Human Powered Season 2, Episode 3 Transcript
"Three convicts, twenty dollars, and a newspaper"
Robert: We had all these dictionaries, we were using Word Perfect at the time. So you had the dictionaries there, You had all this stuff. So I said, here's the deal. If I find a misspelled word in your column, in your writing, you owe me a six-pack.
{>>upbeat music comes in<<}
Adam: Robert Taliaferro worked for five years as the editor of a newspaper, but not the kind that shows up at your front door. This was the Prison Mirror, a newspaper written and published inside Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison.
Robert: And my best writer. He was my best writer, but we probably had about 10 cases of soda in the back of my office. And most of them were from him. Because he just refused to use the dictionaries. And the warden came in one time and he looked back and he saw all these cases of sodas sitting back there, he said, you know, I don't even want to know what the hell that's about. You know, so…
Adam: I'm Adam Carr, public historian and co-host of Human Powered, along with Dasha Kelly Hamilton. This season we're telling stories of the humanities at work within the carceral system. It's a six-part series brought to you from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. And today we're talking about the power of the press. Take Robert, for example, he spent a long chunk of his life inside and his drive to read, write, and create were crucial to him.
Robert: Guys would ask me, "T how did you do 38 years, man, not lose your mind." I said, well, first of all, man, my body's locked up. My mind is not locked up."
{>>instrumental hip-hop beat<<}
Adam: Dasha Kelly, we are back on Human Powered again.
Dasha: Back like we never left.
Adam: And in this episode, I am thrilled to introduce you to two gentlemen I got to know through these interviews: Robert, who we just heard, Robert Taliaferro, and our second guest on the show, Shannon Ross. Both of them worked as prison newspaper editors. And one quote Robert had there just at the end, an idea, I think that cuts right to the core of this podcast: My body's locked up. My mind is not locked up. I know you’ve worked with people who are in that circumstance, can you talk a little bit about where Robert might be coming from.
Dasha: Mmmhmm. And that’s such a great theme to think about, because I feel that even though everyone understands physics, that your body is locked inside of this building, and your mind can still be free. But so many people that find themselves inside and behind those walls don't feel that they have that ownership of their thoughts, of their decisions, of their destiny in a lot of ways. So it's a lot of commitment and reckoning and reconciling to be able to know that you can still have a liberated mind, even when you are incarcerated in one of these buildings.
Adam: Absolutely. And for us, you know, some of us on the outside, that might be like something you read on a, you know, a tea tea label or something like that. Like it's, it's some of that, that wisdom…
Dasha: A poster in the break room,
Adam: Absolutely. It sinks in differently when we're, we're actually talking about a body being locked up.
Dasha: Literally
Adam: One thing about Robert and Shannon who are the two subjects of this show, they published newspapers inside the system and they distributed them outside the system, within the system.
And Dasha, can you talk a little bit about what you've seen from your experience working with folks in the system and even digesting your own experiences about this flow of information?
Dasha: Definitely, a lot of it, like you mentioned, is about creating access to what's happening outside of this building. So that's from major news to how they stay connected with their families to finding out what's happening, you know, in different places around the country, even not just where their homes are.
But the other piece of that is controlling the type of information and the stories that they're able to shape about themselves and for themselves. There's assumptions that we make about one, how someone inside spends their time or the types of conversations they'd be interested in, and not giving the generous thought that they're also creating news, that they're still creating life. They are still alive. So the assumption that we make about what they need and what they're processing can often be very one-dimensional.
So to have them have the opportunity to not just make a newspaper, They're also deciding what stories get to be important. They're deciding the narrative they tell about themselves to each other, and so that is not a semblance of control that is absolutely correcting a narrative that many of them have lived with for their lives.
Adam: And that’s what’s so inspiring about both Robert and Shannon is that they took matters into their own hands, And after having a chance to meet them both individually, we thought, let's get them together for a conversation.
Something that oftentimes you never know what kind of sparks are gonna fly. And these two editors, uh, plus me another editor got together and that's what we're gonna be hearing in this episode.
Dasha: You three editors.
Adam:And you too, you're an editor too. Four editors.
Dasha: Oh, I'll take it.
Adam: And who know who's listening, all kinds of editors.
