December 10, 2025 • 38 mins
Social media has gotten a bad rap over the past decade – we blame it for our growing loneliness, shorter attention spans, and polarized politics. But for incarcerated people, social media can still live up to its original promise of connection. And for those on the outside, contraband cell phones give us an unprecedented look into what life is like behind bars. Dexter talks to Jeremy Busby, an incarcerated journalist, about how social media has helped to force positive changes in jails and prisons, and why he thinks prisons want to ban it.
Shout out to the Never Post Podcast and the Freedom of the Press Foundation for connecting us with Jeremy. Check out Never Post episodes at neverpo.st and Freedom of the Press Foundation at freedom.press.
Got something you’re curious about? Hit us up killswitch@kaleidoscope.nyc, or @killswitchpod, or @dexdigi on IG or Bluesky.
Listen + Watch:
- Check out our episode with Gaby Caplan on tablets in prison: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-review-tablets-in-prisons/id1449757372?i=1000719762318
- kill switch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8oh6zDRg1zgHkyOfikoeQS7cafAytstv&si=zrCE7MYWVBgmpWqi
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
The first time I seeing social media was that the
wind unit in Hauntsville, Texas. I think there's like around
two thousand and eleven.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Jeremy Busby is forty eight years old. We talked back
in October about the Internet and social media. But what's
different about this interview is that Jeremy's calling me from
a prison in Huntsville, Texas. Jimmy's been in prison since
nineteen ninety nine. Back then, the Internet was a different place.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I didn't know anything about Facebook or Twitter. But I
knew about my Space because when I was going to
pre society, my Space was just becoming a thing. So
I knew about that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Jimmy didn't really have any contact with social media until
the early twenty tens, a few years after Facebook was
already popular.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
A friend of mine had a contraband cell phone. It
was fresh from society. It just something certain, and so
this was a hard time livelihood social media. It was
all of my social media.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Since Jeremy's been locked up, social media has gone through
a few different phases. It went from this weird hobby
that college kids and computer nerds were into, to this
new hopeful way to spread democracy to now a more
pessimistic view of this thing that gives us short attention spans,
causes addictive behavior, and makes politics more polarized. But in prison,
the situation is a little different.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
In twenty and twenty, when the pandemic came, Texas prison
system had no protocol on how to deal with the
COVID nineteen pandemic. My salmate had two cell phones. He
was like, man, listen, you can use it on the phone.
He's just sitting right there. Man, I played the video.
You can use it if you want to use it.
And so finally, man, I grabbed a phone, and the
(01:52):
first thing I did is I want to do to
And I googled how do you set up a Facebook beach?
So I learned Facebook. I learned Instagram, I learned Twitter.
I learned how to be the videos. I learned how
to make slides. I learned how to get the message
out on Instagram, how to get the message out on YouTube.
(02:13):
And that's how we're being traded up on live.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In twenty twenty, during the peak of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
Jeremy went live on Instagram with the rapper named Trade
the Truth to talk about the conditions inside the Texas
State Prison. That put a lot more eyes on what
was happening in there.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Well, union man, I can't tell you the union, bro,
but I can tell you all intentions that's getting seenious
down here. Maine brothers. You know they dying from this
Corona main.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You said they cut the phones off. They now dangling
y'all car home.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Nah, they got everything wracked up, man, they go. I
think it's like thirty five units on lockdown for everybody
on here.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
What's the best way for us to do. We need
to write Huntsville, We need to call the.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Social media is giving us unfiltered access into prisons, something
that we never had before, but we may not have
it for much longer.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
You've got to look in prison like in the same
context as you look at this slavery. Not only do
these people try to control what goes out the prison,
they try to control what comes into the prison.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this connect this is kill switch.
I'm Dexah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Before we get into Jeremy's experiences with social media, we
should probably do some backstory. The reason that Jeremy's in
prison starts when he was twenty one years old. It
was October first, nineteen ninety eight, at a motel in
Dallas County. Here's how Jeremy explains it.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I pulled up in a motel about four or five
o'clock in the morning. There was a couple of guys
out in the motel sending in drugs, and so they
tried to send me some drugs, and so we got
into an argument in the middle of the parking lot.
Because they was persistent. The argument turned into threats, and
he took his shirt off like he was going to
try to assout me at whatever the case may be.
His friend tried to hold him back, he wasn't able to,
(04:52):
and so when he ran, taught me I pulled a gun.
I sat him one time, and that was in nineteen
ninety eight, and that was else than me getting a
seventy five year prison sentence from murder.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Jimmy is now on his twenty seventh year of a
seventy five year sentence.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
My mistake was I left the seed of the crime
when it happened. I panicked and I fled, And that
was the biggest mistake that I could have made, because
when they came down to my trial. That's pretty much
what the da TO lied upon, with the fact that
you know, if mister Busby really felt like that this
defense is why he didn't just wait for the police
to come. Why to be flee and all of that
(05:29):
calling kid from the hood, and uh, you know, we
don't really deal with the police too Once when something
like that happened, is just the natural reaction to flee.
But nevertheless, instead of crying up with spilled milk, I
decided to come to prison and identify the areas where
I went wrong that possibly led me to come into
prison for this sentence, and then making all of the
necessary SPEs that I needed to make to ensure that
(05:52):
this doesn't ever happen to me again, right, which includes
my problem sovereignt skills, my conflict resolution skills, my mechanisms,
all of these things that I wasn't taught during my youth.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Pretty soon after Jeremy arrived in prison, he realized that
he had something that the other incarcerated men around him
didn't have.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
When I friends got to prison, one of the things
that I noticed, despite the fact that I had dropped
out of school in the eighth grade, I could read
and write and comprehend better than the majority of the
people that was in Texas prison. And so as a
result of that, I became like a person that would
help people write letters to their families. I was going
(06:33):
down to La La Berry helping people because I'm working
on my own personal case, but as I was learning,
I'm helping them interpret and learn the law.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And then finally I got.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
In contact with a returnent named Dounia was a spoon.
We became real good friends, and she started writing me
because she had heard about my case. She wanted to
help me out, and so all of these letters that
I was writing to her, she eventually said, Jerremany, listen,
I wanted to take some of these lets just started
telling them to the newspaper because you're a real good writer,
(07:04):
and the stuff that you're writing me is about prisons,
and a lot of people on the outside don't understand
everything that you understand, and you do such a good
job and articulate this.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
So, with Donnie's encouragement, Jeremy began the next phase of
his life as a journalist, just one who's reporting from
inside the prison. In general, even if a journalist like
me tries to go and observe things. Prison officials can
be very restrictive of what you can do. So having
a journalist on the inside like Jeremy means that people
in the outside world can get a more unfiltered look
(07:35):
at a world that was almost invisible to most of
us before.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
They are already have this pedious, pedious process. O't recrost
act like person like you want us to fly to
get something on me, You're going to put you through
so much stuff to try to get it, and then
you might not even get it, and then they might
repact whatever you get and all of that craft and
so it's all a universal gain of censorship.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Jeremy knew that he could provide information to people on
the outside. He just didn't know if anyone would care
what he was saying. It turned out some people did.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Back in two thousand and three, I wrote an article
for the San Francisco I View about the heat and
Texas printing system and how we don't have any air
condition here. They don't give us any type of relief
as far as like cold water or any type of
cold showers or anything like that, and the gate extensive
heat and the printing system of course, everyone knows that
(08:33):
Texas has very hot summers. And most of these structures
that we have were built in the mid eighteen hundreds,
early nineteen hundreds, and they're all out of brick and steel,
and they don't have any type of modern ventilation or
anything of bad nature. And so if you don't have
family members on the outside that continue money to buy
(08:54):
a T shirt or buy a pro gym shorts, or
buy a peer tennis shoes, then you got to worry
your state uniform the whole entire time. It makes you
even hotter. There's been temperatures recorded inside of the cell
blocks inside of these buildings sometimes that have exceeded over
one hundred and sixty five degrees in certain places. In
(09:15):
order to come back the heat, this is what I
used to have to do. I go with my cell
and I have to put like maybe a couple of
gallons of water on the floor, and I had to
strip all the way down to my box shots and
I had to lay in that water. And you have
to repeat that process over and over and over and
over again just to maintain a body temperature that prohibits
(09:39):
you from having a heat scroke. And you have some
guys that are like put the shirts and the water
and they work a shirt wise with because we don't
have a shower that you can just go walk and
get into the showers, like one shower per day. Room.
