sets a pattern for their life choices when they get older. It’s always young men. There’s a certain period of time in a person’s life when if they’ve been traumatized in a particular way, they get set up.
Our culture sets them up for failure and lifelong incarceration. Most of these men that I’ve interviewed are intelligent men. If they’d had any other opportunities in life besides the ones that they ended up with, they would be productive members of society. One of the things that I’ve learned in all of my years of interviewing people in prison is that there’s a reason for prison to exist, but there’s also a reason to provide incentives to be released from prison. Somebody who’s committed a crime, especially a violent crime, needs to go to prison to learn something. Everybody learns. Most of the people I’ve talked to learn.
They spend years, decades even, being warehoused at taxpayer expense and not being given a chance to reclaim their lives and try to make good on the opportunities we’ve offered them. A lot of that is because people who are incarcerated are used as pawns in electoral politics. We’re seeing that happen right now here in Oregon. That’s some of what I’ve learned. Some of the hardest ones to talk to are people who have committed murder and loved ones who have been murdered.
As a journalist, I go for both. I don’t just talk to people who have been incarcerated as much sympathy as I have for them and as much sympathy as I have for their families. I talk to people who have been victimized by crime because their stories matter. I don’t think that we can understand the whole system unless we talk to everyone. These people know each other. There’s an intimate connection. It’s rare for people to experience random violence. It does happen, but usually, perpetrators and victims know each other. That’s very common. A lot of times, they’re even related.
We can't really understand the criminal justice system unless we talk to everyone involved. Share on XI’m trying to unpack everything that you said, spoke about, heard, and experienced in talking to people. At the conference, we heard them speak about ACE, Adverse Childhood conditions, and restorative justice, where you’re saying that where the gentleman’s daughter was murdered, and he forgave the person that committed it. Restorative justice is big, and some prisons do have that.
Terrence, who spoke at the conference, talked about that. He was young when the crime was committed and didn’t realize how it affected the family. Restorative justice is important. I’m glad you brought that out. By them being able to tell their story and working with the family, when they do get out, that does help reduce recidivism too. Have you spoken to people that have gotten out of prison and followed their journey?
Prison Pipeline, to make it clear, we’re a collective. There are four of us producing the show. There’s been as many as eight. We cover everything we can possibly think of. We talk to people who are on parole and are post-parole and then have gone back in to be advocates or support, even people who have gone out and then gone back in again. We talk to children of people who are incarcerated, the parents, family members, guards, judges, DAs, defense attorneys, prosecutors, and lawmakers. We talked to the people advocating for incarcerated folks, whether it’s through programs like the Oregon Justice Resource Center. Whether they’re advocating for changes to the law or people who have different specialties, they come in and work with different kinds of trauma and abuse.
We talk about educational programs that are available for adults in custody. We talk to people who do religious instruction. We try to think about everything that there is. We also talk with people who are abolitionists. A big part of our programming involves talking about the political side of the prison, people who are political prisoners, and also trying to reform and change the entire prison industrial complex or even abolish it.
We get the whole gamut. We don’t just talk to adults in custody. We talk to their family members and everyone who’s involved in the system to get a good picture of it. We’re always talking about it from the perspective of advocacy. We don’t do any programming that tries to reinforce the negative cultural stereotypes about incarcerated people. We treat them with the utmost humanity and look at it from the perspective of advocacy. How can we change the system for the better?
Earlier, you spoke about the interviews you did with the people that were incarcerated, some of the reasons behind it, and the type of people they are. I’m interested in hearing more about the other interviews that you’ve done. When you interviewed the children and the families, what are some of their perspectives or things that you’ve heard?
They’re heartbreaking. Interviewing a family member of someone who’s incarcerated, which is something I do a lot, is the most heartbreaking and challenging conversation. Not long ago, I interviewed a woman whose father died. He only had about a month left on his sentence. He was incarcerated in Texas and it was his second time in. He’d been in before it was drug-related. A lot of the mid-level sentences are drug-related, especially in Southern and some of the more rural states. He contracted Hepatitis C while he was in prison. They weren’t sure if he got Hepatitis C when he was in prison or if he got it before he went to prison.