Dasha: (laughter)
Adam: The very first prison newspaper was published in 1800. It was called the Forlorn Hope, pretty on the nose, considering the state of incarceration in the US. We incarcerate a lot of people. According to the Bureau of Prisons in 2020, there were almost 550,000 people in local jails, 975,000 in state prisons, and more than 150,000 in federal prisons.
That's around 1.7 million people, bigger than the population of Phoenix. That same year, nearly 34,000 people were locked up in Wisconsin. That's as big as the entire population of Wausau.
Among state and federal prisons, access to the news varies widely. In some states, you can access print papers in the library, in others, you can see certain news programs on TV. But in all cases, access to information is filtered through the massive bureaucratic structure of the prison system.
So there's this huge, often unmet desire within prison populations for more information, especially stories that reflect their lived experience. So today we'll hear from two people who edited newspapers with that exact purpose.
First up, Robert.
Robert: I’d close my door and I’d say ok first of all any gripes you all got, let’s hear it. And that’s…you know, ok now that you've got that out of your system, now we are going to go to work.
Adam: I first learned about Robert from an Odyssey Beyond Bars course at Oak Hill Correctional in Oregon, Wisconsin. He was in the same English 101 class as Mark Espanol, who you heard in episode two.
I wanted to know more about how he came to editing. So a few weeks after he was released from prison, I asked him how he got started.
Robert: I used to get on the bus and I was like 13, 14 years old. I’d get on the bus. I’d go to the Carnegie library in Pittsburgh and I would sit for hours and hours and hours.
And there was an old janitor down there at one time and he would let me into the old, where we call “the dusties.” Usually it would be the professors or whatever that would be allowed in that area. But he would just say, just, don't tell anybody—I'm telling them now, but he's long dead now—but he used to let me in there and I used to sit there and just be in awe. You get a part of you that you just don’t know exists and then something somewhere just unlocks and next thing you know you fell in love with it. I fell in love with art, I fell in love with writing, with reading classics. And I'm like ok.
Adam: This does my public historian heart good. How do you open your mind? You read. Where do you go when you don't have money for books? The public library. But after high school, Robert — the kid reading dusty ol’ classics in the library—decided to follow a path no one expected.
Robert: I had scholarships for music, I had scholarships for art, I had scholarships for sports to college and I chose the to join the United States Army. And that just blew everybody's mind. At that time I wanted to uh jump out of perfectly good airplanes, you know,I wanted to be airborne, I wanted to be all of that. Then I took the asvabs, which is the army service test that you take.
And, my scores came back. and I scored extremely high on those tests. that I eventually ended up in the, in the, you know, becoming a, an analyst in intelligence channels for the United States army security agency
Adam: In other words, Robert was a spy...but he left the Army after his first tour and birth of his daughter.
Robert: One of the big mistakes I've made in my life was not making the army a career. I loved it. That was the first big mistake.
Adam: And other mistakes followed. After the Army, Robert moved to Wisconsin…and ended up in prison.
Robert: Because I was just stuck on stupid. And I said, well, man, first of all, I committed a crime. I'm going to prison.
Adam: And Robert had to decide what kind of life he wanted for himself when he got there.
Robert: Do I wanna be like a standard lifer, or am I going to do something positive?
Adam: He chose positive. And for Robert, that meant working on his education. Eventually, he was transferred from a prison in Wisconsin to one in Minnesota.
Robert: I said, I'm going to Stillwater, Minnesota. They have a college program up there. That's what I'm planning on doing.
Adam: In 1984, he became a reporter for the Mirror. The official name of Robert’s newspaper was The Prison Mirror, but I’m going to refer to it The Mirror because Robert de-emphasized “prison” on the masthead during his tenure as editor. He got the job because the previous editor…well, I guess you would say he was forced to retire.
Robert: Uh, the editor ran afoul of some people in the institution, they caught up with him in the dining hall, and hit them with a couple of chairs in the dining hall and he decided he was going to retire from the publication. And they asked me, would you like to run the newspaper?
Adam: So Robert, the former spy with no experience as a journalist, says:
Robert: Yeah, why not? Didn't have a clue about running a newspaper. Didn't know what the hell was going on with running a newspaper. Didn't know anything about n spaces m spaces, font size, I didn't know anything about that key line. I didn't know anything about that, but I uh, I said, yeah, I'm going to run a paper. Why not?
Adam: But on this first edition, his lack of experience caught up to him.