I think we was averaging something close to like ten
to fifteen heat related den every single summer.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It takes the Prinson Oh my gosh, they feel like the.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Numbers can beat a lot more because they'll come back
after they ATOPSAI or whatever and say this guy died
for complications of diabetes, or he died for complications and hypertension.
But the truth of the matter is there was the
heat that triggered all of it, and with the heat
related illness that caused depth. And so I had wrote
this long article to the San Francisco A View and
(10:26):
I basically said, listen, there's nothing for these people to
bring down coolers and pull them up with ice every
morning and allow us to be able to drink cold
water throughout the day. And that could possibly say one, two,
maybe ten, maybe one hundred lives. Right when I wrote that,
some days later they came with a whole big cart
full of yellow ig little coolers that were still done
(10:48):
with ice. And they put one on every single cent
of block.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
That immediate, Yeah, that immediately.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And then my editor at the time was Mary Ratcliffe
at the San Francisco a View, and she told me
that they politely sent her a letter asked her she
can retract my article because they had solved the problem.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
about Jeremy, saying that they'd asked for his article to
be retracted. They declined to comment. After Jeremy wrote his
article on the heat inside prisons, He's also reported on
overdoses and suicide in prison, experiencing executions happening in his cell,
and what happens when the prison goes on lockdown. His
works appeared in places that specialize in reporting on prisons,
(11:31):
like the Marshall Project, but it's also been in publications
that the general public reads, like Slate magazine or the
Columbia Journalism Review. But getting those articles out isn't always easy.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
As an incarcerated journalist, I have this heal that I
have to climb with these legacy media outlets. I have
to cost all of my teens, I have to die,
all of my eyes. I damn never have to put
them in contact with the warden, with a warden to say, yeah,
everything that Jeremy wrote is legit. And so a lot
(12:04):
of times some of the stuff that the people right
being incuscerated they write the media outlets, that stuff never
gets to the press because some editor some web saying, hey, man,
I can't find what we can substantiate this, I don't
know if this really is going on, or whatever the
case may be, So it ends up in somebody's ShredIt. Now,
(12:25):
as you know from being on the outside in journalism,
when you got social media, you can skip the whole
entire legacy media outlet process. You have an unobstructed avenue
to put the information out that you want to put out.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
The ability to communicate directly with the outside world is
crucial for Jeremy. But how does he do it? So
there are two main ways that incarcerated people can communicate
through social media. The first one is directly through a
contraband cell phone. These are against the rules, but they
make their way into prisons all the time. The other
way is to call or write to someone who's on
(13:02):
the outside and have them post on your behalf. Jeremy's
done both either way. Social media gives Jeremy away to
show his perspective from prison directly without being filtered through
prison officials or waiting for a local media outlet who
believes is reporting, or hoping that some outside reporter would
take interest and cover it for him. The best example
of this is when COVID hit. The cell mate had
(13:23):
a contraband cell phone, and so Jeremy was able to
directly broadcast what was actually happening and get immediate responses
to help the incarcerated people around them.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I'm researching this COVID nineteen coronavirus and all of the
precautions that we need in order to takguard ourselves from
contracting it. One of the main troo things that they
asked you to do, where there's really three things they
ask you the social distance, the one are n ninety
five masks, and to properly sanitize your hands. Right, so
(13:54):
take the prison just on what they did. They cut
up a bunch of sheets and put the little screens
on the side of the sh and they would issuing
those sheets out to us. It was like an ninety
five mass It's a.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Cut up sheet, it's bed sheets.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Okay, yeah, yeah, it's a bad sheet.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Secondly, they wasn't passing out any type of sanitation chemicals
like hand sanitizers or anything of dead nature. And then thirdly,
it was impossible for a social distance because they got
us locked them stair with another person. So my reporting
on all of that and social media got us n
ninety five masks. They got us a bleach. They started
passing us real food out fire nutrition like savannas and
(14:33):
apples and grill milk.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Again, we asked the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about this,
and they declined to comment. Ask most people what they
think about social media, and they'll tell you that there's
good parts but also a lot of bad parts, echo chambers, misinformation,
all that. Jeremy's aware of this stuff, but he's also
aware that social media is how a lot of people
get their news. For him, that's an opportunity to speak
(14:58):
but also to learn.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
One of the things that social media did for me
is that when I even had an idea of an article,
or if I wrote the article out itself, all different
type of people will start sending me additional information to
either support or the gate starting to advance the topic.
Matters that I found interesting right, And what I realized
(15:21):
about social media is that I can reach people out
around the world, just opposed as like if I write
for a local publication, I might reach people right here
in Texas. If I write for a national application, I
might get to thirty five percent of the nation. But
when I put something on social media, I can circulate
that all over the world and even translate it into
(15:42):
our different type of languages. I was talking to people
that's far away in Switzerland about the situation in Texas printicens.
I know now that I don't necessarily have to put
one of my articles in a publication. I can just
drop it in a thread on it and it have
the same value that it would have if I had
dropped it in a petition like the Apedia.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Once Jeremy found a way to use social media, he
suddenly had access to a whole world that he didn't before.
But that's starting to change. Cell phones have always been contraband,
but now prisons across the country are really cracking down
on social media access. We'll get into how and why
after the break.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
One of the first themes that they told me when
I became a journalist in prison, the warden called me up,
and he talked to me about those two fins that's
around the prison, the trim of the fence with the
bob wah. And he asked me, he said, Buzzin, why
did you think we got those two fins out there
with the bob wah? And I said, well, that's to
keep people from escaping. He said, no, that's the wrong answer.
(16:56):
We're not worried about anybody escaping. That's to keep the
public out here. And when you write what you write
and give these people entry to come into my prison,
you blinging the move with my damn fence.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
And I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
That's what the warman told me. And so the social
media banned Phibbits people from bringing the general public open
the fence.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In twenty sixteen, the state of Texas, where Jemy's incarcerated,
added a brand new rule to the state's prison handbook.
The rule essentially banned incarcerated people from having any personal
social media pages run in their name, meaning that no
one outside of prison is supposed to even run an
account on Jeremy's behalf. Similar bands have also been put
in places in other states like Alabama and Iowa, and
(17:45):
last year the US Federal Bureau of Prisons proposed a
rule like the one in Texas, but that would apply
across the entire federal prison system. If an incarcerated person
was found to have a social media account, that violation
would be treated as a high severity level offense. That's
the same category that's applied to things like fighting in prison.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That garrier that the prison administration had to continue. The
status quo no longer gets to them, and so therefore
they got to do whatever they got to do to
put that back in place. So they got their social
media band back.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
In twenty sixteen, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
put their social media ban in place, they told Vice
News that quote offenders have used social media accounts to
sell items over the internet based on the notoriety of
their crime, harass victims or victims families, and continue their
criminal activity. The department went on to say that they
would quote take all of the necessary steps to prevent
(18:39):
that from happening. We contacted them to ask whether that's
still the reason for the band today. They declined to comment.