He got a pretty lengthy sentence. It was enough time to make a dent in his life and make it hard for his family. While he was in prison, his Hepatitis C got worse. One of the things that we hear a lot about people who are incarcerated is medical neglect. We do a lot of stories about medical neglect on the Prison Pipeline. I know that there are people on the outside who think that prisoners complain and they’re trying to get attention, but the truth is that there’s a lot of medical neglect in the system. People get inadequate levels of healthcare. There’s not a lot of incentive for most DOCs to invest in the health of the people they’re in custody of.
A father of this entire family and loved by dozens of people had Hepatitis C. His condition got so bad that he was sent to the infirmary, and then he was hospitalized. His daughter had talked to him every day and didn’t have any idea what was going on. She didn’t know where he was. It’s really challenging too because people get moved around a lot. Sometimes, even somebody who’s really sick might get moved, especially if they’re not sick. You, as a family member, may not find out. You might have to go through several channels to find out where your loved one has been moved to.
That’s what happened to her father. He got moved to a hospital and she wasn’t told. She spent two weeks trying to track him down in the Texas State Penitentiary System. He had been moved to a hospital several hundred miles away and she didn’t know where he was. By the time she found out where he was, he was almost dead. She only got to see him after he had slipped out of consciousness. He wasn’t even aware of what was happening. She only got to see him in the last few hours of his life and was chained to a bed with a guard, even though he wasn’t even conscious. She didn’t get to say goodbye to her father. She had talked to him every day while he was in prison.
She came on the show. She told the story of his death and what he had meant to his family. That interview was unique for me because we did it over Zoom and she didn’t tell me that the family would be on the call. Over twenty people joined that call. They were all completely quiet as she broke down in tears and told the story of her father dying in the hospital, chained to a hospital bed, not getting to say goodbye, and spending two weeks desperately searching for him. Every interview I do is completely heartbreaking unless it’s a good interview.
I wanted to interject the story that you told is not uncommon. People incarcerated are getting older because the sentences are longer. It’s unfortunate that the prison does not call you when your loved one is sick. Finding out that he was in a hospital and being able to see him even though it was too late, she did get to see him because some people don’t get to see them. I can talk from experience, my brother had Hep C and he died in prison. Back then, I never imagined that he was in the infirmary handcuffed. From what I’ve heard, assuming that he was, I don’t know any better.
It’s heartbreaking. We need to humanize people that are in prison and how it affects the family because we love our loved ones. We’re human beings. Something that we do is not who we are. I wanted to thank you for sharing that. We don’t get to talk to the DAs, the judges, and law enforcement. What are some of their perspectives?
This is one thing that I’ve learned. The thing about prison is that everybody who’s involved in it, whether you’re a journalist, a judge, an advocate, a family member, you’re incarcerated, you’re post-parole, or everybody who’s had something to do with prison, their life is touched by it, and it changes them. There’s something about it that affects them. There are all kinds of judges. You had a good judge on the Prisoner’s Family Conference for 2022. That was a sympathetic judge from the State of Louisiana who is trying to do something in drug court and drug treatment, which is great.
We’ve interviewed judges for Prison Pipeline who are similar. They talk like a judge talks. The way that they talk is not going to be the same way that we talk to someone who’s a political activist, wants to abolish the prison system and sees it as a perpetuation of chattel slavery. That’s going to be a different conversation, which is a great and important conversation too.
People talk about the historical links between the slavery of African people and the Prison Industrial Complex as it exists. That’s as important as talking to a judge. As a journalist, I have to talk to all of those people, be able to understand enough of what they’re saying, ask them good questions, and let them talk. What I’ve learned is that even the judges who sentence people to prison are not robots. In some ways there, I don’t think we understand what they go through emotionally.
They can’t show their emotions. They can’t talk about what they’re going through. They have to be as neutral and following the law as they can be in their position. They also care about the Constitution, our process, and the way that it exists. They may not have the same perspective that we hold, especially those of us who are advocates or have loved ones who have been incarcerated. We have a different view because when we’re talking to someone who’s incarcerated, it’s either somebody that you’ve loved who you now have to deal with their sentence or, like in my case, someone that I’m interviewing that I have a lot of sympathy for.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think that the judges don’t have sympathy. Some do and some don’t. The ones that we get on our show have a lot of sympathies, and they have a lot of awareness. They understand what it means to send someone to prison, as well as the DAs and the prosecutors do. It’s this whole process. If there’s somebody who has an opportunity to do something to reform the system, it’s our state legislators. More than any particular person in the system has the means of changing it. That part of what I hope to do through Prison Pipeline and all of us do as advocates are to change the conversation around incarceration.