Robert: Found out that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about. Um, but I'm a reader, I'm a studier, I'm a researcher. I'm former army intelligence. So I learned how to research things, and how to find things. So I went and got every single book I could find on journalism. I went down to the print shop and I had them, I sat down with them and I said, okay, tell me everything that I need to know about putting together this newspaper.
Adam: So here’s what he needed to know: the newspaper came out every two weeks —32 pages with at least 40 images in each. There were writers to manage, plus the crew down at the print shop.
So, yes, this is the 1980s we're talking about, and he is printing on an actual printing press. Every page had to be laid out by hand – it’s a tremendous amount of work for each paper to just get printed.
Robert was paid $1.75 per hour for a nine-hour day, and earned $126 every two weeks. But the job came with another perk.
Robert: Being the editor of the publication. I was blessed or privileged to see every single edition that was ever printed of the Prison Mirror, we had all the original copies in my office, and I would sit there and the history of that publication, the writing of that publication, you, you're talking about people that were alive in the 1800s.
<western music>
Adam: Okay, this is where I get to nerd out a little. Because The Mirror was started in 1887 by three brothers, Coleman, Robert and James Younger. And if those names sound familiar, or even if they don’t, well:
Robert: They ran with Jesse James. They tried to rob the Northfield bank in Northfield, Minnesota, which has never been robbed to this day and will probably never be robbed.
They got busted, got sent to the territorial prison in Stillwater, at the time it was a territorial prison and they decided we're going to start a newspaper. So in uh, August 10th, 1887, they put up 20 bucks a piece. The warden put up another 20 bucks and they started the Prison Mirror.
It was just one of those rare rare events in prison history, three convicts, starting a newspaper that a hundred and some years later, as you know, I was at the right place at the right time, and the right person.
<western mux out>
Adam: And in addition to reading all the mirror's back issues, he also researched what other papers were doing
Robert: I would study my competitors, which were other prison newspapers. You had the Menard Times in Illinois, you had the Echo, out of Texas you had the, the Trojan out of Leavenworth and you had a ton of these great newspapers. And then you had the Mirror and we are the grandfather of all of them.
But I also had subscriptions to the Washington post, the New York Times, USA today, a ton of publications from around the world. And I would study what they're doing and I'd say, okay, this is crap, but this is pretty good. I'm going to incorporate that into my paper.
Adam: One thing Robert especially liked was people on the street interviews from the USA Today.
Robert: So I would do that with some of the guys in prison. I'd have a question, we do an editorial and I say, go around and talk to the guys. And these guys were like, oh my picture's in the newspaper. And they could share it with their moms, or their dads or their kids. But I wanted to modernize people's ideas of what prisoners were about. So one of the things I did was making sure - giving the prisoners a human face.
Adam: And to do that, Robert put human dignity at the center of his newspaper. It may sound simple - but this isn’t how people who are incarcerated are usually presented by the media. For starters, he never talked about people’s convictions.
Robert: We're not going to talk bad about these guys with all the cases that they have. I don't care about what they did to get in prison. What I care about is what they're doing while they're here.
Adam: One of the stories that Robert remembers publishing was about a younger man who had a reputation for being tough.
Robert: He was considered just this complete bad-ass.
Adam: He kept getting sent to solitary confinement, but then the prison began a bonsai program —You know, like with the miniature trees,
Robert: And this kid, for whatever reason, he just took to these bonsai trees. And he won a blue ribbon. to see this bad-ass kid who was just known to be just badass, you know, nobody liked him. Nobody wanted to be around him, but when he got his ribbon, he was in tears. it was a phenomenal story. because it had just had this life., this bit of life
Adam: That ‘bit of life’ is what separates good journalism from a recitation of facts. Finding the humanity, which can open an audience’s mind. Robert also did interviews with people beyond the prison population – being unbiased was crucial to the paper's success.
Robert: My community was 14 hundred prisoners and 400 staff members. And I had to walk the fine line. between those two communities as well, because I couldn't be pro prisoner and I couldn't be pro-administration. I had to be able to sit up there and talk to both of them
Adam: So he interviewed people like
Robert: John Edgar Wideman, you know, he's an award-winning writer out of Pittsburgh. Al Quie, former governor of Minnesota. Uh, we had, Ed Bradley 60 Minutes host, and, you know, George Foreman boxer. These are the guys we had on our front cover, to make people say, oh, wow, this is a different prison publication.