But again, there's another side of this. If we want
to talk about criminal activity, we have to acknowledge that
social media is exposing allegedly unlawful activity that the outside
world should know about.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Now you can take a picture, shoot a video by
what's going on her the prison system and put that
on Facebook and Instagram, and it's trying to go viral
and it's gonna cost people their jobs. So that's scared
the hell lot of prisons officials. It's a lot of them,
right because now, like what happened with me and No
(19:18):
Way Out documentary, when I work with Kerry Bleckinger behind
the Coast, you have last okay, but I wasn't live
with trade the truth. I was able to do all
of that unrestricted, without having to wrestle with any type
of legal media. I'm met at anything like that. We
just dropped it and it comes a whole bunch of
(19:40):
back lass. So let me call you one more time.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Okay. Phone calls in Jeremy's unit are limited to thirty minutes,
so we had to reconnect a few times during the interview.
That's why you might hear Jeremy rush through sentences. Sometimes
he's just trying to get out as much as possible
before he gets cut off. But what he's getting at
here is important. When word gets out about conditions on
the inside, it can make things hard for the officials
(20:04):
who work there. Jeremy thinks that the bands are partially
there to stop that from happening, but banning stuff from
making rules is one thing. The next step is the
current Trump administration wants to make it physically impossible to
communicate directly with the outside branding card.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Now from the FCC, they're going around trying to pass
this new law to where they can put cell phone
genres up outside of prisons.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Cell Phone jammers are devices that can block cell phone
signals within a certain range. These devices, in general are
illegal partially because they're dangerous. I mean, think about it.
If cell signals can't get through, you can't call the
paramedics or they can't find you. So obviously the general
public can't have them. But for that same reason, in general,
(20:48):
even state and local law enforcement can't legally use them.
But recently the FCC is considering letting prisons use these
jammers to block contraband cell phone use.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
They want people to think the people utilizing these phones
to organized criminal activity, and you might have a handful
of people that might utilize the country band cell phone
organized criminal activity, but from being incarcerated almost thirty years,
I'm gonna tell you that the majority of the people
that using country band cell phones are trying to connect
with non lost family members, loved ones, childhood plans, and
(21:21):
other people like myself are utilizing to report on the
conditions of the prison. And then you got third demographic
for people that just want to watch porn and movies
and videos and things of that nature. Right, there's very
few people that utilize the phone to organize criminal activity,
but the prison dishes they scared that the person that's
(21:43):
incarcerated is gonna take the phone and expose them, and
so that's the reason why they're pushing this.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Despite all these attempts to block incarcerated people's access to
social media, Jeremy's been able to report out what's going
on in prison. But when he has, he says he's
been retaliated against.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
The nature of my career is when I write something,
it don't take very long one to come down and
talk to me or try to or intimidate or you know,
and all of that. I'm pump beginning me number one
with these people. If you see anything that people don't like,
they can go look through your files and possibly subject
you to some type of political prosecution or file of
(22:24):
lossuit on you'll smear your name or come kick in
your door, or lock you up and spread you with
chemical agents and all that. I've been through all of that,
but you don't have as many people like myself. That's
what you speaking out against these people, because they gonna
come out for you, right, They're gonna take all your property,
they gonna transfer you to different units, they gonna put
(22:44):
you in solitary confinement. Last year, I've been transferred to
four different units. Each time I get to the unit,
I'm spending days in the said with no mattress, no sheets,
no blankets, no basic necessities like self two basic deodorant.
This is the stuff that.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
You go through.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And so for the majority of the people in prison here,
hey man, just put your head down and don't say nothing,
and they.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Don't come after you.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
I have never took that approach because I understand what
that approach does to a person. For you to put
your head down for so many times, after so many years,
that becomes in you. You're part of your character and
who you are. And I don't want to live like that.
And so I resist, then I do it in the
fist of matters, right. I don't never write anything ever
(23:31):
that I don't try to work with the administration first
all and say here's a problem right here. I'm thinking
about writing this, but if we can solve this problem,
I forget about writing it. It's only when they're not
interested in solving the problem that I know I can
write and get the problem solved. So as a result
of that, Jeremy Busby is public enemy number one. I'm
(23:53):
the number one agitator whatever they want to call me.
But you know, I don't really you know, I don't
really call an agitation. I can't just like good trouble,
like John Lewis caught it good Truble. This is good trouble.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Earlier this year, when the Columbia Journalism Review asked Texas
prison officials about Jeremy's claims that he's being retaliated against,
they've denied it. When we asked them, they declined to comment.
Right now, as we record this episode, Jeremy's in solitary
confinement for what he says is a response to his reporting.
More on that after the break. So hold on, Jimmy,
(24:37):
you're in solitary right now.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm a solitary confinement right now. I'm talking to
you from a solitary confinement sale. My sale is about
the size of your king size mattress. That's the whole
size of my sale. I got a callet in a
sink to be a combot right here. I got a gash,
and I got a metal bump that I lay on,
and I'm confine to this sale twenty four hours a day.
(25:03):
There are no windows. I can't tell you if there's
nighttime or daytime. The only thing that I can see
is directly in front of my said when somebody walks past.
They got a solid steel door with two petch of
glass windows on the front of it, and a siny
steel door that goes all the way down to the bottom.
Why I can't even slide anything out of the bottom.
I don't even have any communication with anybody except for
(25:25):
the guard. So it's mentally crippling. Everybody understand that it
is mentally crippling because it cuts you all the way
off from human to human contact.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
If you remember our episode on tablets in prison, Jeremy
says that they were recently given one of those state
issued tablet devices that lets them watch religious and educational programming,
and from two pm to eight pm daily, he can
pay to make phone calls if it's to a number
that has registered to receive a call from the prison.
How long you been in there?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I've been inside of child from finally since June two
thy and twenty four year. Over a year. No discproary cases, nothing.
The guards I always asked me all the time, hey man,
why they got you in here? Buzz people? And I
tell them just google me and then they come back
and say, Okay, I know why they got you in here.
Right then I even they have some of them come
(26:16):
to me and hey, man, won't you just quit being a journalist?
They and let you out of here? And I'm like,
you know, it's certain trade offs that I'm just not
willing to make, right, And uh, these people they continue
to try to harass me and book and you know,
and do all the things that they do because of
my journalism. Then hey, that's just the here that I'm down, right,
(26:37):
that's the hear that I'm down Because I didn't have
very much dext to when I came to prison. You know,
I grew up my mind. I lost my mind when
I was floored. My dad has always been a dead beat.
I dropped out of school when I was eight, and
I was running the streets and all of that, and
so all of the meaningful things that I was able
to obtain for myself during my in concentration, I'll be
(26:57):
damned if I'm gonna give that back to anybody.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
You were talking about. That was somebody knocking back there. Hey,
So in the middle of our interview, we were interrupted
by a guard knocking on jeremy cell door.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Hey, hey, look at hello, Hey man, I want you
to quit doing that. I'm on the telephone. I asked you,
I asked you to quit doing that, but I'm on
the phone. I asked you to quit beating on the
door because I'm on the telephone. You're interrupted my telephone call.
I asked you that you did that to day, and
(27:34):
I asked you to quit doing that. I I know you, Okay,
I'm sorry about that. Now you got you got some
officers that he said here, he's seated most as the phone,
so he's just don't come and just beat on the door,
beat on the door, beat on the door. But anyway,
I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
It's all good, it's all good.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Who was it? What happened?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Just now?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
I got a guard. Now he's the guard. Right. What
they do is they come by every five, ten, fifteen
minutes and just beat on the door with the bard
things that they got. He had done that five times today.
He's trying to attagnize me. He trying to get the
reaction that he just got to know that he's getting
up under my skin. They do stuff like that, and
so but I talked talk politely, you know, first couple
(28:22):
of times and say, hey, sir, if you don't mind,
and you come to the door. You can see me
in the door and my light is on. I'm moving
around it myself. Why do you feel like you have
to beat on the door for five minutes? He has
a language barrier. His English is not very good. And
so he came back and did it again, and I say, hey, man,
do you understand you just stir at people's piece when
(28:44):
you're doing all of this. But anyway, so here it is.