It may not happen now, 20 years, or even 100 years. What I hope is that by us continuing to do the work of telling these stories and making people aware of everything that we’re going to over the long run have an impact on this system. We’re going to make it more humane the same way that the racial justice movement has taken a bite out of policing. The racial justice movement, when George Floyd was murdered, changed this country.
The reason it changed the country around policing is because there were 50 years of advocacy before that. Going all the way back to Jim Crow, everything that happened during the Civil Rights Movement up through now, the Black Power movements, and to the ‘60s took that long. It took 50 or 60 years to get to George Floyd and he wasn’t some climax. George Floyd was a moment when the floodgates broke open. That’s what I hope we’re doing. I hope that we’re part of that process of bending the arc of justice like the long arc that Martin Luther King talks about. Hopefully, we’re bending it a little towards justice through the work we do.
We are definitely. That’s why we do this show and you have the radio show. That’s why we speak at conferences, go to conferences, and have conferences. We talk to people and provide support for people to know so that they’re not alone. A lot of times, when it does happen to somebody, they don’t have the information. It’s like what you were saying earlier about growing up, and when you went into prison, you had these biases that you didn’t realize that you had. I can relate because I worked on Criminal Justice Software and I used to go into prisons. I do not really see people as people because I was in there doing my job. It wasn’t until my brother was incarcerated. It opens our hearts.
It makes us more compassionate, non-judgmental and accepting. The people that have been through it have a voice. You’re giving them an opportunity to have that voice. Hopefully, our legislators are hearing that. You’re interviewing people who have been affected and are talking to their legislators because, as you said, that’s the only way that we will have changed.
You’re also talking about George Floyd and the floodgates opening, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, “That’s the tipping point.” Things are changing now. They can’t go back. We have to make sure that they don’t go back and we keep moving forward. I want to thank you. There’s more to talk about and we do have a little more time. Is there anything else that we haven’t broached that you want to bring out and share?
The most powerful stories are when adults in custody and former adults in custody have the opportunity to tell their own stories on the radio. They also are the people who get to do the interviewing, the talking, and the research. I become obsolete because they’re empowered to do the work. I hope someday my Collective Prison Pipeline becomes that collective, where adults in custody and former adults in custody are able to produce their own media. I am also hoping that in the future, people will be able to produce media while they’re in custody or incarcerated. That’s the most powerful place for storytelling and getting to know people in a way that you can’t know them in any other way.
The most powerful place for storytelling is getting to know people in a way that you just can't know them in any other way. Share on XThere’s this incredible lack of access to resources in prisons. Prisons are supposed to be places where people are rehabilitated and they’re given a second chance at life. In a way, we should be giving people who are in custody this abundance of resources. They shouldn’t be sitting in their cells watching television all day, getting bad food, and getting a shower three times a week.
People in custody should be getting a chance to have lots of different programs that they can get involved in, opportunities to make things, learn by positive behavioral modeling from community members who want to come in and support them, and be given jobs, skills, and life training. There’s so much that could go into rehabilitating people. In the end, we all want to live in a world where we’re safe.
That’s what most people want to feel safe. We can’t have a safe world unless people are getting their basic needs taken care of. There’s a lot that we can do to make changes in prisons so that people don’t recidivate. They’ve had a chance to get a life education in the emotional coping skills, the intellectual and job skills, and the social supports that they need to succeed once they get out.
That’s what I notice from all of these years of interviewing people. It’s the lack of resources that people don’t get while they’re incarcerated. It not only makes their sentences unbearable, but it also makes them incapable of dealing with the world when they come out. If they don’t have a good family who’s there for them and they don’t have that support, it’s much harder. People don’t understand how incredibly hard it is. It’s harder to get out of prison than it is to do time. That’s a little bit of what I’ve learned.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. I don’t know if I’m going to be putting you on the spot, but I wonder, how do we talk to people that haven’t been affected? How do we talk to the people that say, “Lock them up and throw away the key?” How do we talk to the people that say, “Let’s be tough on crime?” How do we open the minds and hearts that the people that are incarcerated and their families are affected? Providing the programs makes communities better, safer, and will bring people out as contributing citizens.