Adam: And sure enough, Robert's prison publications started to get recognized.
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Robert: We won our first award: national award as the best prison newspaper in the country. And every year after that, we did the same thing. Every single one of my writers won awards, uh, every single one of my photographers, won awards, every single one of my sports writers won awards. People that produce poetry. They won awards. And in the four year period that we had, we had 110 I think national awards, for journalism.
{music fades down}
Adam: Talking to Robert, it's clear how proud he is of the Mirror and his work with it. Since the prison mirror started in the 1880s, more than 450 prison newspapers have been published. Many shared the goal of bringing about better understanding between people in prison and people outside. But as important as Robert’s story is, times have changed. Right now, there are only 12 states that have a prison newspaper program.
But with today’s means of digital communication, official prison newspapers are not the only way those kinds of connections can be made. To get a sense of how this idea is playing out right now, I wanted to talk to my friend Shannon Ross.
Shannon Ross: Hello, I'm Shannon Ross and I'm the executive director of The Community
Adam: The Community is a newsletter that Shannon started when he was inside. It started in print, but now reaches half of Wisconsin’s prison population through email, with even more people on the outside. Something like 30,000 people read each one.
Shannon was, in many ways, the perfect person for this project. He was a walking talking newsletter.
Shannon: I would get a lot of information that would come across my path, mostly because I'm very curious. And I was always asking people, can you get me this? Can you send me this?
Adam: He was reading USA Today, Journal Sentinel, and the Wall Street Journal. So he has all this information and people are starting to notice that he knows things.
Shannon Ross: People would always be like, oh man, where'd you get that from? Cause I would share the information I would give other people. And so I was already this source of information for people, whether they would come ask me whether I was just telling them proactively or sharing, um, paperwork. I was like in a sense already a newsletter.
Adam: But at the time, Shannon had actually been working on a blog. It was called Inner Voice 84. That title says a lot about Shannon’s goals for the project. He wanted to recruit a bunch of different people to tell their stories of life inside and outside of prison—to serve as thet little voice in your head. The angel on your shoulder for people still inside.
Shannon Ross: Just like different players in the system writing about their experience and, and how that relates to helping a person not come back. It was like, it was supposed to be a nudge, maybe you were about to go do something stupid. You read about how my situation is right now to remind you of where you were and where you could be.
Adam: But, on one level, the blog didn’t really work. Shannon reached out to people and asked them to write, but the articles never came. But even if he had a hard time landing guest writers, he was building connections.
Shannon: The irony of it is that what I was actually doing is creating this network that would benefit the actual newsletter and then benefit me greatly when I actually got out and was able to take off in a way that does seem like, you know, oh my God, he took off like, well, it was a lot of years of work beforehand people, you know, I was connected to.
Adam: So after five years Shannon changed course. The blog idea morphed into a physical newsletter available to folks inside and outside.
But this wasn't an officially sanctioned prison newspaper like the Mirror. He had no budget, no staff, no office. But Shannon had his network; people lined up who wanted to help. Folks from all over Wisconsin who volunteered to help
Shannon: Jim he's up in Eau Claire still, he's A former librarian um, just has a variety of skills and different things he wanted to help. My mother was a soon-to-retire newspaper reporter, my mom can catch everything. She's a good editor. She’s organized. Then finally was my friend Buzz who was a former priest.
Adam: This is how shoestring the operation was. And this crew had an elaborate process, but it worked.
Shannon: I would send it to Jim back and forth about the design. He would print it, he would send it from Eau Claire. He would send it to Buzz, Buzz'd put the labels on. He would send them out to people in prison, and then he would send the remainders to my mom. And then she would send them to people as they signed up brand new.
And then me replying to people, me going to different prisons. And some places had a typewriter I could use to reply to people. Some places I wouldn't, I would have to write it out.
My mom would type it up. And that was our convoluted process for the first, like two years
Adam: Putting out the newsletter got a lot easier, and a lot cheaper, when they went digital. Today the Community newsletter is distributed to people through email. The newsletter has both practical resources, like how to find an attorney if you're fighting a case, or what kind of reentry support is available for a job search. And it also has stories from people who are incarcerated or are now out.
Shannon: Our purpose is to connect, to connect you to information, to connect you to your potential, to connect you to other people that you might even live on the unit with, but don't even know. Like we will have success stories where you're showing you examples of people who made it, and give you some feedback on what they've done, how much time they did, their advice. But just connecting you to whatever it may be that helps in that situation that you and your loved ones get through as successfully as possible, this experience in the prison system.