He came and worked at seven o'clock this morning. It's
three o'clock and uh, just the same time that he's
been to my cell and done this crap.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. No, you don't got to
apologize me. Hearing what Jeremy has to go through just
to survive is a lot. I can't imagine what it's
like to be doing journalistic reporting.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
And then on top of that, we did a no
Kings protest real quick.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
So I organized the no Kings protest, right.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Jeremy, You organized a no Kings protest in there?
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Hell yeah, Hell yeah, Jeremy.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Hey man, this stuff is serious. Bro. Let me tell
you how to organized it. Okay, can say like the
dudes is down in the world for me. He sent
me a letter and telling me that his niece came
home and her mom and her dad had been picked
up by ice. No, his niece came off from school
and her parents was gone. Then I got this other guy.
He's telling me about how his mom been working for
(29:50):
the federal government in Houston at nasal for all of
these years, and the government shut down then slowed her right,
so she's not able to send any money for his
coming center money on his phone. So when I got
thinking about all this, I'm telling all of these dudes
over there while I'm met, like, hey man, this thing
and Trump got going on and the second all of us.
So we need to protest and stand in solid differently
(30:12):
with the people on our side.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Okay, Jeremy, what you.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Got in mind? Okay, listen for this Saturday, We're gonna
not accept our food. If anybody need food, let me know.
I'll send you some food to eat. But we're gonna
put sign on our doors they say no food, no talk,
no kings.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Wow we did that, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
So it was.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Peaceful all the way up to about eight o'clock at night.
They one of the guys that we recruited, he's not
all the way there, and so he started talking like,
you know, man, damn this denying of food. I'm ready
to set it off. So he set there like three
long fire in his sail, right and this other guy
manipulated the lock on his cell and he busts out
(30:55):
the sail and just start ripping the TV's off the wall.
But what I'm showing you is this, Okay, these guys,
the guy that ripped the TV off the while that
don't hurt the prison officials. Those TV's are for us.
And so now all the TV's that you have ripped off,
people came walf the news or whatever it is that
they want to watch. You're hurting the whole community. They
just chose you. The mental deficiency that most the majority
(31:17):
of the people current have and is not mild.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
According to Jeremy, the conditions of the system only exacerbate
the problems that he sees in prison along with mental illness.
He says that the prison system in Texas suffers from
problems with violence, drugs, and suicides, and to him, these
problems and the social media bands that they want to
put in place, it's all related.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's always been my position that when you describe family
bonds and make it impossible for the family is to communicate,
then that puts the person in a better situation, and
sometimes in order to get out of that situation because
of what's going on in prison, you have to turn
the dope. My whole things needed like, it's not of
putting money into further destroying family times, as far as
(32:05):
taking people small privileges away and putting them in a
position to where they can become more depressed and become
more mentally disturbed, to where they have to increase their
drug usage. Let's take that same energy, those same resources
and the same money as let's put it towards shown
to repair family bonds. Let's put it towards trying to
help people accumulate menal for things like today can receive
(32:28):
a substance use. Let's put it towards like putting people
through rehabilitation.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I'm just gonna say this, as a journalist who's reported
on prisons, I would never be able to bring you
this kind of insight. Jeremy's work provides something that's really rare.
It's a look at what's actually happening inside this prison.
But also his work isn't just on behalf of the
incarcerated people. There's one of your pieces that I was
(32:55):
reading earlier today, and it was an article this is
for the Chronicle. I want to quote you here. You said,
for nearly three decades, I've watched this broken system break people,
both staff and the incarcerated. Instead of returning prisoners back
to their communities a better version of themselves, prisons returned
them more psychologically damaged, disenfranchised, and poorer than when they entered.
(33:19):
I've seen staff members lose their families, their drive to succeed,
and even with suicide, their lives. I think people might
be surprised to hear that you're also advocating for staff
members for the guards. Yeah, like the person who just
came by and beat on your door.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, and that comes from my mentor is retired sing
to Warden burning Pigment. And one of the things that
Warden Pigman told me about is that, hey, Disney, gentleman,
we all are humans, whether if you made a mistaken
you in prison, or if you made a mistaken you
worked for the prison. Because everybody could work for the
prisons and made them mistake. The people that work in
(33:59):
prison and the people that are in prison all come
from the same social economic demographics. The majority of them
either made it through high school and went to the
military and couldn't make it. Some of them dropped out
of high school and got the ged and started working
at a low local fast food restaurant or something. But
it's very few people inside of prison that has a
(34:20):
cottage degree that works here. Very few people.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I mean, it really could be people who would have
been neighbors otherwise. And I guess the neighbors now, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, of course the neighbors. They of course they neighbors.
And I'm telling y'all. Let to say this, the people
that work here are not the brightest people that you're
gonna find on earth. So they easily manipulated. And the
same deficiencies that I came to prison with, which is
a lack of coping skills, no conflict resolution, no constructive
decision making processes or any of that, the same things
(34:51):
that I came to prison with the majority of these
God has worked in the prison with those same deficiencies.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I got to ask you this, are you concerned about
talking to me about this?
Speaker 3 (35:02):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
No, no, no, no, no talk. I'll talk about this
every chance that I get. One of this is any
secret these people that what's going on. These people have
done so much to me, there's nothing else that they
can do. I'm not worried about them killing me physically, right,
There's nothing that they can do to me but my
journalism that haven't already been done.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
So my conversation with Jeremy had me thinking about another
conversation I had a few months ago with Gabby Kaplan.
She's the journalist who's reported on the tablets that have
been issued in prisons across the country and the federal
government's efforts to limit the communication abilities on those tablets.
If you haven't heard that episode yet, definitely check it out.
I'll leave a link in the show notes. But if
(35:48):
you look at the comments online about her reporting, you
might see people arguing that, well, if you're in prison,
having a tablet or social media is a luxury, you
shouldn't be able to have that kind of luxury.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Period.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Okay, that's an opinion, but I can read you an
argument that Jeremy Busby himself wrote in a recent article,
and I'm just gonna quote him here. Regulations that rob
incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human
rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people
and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent, just
(36:23):
as those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by
reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cell phones.
And then he closes that article with a request, quote,
give journalists meaningful access to prisons and prison records, give
incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world
and document abuses without censorship and retaliation. And I'll never
(36:48):
use a contraband cell phone again, or better yet, don't
commit those abuses at all. In quote special thanks this
week to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and to
the Never Post podcast to introduce us to Jeremy and
help make this whole episode possible. If you like kill Switch,
(37:10):
I think you'll also like Never Post and we'll put
a link to that in the show notes. And thank
you once again for listening to kill Switch. If you
want to talk, you can email us at kill Switch
at Kalaidscope dot NYC. We're also on Instagram at kill
switch pod. And if you dug this one, think about
leaving us a review. It helps other people find the show,
(37:30):
which you turn helps us keep doing our thing, and
once you've done that, in case you didn't know, kill
Switch is also on YouTube, so if you'd like to
see the people that you're hearing, you can check out
the link for that in the show notes. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki,
Darluck Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
(37:51):
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show
from Kalaidoscope. Our executive producers are oz Va Lashin, Mangesh
Hadikador and Kate Osba from iHeart Our executive producers are
Katrina Norvel and Nikki E.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Tor.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Thank you for using sekuus. Goodbye,
The first time I seeing social media was that the
wind unit in Hauntsville, Texas. I think there's like around
two thousand and eleven.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
Jeremy Busby is forty eight years old. We talked back
in October about the Internet and social media. But what's
different about this interview is that Jeremy's calling me from
a prison in Huntsville, Texas. Jimmy's been in prison since
nineteen ninety nine. Back then, the Internet was a different place.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
I didn't know anything about Facebook or Twitter. But I
knew about my Space because when I was going to
pre society, my Space was just becoming a thing. So
I knew about that.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Jimmy didn't really have any contact with social media until
the early twenty tens, a few years after Facebook was
already popular.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
A friend of mine had a contraband cell phone. It
was fresh from society. It just something certain, and so
this was a hard time livelihood social media. It was
all of my social media.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Since Jeremy's been locked up, social media has gone through
a few different phases. It went from this weird hobby
that college kids and computer nerds were into, to this
new hopeful way to spread democracy to now a more
pessimistic view of this thing that gives us short attention spans,
causes addictive behavior, and makes politics more polarized. But in prison,
the situation is a little different.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
In twenty and twenty, when the pandemic came, Texas prison
system had no protocol on how to deal with the
COVID nineteen pandemic. My salmate had two cell phones. He
was like, man, listen, you can use it on the phone.