It’s hard to talk about. The first thing that we have to do is we have to acknowledge the harm that’s done by people who commit crimes. If we, as advocates, don’t acknowledge that people do terrible things and the terrible things that they do collectively create a certain attitude within the general public. I don’t think that we’re going to get too far if we don’t acknowledge the harm that’s done by people who are incarcerated because every person who’s been victimized is part of a bigger story. I don’t know if it’s a problem but the reality is that we live in a society where the victims of crime are given a lot of support and attention. The people who perpetrate crimes are not given any support at all and are treated almost like animals.
That’s the country we live in. It’s not fair because if you take a deeper look, you see that the people who commit crimes are victims themselves. They’re people who had something bad happen to them, or they have a lack of opportunity. It’s very rare that someone commits a crime out of pure greed, total stupidity, passion, or rage. There’s a story that goes into every crime. It’s something that escalates, starts in childhood, and is modeled. As advocates, we have to acknowledge the harm that’s done because I don’t think that we can get into an honest conversation with our state legislators, neighbors, or anyone because there’s such an extreme prejudice against criminals or people who have committed crimes.
If you take a deeper look at the lives of convicts, you can see that these people who have committed crimes are usually victims themselves. Share on XThe first thing we have to do is say, “That’s the reality that we live in.” It was said in whatever sacred text you have. Whether it’s the Bible, the Torah, the Quran, the sacred scripts of the dead, or whatever your cultural narrative is, I bet you that somewhere in your sacred writings, it says the same thing in the Bible, which is, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.” In the Torah, when the divine realizes that they’ve gone way too far. When Abraham says to God, “If there are ten righteous people in this city, then will you spare this city?” That’s the attitude that we all need to have. We need to say everybody deserves a second chance, not just a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th chance.
People deserve to be treated with dignity, respect, and humanity. Even if they’ve done something at the worst possible time in their life and moment and they made a terrible decision, they still deserve a second chance. Believe me, people who go to prison get punished. Prison is nothing but a punishment. People who go to prison get that.
They deserve a chance at life and at all of the opportunities of life that we have after they’ve done their time. Before they do their time, they deserve to live in a society where we’ve thought through what it means to send someone to prison because we don’t get anything for our money out of the system we have right now. We’re spending more money than any other country in the world to incarcerate people. We’re not getting any value out of our investment. We’re wasting people’s lives, and we can do this much better. We can change the system that is much more effective, and it will change people’s lives and make a difference.
Emma, thank you so much for that. I want everybody to hear what you said. I want people to be able to listen to your radio show if you could spill it out and tell us how to access it and how we can listen to it.
Prison Pipeline airs every Monday on KBOO Community Radio. That’s 90.7 FM in Portland, Oregon, and also in the Willamette Valley. You can also hear it online at KBOO.fm. We air every Monday at 6:30 PM Pacific Time, so that’s West Coast time. All of our programs are also archived on KBOO.fm. You can find every show we’ve ever produced since they started digitizing shows years ago.
I want to thank you so much for sharing everything. I know I’m going to go out there. I want to hear some of the stories that you’ve shared and also the different people that are involved. As you said, everybody is affected, and I want to hear what the judges and the prosecutors say, along with the families and everybody else. Thank you so much, Emma.
Thanks so much, Julia. It’s been great being on the show with you. You’re an inspiration to me. I remember the first time I heard about your show. It blew me away. It’s a great show, and you’ve kept it with it all these years.
Thank you so much, Emma.
Important Links
- KBOO
- Prison Pipeline
- Prisoner’s Family Conference
- Juan Melendez – Prison Pipeline Previous Episode
- https://www.Facebook.com/PrisonPipeline/
- https://PrisonFamiliesAlliance.org
About Emma Lugo
Emma Lugo is a journalist and advocate who serves on the board of KBOO community radio as chair. She has been involved in community media for 35 years, beginning as a producer of public access television. She has produced television, radio, print and web-based journalism on a variety of issues including progressive politics, peace, criminal justice reform and environmental justice. As a producer of Prison Pipeline, Emma works with a collective of radio activists to educate and inform the public about Oregon’s criminal justice system including legislative reform, and voices from insiders, advocates and family members. Emma lives in Portland, Oregon with her partner and six cats.
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