Adam: When someone in prison reads this newsletter, their humanity is reflected back at them. And that matters.
Shannon: People before they come out, that is where re-entry is. It's when you try to focus on somebody when they come home and you'd have all these measures of, we want to focus on recidivism and we want to be, you know, algorithmically, trying to increase or decrease by percentage points, this or that for the public safety or what we think is public safety.
You're missing the fact that human beings inside are going to respond to the environment and the treatment that they have and the trauma that they have. And if you don't treat them as a human being, first and foremost, they're never going to effectively get to employee or parents or student or any other label or position that you want in society - you can’t make them be those things if you skip the human stage.
And the connection that a newsletter brings just to stories and just having people actually care about your concerns and having a place you can write to, and somebody write back about this is what's going on with that. That is how that has to start.
<music>
Adam: I had long conversations with both Robert and Shannon and I was…inspired. Working from two completely different systems, two totally different budgets, two completely different means of distribution and coming from essentially two different generations— they still had essentially the same approach: Putting the people in prison at the center of their work. Not their crimes, not their institution. Themselves.
And in the spirit of making connections and building networks, I thought—these two guys should meet. Because honestly, I just wanted to listen to them swap stories and think about how media can present the story of prisons and people inside them differently.
So I set up a zoom.
Shannon: So when Adam was mentioning that he'd spoken to you, um, I definitely perked up cuz I read the, you know, the Prison Mirror when I was incarcerated and that was um, not so much a source of inspiration, but a guide, you know, definitely a guide in terms of what can be done and what's being done in other places.
Robert: I mean its refreshing You know when Adam was talking about you. And I said, oh, hell yeah, I wanna meet this guy. Absolutely. I wanna meet this guy. You know, I wanna meet anybody that has this concept of we're gonna make some changes. I commend you for doing what you're doing as far as that new, well, what's the name of the newsletter, by the way,
Shannon: I was going to ask you, The Community.
Robert: I know exactly what you're talking. Yeah.
Shannon: I was going to be disappointed if you hadn’t heard of it.
Robert: I've read it and I, I get it. I've yeah, I've read it. And I get a copy of it now. I, I get to meet the person. Okay. I'm very well aware of it. Absolutely. I'm very, very well aware of it. Outstanding. Well, yeah, I mean, that's one of the things, when it’d come, I'd really cover to cover.
Adam: So that was how their conversation started. They had many similar experiences. They were both often approached by people in prison wanting them to write about their case and they both had the perspective not to weigh in on one person's guilt or innocence. They sought the stories that weren't being told.
Robert: The mainstream media screws us. They write all the negative stuff, all, whatever they do, all of that. I say, we're going to be the advocate for change. We're gonna be other, when a guy sits up there and he, he wins a blue ribbon for a bonsai tree in prison at Stillwater state penitentiary.
Those are the people we want to talk about. We’re not gonna write about my case. We're not gonna write about your case. We're not gonna write about anybody else's case
Shannon: No, you, you speaking exactly what I deal with and promote in the work. I was always amused and I was inside that people would be like, man, when I get out, I'm gonna tell everybody about what's going on in here. I'm like you think people aren't doing that, they've been doing that for decades.
Robert: Right. Exactly.
Shannon: That's not the message, nobody cares. You have to find different ways to connect and get them to see why this is relevant and telling them how it is in here doesn't matter because they don't look at you as a human being. So how do we change that before they actually give a crap about what's going on in there? And so the whole thing that I've always wanted to do is that what we focus on and what we promote is going to be counter stories against what is always in the news. So what you were saying is, is spot on
I don't even like telling people, this is a big part of my message now, personally, is that I don't tell people what I was in for, because unless you are somebody who knows what that means, unless you're in this work, unless you're incarcerated, you're going to hear the title, the crime that I was convicted of. And it's going to take you off into places that are completely irrelevant.