He's just sitting right there. Man, I played the video.
You can use it if you want to use it.
And so finally, man, I grabbed a phone, and the
(01:52):
first thing I did is I want to do to
And I googled how do you set up a Facebook beach?
So I learned Facebook. I learned Instagram, I learned Twitter.
I learned how to be the videos. I learned how
to make slides. I learned how to get the message
out on Instagram, how to get the message out on YouTube.
(02:13):
And that's how we're being traded up on live.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
In twenty twenty, during the peak of the COVID nineteen pandemic,
Jeremy went live on Instagram with the rapper named Trade
the Truth to talk about the conditions inside the Texas
State Prison. That put a lot more eyes on what
was happening in there.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Well, union man, I can't tell you the union, bro,
but I can tell you all intentions that's getting seenious
down here. Maine brothers. You know they dying from this
Corona main.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
You said they cut the phones off. They now dangling
y'all car home.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
Nah, they got everything wracked up, man, they go. I
think it's like thirty five units on lockdown for everybody
on here.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
What's the best way for us to do. We need
to write Huntsville, We need to call the.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Social media is giving us unfiltered access into prisons, something
that we never had before, but we may not have
it for much longer.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
You've got to look in prison like in the same
context as you look at this slavery. Not only do
these people try to control what goes out the prison,
they try to control what comes into the prison.
Speaker 4 (03:20):
I'm afraid.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
From Kaleidoscope and iHeart podcasts, this connect this is kill switch.
I'm Dexah Thomas.
Speaker 4 (03:33):
I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Before we get into Jeremy's experiences with social media, we
should probably do some backstory. The reason that Jeremy's in
prison starts when he was twenty one years old. It
was October first, nineteen ninety eight, at a motel in
Dallas County. Here's how Jeremy explains it.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
I pulled up in a motel about four or five
o'clock in the morning. There was a couple of guys
out in the motel sending in drugs, and so they
tried to send me some drugs, and so we got
into an argument in the middle of the parking lot.
Because they was persistent. The argument turned into threats, and
he took his shirt off like he was going to
try to assout me at whatever the case may be.
His friend tried to hold him back, he wasn't able to,
(04:52):
and so when he ran, taught me I pulled a gun.
I sat him one time, and that was in nineteen
ninety eight, and that was else than me getting a
seventy five year prison sentence from murder.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Jimmy is now on his twenty seventh year of a
seventy five year sentence.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
My mistake was I left the seed of the crime
when it happened. I panicked and I fled, And that
was the biggest mistake that I could have made, because
when they came down to my trial. That's pretty much
what the da TO lied upon, with the fact that
you know, if mister Busby really felt like that this
defense is why he didn't just wait for the police
to come. Why to be flee and all of that
(05:29):
calling kid from the hood, and uh, you know, we
don't really deal with the police too Once when something
like that happened, is just the natural reaction to flee.
But nevertheless, instead of crying up with spilled milk, I
decided to come to prison and identify the areas where
I went wrong that possibly led me to come into
prison for this sentence, and then making all of the
necessary SPEs that I needed to make to ensure that
(05:52):
this doesn't ever happen to me again, right, which includes
my problem sovereignt skills, my conflict resolution skills, my mechanisms,
all of these things that I wasn't taught during my youth.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
Pretty soon after Jeremy arrived in prison, he realized that
he had something that the other incarcerated men around him
didn't have.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
When I friends got to prison, one of the things
that I noticed, despite the fact that I had dropped
out of school in the eighth grade, I could read
and write and comprehend better than the majority of the
people that was in Texas prison. And so as a
result of that, I became like a person that would
help people write letters to their families. I was going
(06:33):
down to La La Berry helping people because I'm working
on my own personal case, but as I was learning,
I'm helping them interpret and learn the law.
Speaker 3 (06:41):
And then finally I got.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
In contact with a returnent named Dounia was a spoon.
We became real good friends, and she started writing me
because she had heard about my case. She wanted to
help me out, and so all of these letters that
I was writing to her, she eventually said, Jerremany, listen,
I wanted to take some of these lets just started
telling them to the newspaper because you're a real good writer,
(07:04):
and the stuff that you're writing me is about prisons,
and a lot of people on the outside don't understand
everything that you understand, and you do such a good
job and articulate this.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
So, with Donnie's encouragement, Jeremy began the next phase of
his life as a journalist, just one who's reporting from
inside the prison. In general, even if a journalist like
me tries to go and observe things. Prison officials can
be very restrictive of what you can do. So having
a journalist on the inside like Jeremy means that people
in the outside world can get a more unfiltered look
(07:35):
at a world that was almost invisible to most of
us before.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
They are already have this pedious, pedious process. O't recrost
act like person like you want us to fly to
get something on me, You're going to put you through
so much stuff to try to get it, and then
you might not even get it, and then they might
repact whatever you get and all of that craft and
so it's all a universal gain of censorship.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
Jeremy knew that he could provide information to people on
the outside. He just didn't know if anyone would care
what he was saying. It turned out some people did.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
Back in two thousand and three, I wrote an article
for the San Francisco I View about the heat and
Texas printing system and how we don't have any air
condition here. They don't give us any type of relief
as far as like cold water or any type of
cold showers or anything like that, and the gate extensive
heat and the printing system of course, everyone knows that
(08:33):
Texas has very hot summers. And most of these structures
that we have were built in the mid eighteen hundreds,
early nineteen hundreds, and they're all out of brick and steel,
and they don't have any type of modern ventilation or
anything of bad nature. And so if you don't have
family members on the outside that continue money to buy
(08:54):
a T shirt or buy a pro gym shorts, or
buy a peer tennis shoes, then you got to worry
your state uniform the whole entire time. It makes you
even hotter. There's been temperatures recorded inside of the cell
blocks inside of these buildings sometimes that have exceeded over
one hundred and sixty five degrees in certain places. In
(09:15):
order to come back the heat, this is what I
used to have to do. I go with my cell
and I have to put like maybe a couple of
gallons of water on the floor, and I had to
strip all the way down to my box shots and
I had to lay in that water. And you have
to repeat that process over and over and over and
over again just to maintain a body temperature that prohibits
(09:39):
you from having a heat scroke. And you have some
guys that are like put the shirts and the water
and they work a shirt wise with because we don't
have a shower that you can just go walk and
get into the showers, like one shower per day. Room.
I think we was averaging something close to like ten
to fifteen heat related den every single summer.
Speaker 3 (10:01):
It takes the Prinson Oh my gosh, they feel like the.
Speaker 1 (10:04):
Numbers can beat a lot more because they'll come back
after they ATOPSAI or whatever and say this guy died
for complications of diabetes, or he died for complications and hypertension.
But the truth of the matter is there was the
heat that triggered all of it, and with the heat
related illness that caused depth. And so I had wrote
this long article to the San Francisco A View and
(10:26):
I basically said, listen, there's nothing for these people to
bring down coolers and pull them up with ice every
morning and allow us to be able to drink cold
water throughout the day. And that could possibly say one, two,
maybe ten, maybe one hundred lives. Right when I wrote that,
some days later they came with a whole big cart
full of yellow ig little coolers that were still done
(10:48):
with ice. And they put one on every single cent
of block.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
That immediate, Yeah, that immediately.
Speaker 1 (10:55):
And then my editor at the time was Mary Ratcliffe
at the San Francisco a View, and she told me
that they politely sent her a letter asked her she
can retract my article because they had solved the problem.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
about Jeremy, saying that they'd asked for his article to
be retracted. They declined to comment. After Jeremy wrote his
article on the heat inside prisons, He's also reported on
overdoses and suicide in prison, experiencing executions happening in his cell,
and what happens when the prison goes on lockdown. His
works appeared in places that specialize in reporting on prisons,
(11:31):
like the Marshall Project, but it's also been in publications
that the general public reads, like Slate magazine or the
Columbia Journalism Review. But getting those articles out isn't always easy.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
As an incarcerated journalist, I have this heal that I
have to climb with these legacy media outlets. I have
to cost all of my teens, I have to die,
all of my eyes. I damn never have to put
them in contact with the warden, with a warden to say, yeah,
everything that Jeremy wrote is legit. And so a lot
(12:04):
of times some of the stuff that the people right
being incuscerated they write the media outlets, that stuff never
gets to the press because some editor some web saying, hey, man,
I can't find what we can substantiate this, I don't
know if this really is going on, or whatever the
case may be, So it ends up in somebody's ShredIt. Now,
(12:25):
as you know from being on the outside in journalism,
when you got social media, you can skip the whole
entire legacy media outlet process. You have an unobstructed avenue
to put the information out that you want to put out.
Speaker 2 (12:42):
The ability to communicate directly with the outside world is
crucial for Jeremy. But how does he do it? So
there are two main ways that incarcerated people can communicate
through social media. The first one is directly through a
contraband cell phone. These are against the rules, but they
make their way into prisons all the time. The other
way is to call or write to someone who's on
(13:02):
the outside and have them post on your behalf. Jeremy's
done both either way. Social media gives Jeremy away to
show his perspective from prison directly without being filtered through
prison officials or waiting for a local media outlet who
believes is reporting, or hoping that some outside reporter would
take interest and cover it for him. The best example
of this is when COVID hit. The cell mate had
(13:23):
a contraband cell phone, and so Jeremy was able to
directly broadcast what was actually happening and get immediate responses
to help the incarcerated people around them.
Speaker 1 (13:33):
I'm researching this COVID nineteen coronavirus and all of the
precautions that we need in order to takguard ourselves from
contracting it. One of the main troo things that they
asked you to do, where there's really three things they
ask you the social distance, the one are n ninety
five masks, and to properly sanitize your hands. Right, so
(13:54):
take the prison just on what they did. They cut
up a bunch of sheets and put the little screens
on the side of the sh and they would issuing
those sheets out to us. It was like an ninety
five mass It's a.
Speaker 2 (14:05):
Cut up sheet, it's bed sheets.
Speaker 3 (14:07):
Okay, yeah, yeah, it's a bad sheet.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Secondly, they wasn't passing out any type of sanitation chemicals
like hand sanitizers or anything of dead nature. And then thirdly,
it was impossible for a social distance because they got
us locked them stair with another person. So my reporting
on all of that and social media got us n
ninety five masks. They got us a bleach. They started
passing us real food out fire nutrition like savannas and
(14:33):
apples and grill milk.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
Again, we asked the Texas Department of Criminal Justice about this,
and they declined to comment. Ask most people what they
think about social media, and they'll tell you that there's
good parts but also a lot of bad parts, echo chambers, misinformation,
all that. Jeremy's aware of this stuff, but he's also
aware that social media is how a lot of people
get their news. For him, that's an opportunity to speak
(14:58):
but also to learn.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
One of the things that social media did for me
is that when I even had an idea of an article,
or if I wrote the article out itself, all different
type of people will start sending me additional information to
either support or the gate starting to advance the topic.
Matters that I found interesting right, And what I realized
(15:21):
about social media is that I can reach people out
around the world, just opposed as like if I write
for a local publication, I might reach people right here
in Texas. If I write for a national application, I
might get to thirty five percent of the nation. But
when I put something on social media, I can circulate
that all over the world and even translate it into
(15:42):
our different type of languages. I was talking to people
that's far away in Switzerland about the situation in Texas printicens.
I know now that I don't necessarily have to put
one of my articles in a publication. I can just
drop it in a thread on it and it have
the same value that it would have if I had
dropped it in a petition like the Apedia.
Speaker 2 (16:05):
Once Jeremy found a way to use social media, he
suddenly had access to a whole world that he didn't before.
But that's starting to change. Cell phones have always been contraband,
but now prisons across the country are really cracking down
on social media access. We'll get into how and why
after the break.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
One of the first themes that they told me when
I became a journalist in prison, the warden called me up,
and he talked to me about those two fins that's
around the prison, the trim of the fence with the
bob wah. And he asked me, he said, Buzzin, why
did you think we got those two fins out there
with the bob wah? And I said, well, that's to
keep people from escaping. He said, no, that's the wrong answer.
(16:56):
We're not worried about anybody escaping. That's to keep the
public out here. And when you write what you write
and give these people entry to come into my prison,
you blinging the move with my damn fence.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
And I don't like that.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
That's what the warman told me. And so the social
media banned Phibbits people from bringing the general public open
the fence.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
In twenty sixteen, the state of Texas, where Jemy's incarcerated,
added a brand new rule to the state's prison handbook.
The rule essentially banned incarcerated people from having any personal
social media pages run in their name, meaning that no
one outside of prison is supposed to even run an
account on Jeremy's behalf. Similar bands have also been put
in places in other states like Alabama and Iowa, and
(17:45):
last year the US Federal Bureau of Prisons proposed a
rule like the one in Texas, but that would apply
across the entire federal prison system. If an incarcerated person
was found to have a social media account, that violation
would be treated as a high severity level offense. That's
the same category that's applied to things like fighting in prison.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
That garrier that the prison administration had to continue. The
status quo no longer gets to them, and so therefore
they got to do whatever they got to do to
put that back in place. So they got their social
media band back.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
In twenty sixteen, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice
put their social media ban in place, they told Vice
News that quote offenders have used social media accounts to
sell items over the internet based on the notoriety of
their crime, harass victims or victims families, and continue their
criminal activity. The department went on to say that they
would quote take all of the necessary steps to prevent
(18:39):
that from happening. We contacted them to ask whether that's
still the reason for the band today. They declined to comment.
But again, there's another side of this. If we want
to talk about criminal activity, we have to acknowledge that
social media is exposing allegedly unlawful activity that the outside
world should know about.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
Now you can take a picture, shoot a video by
what's going on her the prison system and put that
on Facebook and Instagram, and it's trying to go viral
and it's gonna cost people their jobs. So that's scared
the hell lot of prisons officials. It's a lot of them,
right because now, like what happened with me and No
(19:18):
Way Out documentary, when I work with Kerry Bleckinger behind
the Coast, you have last okay, but I wasn't live
with trade the truth. I was able to do all
of that unrestricted, without having to wrestle with any type
of legal media. I'm met at anything like that. We
just dropped it and it comes a whole bunch of
(19:40):
back lass. So let me call you one more time.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Okay. Phone calls in Jeremy's unit are limited to thirty minutes,
so we had to reconnect a few times during the interview.