Adam: The most powerful part of the conversation for me was hearing them talk about the necessity of people in prison leading the way in efforts to unravel mass incarceration. And they saw their newspaper and their newsletter as a piece of this puzzle. Want to understand how to lower recidivism rates? Listen to the people impacted by prison. Want to figure out a policy solution to mass incarceration? Listen to the people impacted by prison
Robert: And the only people that can really make changes in the system are people like us that we've, we've done that time. We've seen the system, we've seen the good parts of the system such as they are. We've seen the bad parts of the system, which are more than the good parts, but we have the answers. And if, if there's gonna be any real viable changes in the correctional system in this country, it is people like yourself, myself, and others who are coming out, who, who have the skillset who have that, that personality, where people, we can talk to people. We made the connections while we were inside.
Adam: Robert has been thinking about this for almost 40 years and using the humanities tools at his disposal to try to change the narrative.
Robert: You have that, that correctional system is broken. This mass incarceration concept is broken. The prison industrial concept is broken. There are people that are available to fix it. You can't do it. You're civilians. You walk around there, you come outta high school. You go to college, you study four years in college. You become a caseworker in the prison. You haven't lived the life. You came from who done it, Wisconsin somewhere got a degree. And now you determine your life Shannon, or you determine, Taliaferro's life, or you determine other people's lives in, in, in the system. You guys don't have the answers, but we do.
{music}
Adam: When I talked to Robert and Shannon, they’d both recently moved back into freedom. And each was turbocharged to do the work they did on the inside, on the outside. They immediately began connecting with other folks getting out and began helping others find and develop their voice.
Robert: Before I got out, I had already pretty much put it in my mind and I said, I'm gonna have to, uh, we've gotta make some changes.
Adam: Robert is working with an organization that creates curriculum for classes within prison. That's his job, but he's also trying to influence decision makers within the system.
Robert: I could sit around here. I got my Cuban cigars, and I could sit out my back porch here and I could smoke my cigars and drink my ginger ale all day long. Or I can take my ass up to the twin cities. And I can talk to the commissioner corrections, the secretary of the department of corrections or commissioner corrections when I get called up there, or I can put my name out there to, to talk to these parole agencies, to talk to this judge that I'm gonna be talking to with regard to whatever, simply because I believe that we can make some changes.
Adam: The conversations I had with Robert and Shannon individually and together have continued to be in my thoughts ever since. Each challenged me to think about some of the myths I've yet to question that are living rent free in my life. Like, when I first spoke with Shannon, he told me
Shannon: Before I could actually get to a point where I was a good writer, if I even dare say that about myself, I had to become aware of what it meant to be as a human being. You know, what it meant to be as a flawed individual, which we all are, who's done something terrible. Who's hurt people. That was huge for me. Grappling with what it means to exist in this world, with this very confusing and flawed mind and heart that we had and you know, why do you feel this way and why do we, why are we compelled to respond and react to things and these ridiculous ways that are so clearly, you know, negative and we regret almost immediately, but then we keep doing it. But it was the seed
You don't see the seed, you don't see what's going on underneath the soil, but when the plant's up, nobody wants to look at the roots in the soil. Nobody wants to look at, you know, what happened before you saw the blossoming. And so that's I think another example of why it is so powerful and so important.
Adam: And Robert told Shannon and I...
Robert: It's not about the money. It is not about the reputation. It's not about the accolades. It's not about any of that. It's about what you have in your heart, in your spirit, in your mind, and what you believe as a human being and how you want other human beings to look at you and how you want to be too, to have other beings look at, you know, the whole condition that we came out of.
Adam: Now, Robert gets to be in the same space as his family for the first time in decades,
Robert: I think one of the greatest successes is that. I'll sit in my room and I'll hear this knock on the door and pap pap, pap pap. And I'm like, what, what, what. Pap pap and she'll push my door open and she'll come up and every morning she'll want get up, sit on the bed. And she eats her licorish she drinks her little bottle and, and, you know, here's this great big six foot seven man who this little, two foot human being completely trusts.
And, I think that's the greatest success, I guess, is to, to finally be that father and that grandfather and that great-grandfather and this community member that I'm starting to become.
Adam: Maybe that's the whole point, connecting with people. Being there for your people, holding your baby. That's what makes us human.
Adam: I think the concept of this interview was like three editors. but it's like, we're all fathers too. I also have a daughter and I can hear your child
Shannon: Yeah, I can.
Adam: We can hear your child like through this door, but uh yeah, that's really, I think that's really beautiful. And thank you for sharing Robert. That, that was a beautiful picture you painted.
So do you guys have anything want to add before we let everybody get out to the, the rest of their Friday?