That's why you might hear Jeremy rush through sentences. Sometimes
he's just trying to get out as much as possible
before he gets cut off. But what he's getting at
here is important. When word gets out about conditions on
the inside, it can make things hard for the officials
(20:04):
who work there. Jeremy thinks that the bands are partially
there to stop that from happening, but banning stuff from
making rules is one thing. The next step is the
current Trump administration wants to make it physically impossible to
communicate directly with the outside branding card.
Speaker 1 (20:19):
Now from the FCC, they're going around trying to pass
this new law to where they can put cell phone
genres up outside of prisons.
Speaker 2 (20:28):
Cell Phone jammers are devices that can block cell phone
signals within a certain range. These devices, in general are
illegal partially because they're dangerous. I mean, think about it.
If cell signals can't get through, you can't call the
paramedics or they can't find you. So obviously the general
public can't have them. But for that same reason, in general,
(20:48):
even state and local law enforcement can't legally use them.
But recently the FCC is considering letting prisons use these
jammers to block contraband cell phone use.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
They want people to think the people utilizing these phones
to organized criminal activity, and you might have a handful
of people that might utilize the country band cell phone
organized criminal activity, but from being incarcerated almost thirty years,
I'm gonna tell you that the majority of the people
that using country band cell phones are trying to connect
with non lost family members, loved ones, childhood plans, and
(21:21):
other people like myself are utilizing to report on the
conditions of the prison. And then you got third demographic
for people that just want to watch porn and movies
and videos and things of that nature. Right, there's very
few people that utilize the phone to organize criminal activity,
but the prison dishes they scared that the person that's
(21:43):
incarcerated is gonna take the phone and expose them, and
so that's the reason why they're pushing this.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Despite all these attempts to block incarcerated people's access to
social media, Jeremy's been able to report out what's going
on in prison. But when he has, he says he's
been retaliated against.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
The nature of my career is when I write something,
it don't take very long one to come down and
talk to me or try to or intimidate or you know,
and all of that. I'm pump beginning me number one
with these people. If you see anything that people don't like,
they can go look through your files and possibly subject
you to some type of political prosecution or file of
(22:24):
lossuit on you'll smear your name or come kick in
your door, or lock you up and spread you with
chemical agents and all that. I've been through all of that,
but you don't have as many people like myself. That's
what you speaking out against these people, because they gonna
come out for you, right, They're gonna take all your property,
they gonna transfer you to different units, they gonna put
(22:44):
you in solitary confinement. Last year, I've been transferred to
four different units. Each time I get to the unit,
I'm spending days in the said with no mattress, no sheets,
no blankets, no basic necessities like self two basic deodorant.
This is the stuff that.
Speaker 3 (22:59):
You go through.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
And so for the majority of the people in prison here,
hey man, just put your head down and don't say nothing,
and they.
Speaker 3 (23:08):
Don't come after you.
Speaker 1 (23:10):
I have never took that approach because I understand what
that approach does to a person. For you to put
your head down for so many times, after so many years,
that becomes in you. You're part of your character and
who you are. And I don't want to live like that.
And so I resist, then I do it in the
fist of matters, right. I don't never write anything ever
(23:31):
that I don't try to work with the administration first
all and say here's a problem right here. I'm thinking
about writing this, but if we can solve this problem,
I forget about writing it. It's only when they're not
interested in solving the problem that I know I can
write and get the problem solved. So as a result
of that, Jeremy Busby is public enemy number one. I'm
(23:53):
the number one agitator whatever they want to call me.
But you know, I don't really you know, I don't
really call an agitation. I can't just like good trouble,
like John Lewis caught it good Truble. This is good trouble.
Speaker 2 (24:07):
Earlier this year, when the Columbia Journalism Review asked Texas
prison officials about Jeremy's claims that he's being retaliated against,
they've denied it. When we asked them, they declined to comment.
Right now, as we record this episode, Jeremy's in solitary
confinement for what he says is a response to his reporting.
More on that after the break. So hold on, Jimmy,
(24:37):
you're in solitary right now.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm a solitary confinement right now. I'm talking to
you from a solitary confinement sale. My sale is about
the size of your king size mattress. That's the whole
size of my sale. I got a callet in a
sink to be a combot right here. I got a gash,
and I got a metal bump that I lay on,
and I'm confine to this sale twenty four hours a day.
(25:03):
There are no windows. I can't tell you if there's
nighttime or daytime. The only thing that I can see
is directly in front of my said when somebody walks past.
They got a solid steel door with two petch of
glass windows on the front of it, and a siny
steel door that goes all the way down to the bottom.
Why I can't even slide anything out of the bottom.
I don't even have any communication with anybody except for
(25:25):
the guard. So it's mentally crippling. Everybody understand that it
is mentally crippling because it cuts you all the way
off from human to human contact.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
If you remember our episode on tablets in prison, Jeremy
says that they were recently given one of those state
issued tablet devices that lets them watch religious and educational programming,
and from two pm to eight pm daily, he can
pay to make phone calls if it's to a number
that has registered to receive a call from the prison.
How long you been in there?
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I've been inside of child from finally since June two
thy and twenty four year. Over a year. No discproary cases, nothing.
The guards I always asked me all the time, hey man,
why they got you in here? Buzz people? And I
tell them just google me and then they come back
and say, Okay, I know why they got you in here.
Right then I even they have some of them come
(26:16):
to me and hey, man, won't you just quit being a journalist?
They and let you out of here? And I'm like,
you know, it's certain trade offs that I'm just not
willing to make, right, And uh, these people they continue
to try to harass me and book and you know,
and do all the things that they do because of
my journalism. Then hey, that's just the here that I'm down, right,
(26:37):
that's the hear that I'm down Because I didn't have
very much dext to when I came to prison. You know,
I grew up my mind. I lost my mind when
I was floored. My dad has always been a dead beat.
I dropped out of school when I was eight, and
I was running the streets and all of that, and
so all of the meaningful things that I was able
to obtain for myself during my in concentration, I'll be
(26:57):
damned if I'm gonna give that back to anybody.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
You were talking about. That was somebody knocking back there. Hey,
So in the middle of our interview, we were interrupted
by a guard knocking on jeremy cell door.
Speaker 1 (27:13):
Hey, hey, look at hello, Hey man, I want you
to quit doing that. I'm on the telephone. I asked you,
I asked you to quit doing that, but I'm on
the phone. I asked you to quit beating on the
door because I'm on the telephone. You're interrupted my telephone call.
I asked you that you did that to day, and
(27:34):
I asked you to quit doing that. I I know you, Okay,
I'm sorry about that. Now you got you got some
officers that he said here, he's seated most as the phone,
so he's just don't come and just beat on the door,
beat on the door, beat on the door. But anyway,
I'm sorry about that.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
It's all good, it's all good.
Speaker 3 (27:55):
Man.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Who was it? What happened?
Speaker 3 (27:58):
Just now?
Speaker 1 (27:59):
I got a guard. Now he's the guard. Right. What
they do is they come by every five, ten, fifteen
minutes and just beat on the door with the bard
things that they got. He had done that five times today.
He's trying to attagnize me. He trying to get the
reaction that he just got to know that he's getting
up under my skin. They do stuff like that, and
so but I talked talk politely, you know, first couple
(28:22):
of times and say, hey, sir, if you don't mind,
and you come to the door. You can see me
in the door and my light is on. I'm moving
around it myself. Why do you feel like you have
to beat on the door for five minutes? He has
a language barrier. His English is not very good. And
so he came back and did it again, and I say, hey, man,
do you understand you just stir at people's piece when
(28:44):
you're doing all of this. But anyway, so here it is.
He came and worked at seven o'clock this morning. It's
three o'clock and uh, just the same time that he's
been to my cell and done this crap.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. No, you don't got to
apologize me. Hearing what Jeremy has to go through just
to survive is a lot. I can't imagine what it's
like to be doing journalistic reporting.
Speaker 3 (29:10):
And then on top of that, we did a no
Kings protest real quick.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
So I organized the no Kings protest, right.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Jeremy, You organized a no Kings protest in there?
Speaker 3 (29:23):
Hell yeah, Hell yeah, Jeremy.
Speaker 1 (29:27):
Hey man, this stuff is serious. Bro. Let me tell
you how to organized it. Okay, can say like the
dudes is down in the world for me. He sent
me a letter and telling me that his niece came
home and her mom and her dad had been picked
up by ice. No, his niece came off from school
and her parents was gone. Then I got this other guy.
He's telling me about how his mom been working for
(29:50):
the federal government in Houston at nasal for all of
these years, and the government shut down then slowed her right,
so she's not able to send any money for his
coming center money on his phone. So when I got
thinking about all this, I'm telling all of these dudes
over there while I'm met, like, hey man, this thing
and Trump got going on and the second all of us.
So we need to protest and stand in solid differently
(30:12):
with the people on our side.
Speaker 3 (30:14):
Okay, Jeremy, what you.
Speaker 1 (30:15):
Got in mind? Okay, listen for this Saturday, We're gonna
not accept our food. If anybody need food, let me know.
I'll send you some food to eat. But we're gonna
put sign on our doors they say no food, no talk,
no kings.
Speaker 2 (30:29):
Wow we did that, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
So it was.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Peaceful all the way up to about eight o'clock at night.
They one of the guys that we recruited, he's not
all the way there, and so he started talking like,
you know, man, damn this denying of food. I'm ready
to set it off. So he set there like three
long fire in his sail, right and this other guy
manipulated the lock on his cell and he busts out
(30:55):
the sail and just start ripping the TV's off the wall.
But what I'm showing you is this, Okay, these guys,
the guy that ripped the TV off the while that
don't hurt the prison officials. Those TV's are for us.
And so now all the TV's that you have ripped off,
people came walf the news or whatever it is that
they want to watch. You're hurting the whole community. They
just chose you. The mental deficiency that most the majority
(31:17):
of the people current have and is not mild.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
According to Jeremy, the conditions of the system only exacerbate
the problems that he sees in prison along with mental illness.
He says that the prison system in Texas suffers from
problems with violence, drugs, and suicides, and to him, these
problems and the social media bands that they want to
put in place, it's all related.
Speaker 1 (31:41):
It's always been my position that when you describe family
bonds and make it impossible for the family is to communicate,
then that puts the person in a better situation, and
sometimes in order to get out of that situation because
of what's going on in prison, you have to turn
the dope. My whole things needed like, it's not of
putting money into further destroying family times, as far as
(32:05):
taking people small privileges away and putting them in a
position to where they can become more depressed and become
more mentally disturbed, to where they have to increase their
drug usage. Let's take that same energy, those same resources
and the same money as let's put it towards shown
to repair family bonds. Let's put it towards trying to
help people accumulate menal for things like today can receive
(32:28):
a substance use. Let's put it towards like putting people
through rehabilitation.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I'm just gonna say this, as a journalist who's reported
on prisons, I would never be able to bring you
this kind of insight. Jeremy's work provides something that's really rare.
It's a look at what's actually happening inside this prison.
But also his work isn't just on behalf of the
incarcerated people. There's one of your pieces that I was
(32:55):
reading earlier today, and it was an article this is
for the Chronicle. I want to quote you here. You said,
for nearly three decades, I've watched this broken system break people,
both staff and the incarcerated. Instead of returning prisoners back
to their communities a better version of themselves, prisons returned
them more psychologically damaged, disenfranchised, and poorer than when they entered.
(33:19):
I've seen staff members lose their families, their drive to succeed,
and even with suicide, their lives. I think people might
be surprised to hear that you're also advocating for staff
members for the guards. Yeah, like the person who just
came by and beat on your door.
Speaker 1 (33:38):
Yeah, and that comes from my mentor is retired sing
to Warden burning Pigment. And one of the things that
Warden Pigman told me about is that, hey, Disney, gentleman,
we all are humans, whether if you made a mistaken
you in prison, or if you made a mistaken you
worked for the prison. Because everybody could work for the
prisons and made them mistake. The people that work in
(33:59):
prison and the people that are in prison all come
from the same social economic demographics. The majority of them
either made it through high school and went to the
military and couldn't make it. Some of them dropped out
of high school and got the ged and started working
at a low local fast food restaurant or something. But
it's very few people inside of prison that has a
(34:20):
cottage degree that works here. Very few people.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
I mean, it really could be people who would have
been neighbors otherwise. And I guess the neighbors now, yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:29):
Yeah, yeah, of course the neighbors. They of course they neighbors.
And I'm telling y'all. Let to say this, the people
that work here are not the brightest people that you're
gonna find on earth. So they easily manipulated. And the
same deficiencies that I came to prison with, which is
a lack of coping skills, no conflict resolution, no constructive
decision making processes or any of that, the same things
(34:51):
that I came to prison with the majority of these
God has worked in the prison with those same deficiencies.
Speaker 2 (34:57):
I got to ask you this, are you concerned about
talking to me about this?
Speaker 3 (35:02):
No?
Speaker 1 (35:02):
No, no, no, no, no talk. I'll talk about this
every chance that I get. One of this is any
secret these people that what's going on. These people have
done so much to me, there's nothing else that they
can do. I'm not worried about them killing me physically, right,
There's nothing that they can do to me but my
journalism that haven't already been done.
Speaker 2 (35:27):
So my conversation with Jeremy had me thinking about another
conversation I had a few months ago with Gabby Kaplan.
She's the journalist who's reported on the tablets that have
been issued in prisons across the country and the federal
government's efforts to limit the communication abilities on those tablets.
If you haven't heard that episode yet, definitely check it out.
I'll leave a link in the show notes. But if
(35:48):
you look at the comments online about her reporting, you
might see people arguing that, well, if you're in prison,
having a tablet or social media is a luxury, you
shouldn't be able to have that kind of luxury.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Period.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Okay, that's an opinion, but I can read you an
argument that Jeremy Busby himself wrote in a recent article,
and I'm just gonna quote him here. Regulations that rob
incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and human
rights violations and hold prison officials accountable hurt more people
and cause more negative societal consequences than they prevent, just
(36:23):
as those whose lives were saved or drastically improved by
reporting only made possible with the use of contraband cell phones.
And then he closes that article with a request, quote,
give journalists meaningful access to prisons and prison records, give
incarcerated people the tools to communicate with the outside world
and document abuses without censorship and retaliation. And I'll never
(36:48):
use a contraband cell phone again, or better yet, don't
commit those abuses at all. In quote special thanks this
week to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and to
the Never Post podcast to introduce us to Jeremy and
help make this whole episode possible. If you like kill Switch,
(37:10):
I think you'll also like Never Post and we'll put
a link to that in the show notes. And thank
you once again for listening to kill Switch. If you
want to talk, you can email us at kill Switch
at Kalaidscope dot NYC. We're also on Instagram at kill
switch pod. And if you dug this one, think about
leaving us a review. It helps other people find the show,
(37:30):
which you turn helps us keep doing our thing, and
once you've done that, in case you didn't know, kill
Switch is also on YouTube, so if you'd like to
see the people that you're hearing, you can check out
the link for that in the show notes. Kill Switch
is hosted by Me Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Shena Ozaki,
Darluck Potts, and Julia Nutter. Our theme song is by
(37:51):
me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also mixed the show
from Kalaidoscope. Our executive producers are oz Va Lashin, Mangesh
Hadikador and Kate Osba from iHeart Our executive producers are
Katrina Norvel and Nikki E.
Speaker 4 (38:04):
Tor.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Thank you for using sekuus. Goodbye,
kill switch News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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