Shannon: Uh, I just wanna be able to stay in touch with Robert over time. I think there's a lot of, lot of things that, um, are very, you know, apropo and questions I still have, so Yeah. That'd be great.
Robert: Absolutely, man, I'll tell you, you got a pencil. I'll give you my number.
Shannon: Yeah, I was gonna say I, I got a new age pencil. Yeah. Got my cell phone
Robert: Oh, Hey, but you know what? I see, I'm an old writer. I still use that.
Dasha: Adam, that was really good. My heart is full to know that these two stories have come together into one. Thank you
Adam: Yeah. And just getting to spend time with Robert and Shannon felt like such an honor, so many, uh, profound ideas that they, they jumped into and, you know, really one they, they both came to in their own way was that the challenges that they faced inside of the system, they understood them so well that that's where the answers should be coming from that people in the system shouldn't be seen as a problem, but rather the solutions can be coming from them. That might not be intuitive for some of us.
Dasha: Ffirst of all, it's perfectly said that we, we aren't making intuitive decisions on how we are thinking about people are incarcerated, how we're talking about reform and change and improvement. We’ve in many cases, have already set these humans aside based on their error. So this is no longer a father, it's a,s a dealer. This is no longer someone's sister. This is someone who was soliciting, this is no longer a grandfather. It's someone who was a thief. And, and yes, they have things that they are accountable for, but these are still whole human beings with thoughts and ideas and something to contribute.
We are reminded that we are trying to go towards solutions and invite the people we are talking about into the conversation because they're going to have solutions and ideas that are going to be authentic, that are going to be rooted in experience, and in many cases, empathy and not based on theories, assumptions, and a already misplaced ideal on air quotes, how things are supposed to go.
Adam: Absolutely. And you know, something I think very powerful about both Shannon and Robert's path is that their work necessarily brought them out of isolation, they sought opportunities to connect. You know, Robert being the center of a newspaper, Shannon, creating this newsletter that is literally called the community and goes out to other people. It's a way of saying, you know, not only am I gonna cultivate my own humanity, but I'm gonna connect to that of others.
Dasha: Absolutely. We have made this category. Where we've decided that once you've made the mistake and you go in this building, that somehow the intellect you went in there with, the experience you went inside with, the desires you went inside with are moot because all you are is this number and this docket file. So writing gives people, and I'm thinking about the folks I've had a chance to work with inside, gives 'em a chance to write about how they feel. What they think, um, sort through their ideas, and not even about towards policy or change, but just that memory when they were seven. Just that feeling they have when they see their grandmother, just their lives, right? In that experience, they get to celebrate their own humanity.
So, it's a process of, of discovery. It's a process of permission, And that builds a muscle for being able to get more out and say more. Add your voice to conversations, add your experience to solution building because you have a little bit more confidence in what you have to say and the fact that you're able to say it.
<upbeat music up>
Adam: So this is where the episode was supposed to end with, you know, the two guys being connected, Shannon and Robert, and they promised to keep in touch. It's been a little bit since we did the interview and I recently got a text from Shannon, um, and apparently he is hiring Robert to be the editor of his newsletter.
Dasha: Get out of town
Adam: Absolutely, he is back in the game editing, but this time on the outside.
Dasha: That is incredible
Adam: Absolutely
Dasha: Good job universe. Good job universe. Good job.
{>>psychedelic rock music comes in with vocals: “Ah ah ahhhhhh….”<<}
Adam: Human Powered is a podcast from Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. Our senior producer is Craig Eley. Craig also edits and mixes the show. Producers are Jade Iseri -Ramos and Jen Rubin. Creative producer is Jessica Becker and the Executive producer is Dena Wortzel. Podcast interns are Megan Gorden, Kali Froncek, Alejandro Dominguez, and Kamika Patel. Editing assistance by Terence Bernardo.
The outro music is by the band Upheaval, they were a prison band at Waupun Correctional Institution in the 1970's.
Check out our episode webpage on the Wisconsin Humanities website to learn more about Shannon and Robert and the history of prison newspapers. You can find it at WisconsoninHumanities.org/podcast.
And If you haven’t already, subscribe to Human Powered now so you don’t miss our new episodes. We will be back in a few months with the rest of the season.
I’m Adam Carr, and my co-host is Dasha Kelly Hamilton, and this is what happens when a public historian and a poet laureate walk into a podcast.
