362: What if you wrote your way out of prison?
This Is Actually Happening
Wondery
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2025
⏱️ 80 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cultivating rage as a solution to inherited trauma, a young man commits murder over a five-dollar dispute, but once in prison, he devotes his life to liberation from systems of oppression and the jailor within himself.
Today’s episode featured Emile Suotonye DeWeaver. If you’d like to contact Emile, please email him at [email protected] or find him on social media:
Substack: @reframeconsults
Instagram: @emilesuotonyedeweaver
Bluesky: Bluesky
LinkedIn: LinkedIn
Emile’s first book, Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future, comes out today, May 13, 2025, from The New Press.
Per Emile, “I wrote this book for many reasons. I’d been organizing for a decade in prison, and I witnessed the ways we in justice work have beautiful, courageous intentions and yet we often exacerbate the problems we fight against. Back then I felt like I didn’t have the right frameworks to have this conversation. I dedicated the next ten years to thinking them through. I wrote Ghost in the Criminal Justice System not as a solutions book. I wrote it as an offering of these frameworks in the hopes that you will share them in your communities, so that we can come up with solutions together.”
Confirmed Book tour dates in Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Chicago: https://www.reframeconsults.com/events - please RSVP!
Ghost in the Criminal Justice Machine: Reform, White Supremacy, and an Abolitionist Future is also a great teaching tool. A perfect fit for classrooms, movement organizing, book clubs. Get it for your community, then invite Emile to come talk to you! His goal is to take this conversation to all the corners of this country so we all can build a better future.
Producers: Whit Missildine, Andrew Waits, Aviva Lipkowitz
Content/Trigger Warnings: drug use and dealing, murder, bodily injury from attack, attempted murder, injury from gunshot, prison, white supremacy, racism, explicit language
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Twitter: @TIAHPodcast
Website: thisisactuallyhappening.com
Website for Andrew Waits: andrdewwaits.com
Website for Aviva Lipkowitz: avivalipkowitz.com
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Intro Music: “Sleep Paralysis” - Scott Velasquez
Music Bed: Re-Entry
Services
If you or someone you know is struggling with the effects of trauma or mental illness, please refer to the following resources:
National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Text or Call 988
National Alliance on Mental Illness: 1-800-950-6264
National Sexual Assault Hotline (RAINN): 1-800-656-HOPE (4673)
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to exclusive episodes of This Is Actually Happening |
| 0:05.0 | by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts. |
| 0:09.6 | This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. |
| 0:13.9 | Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode |
| 0:17.0 | and for more information about support services. |
| 0:34.3 | Our senses of identity, our senses of who we are have been conflated, |
| 0:41.3 | elegantly and expertly, with physical survival. And they're not the same. So when I say annihilation, I am talking about, of those things that we've been taught to weave into our identities |
| 0:47.6 | as human beings, that's the kind of annihilation I'm talking about. I thought I would be annihilated |
| 0:54.0 | when I was in fact reborn. |
| 1:00.0 | From Wondery, I'm Whit Misseldine. You're listening to this is actually happening. |
| 1:16.4 | Episode 362. |
| 1:20.2 | What if you wrote your way out of prison? |
| 1:32.1 | Hi, I'm Mr. Ballin, the host of Mr. Ballin's medical mysteries. |
| 1:38.0 | And each week on my podcast, you can expect to hear stories about bizarre illnesses no one can explain, |
| 1:43.6 | miraculous recoveries that shouldn't have happened, and cases so baffling, they stumped even the best doctors. |
| 1:48.5 | Listen to Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 1:53.9 | When Luigi Mangione was arrested for allegedly shooting the CEO of United Healthcare, |
| 2:00.8 | he didn't just spark outrage. He ignited a cultural firestorm. Is the system working or is it time for a reckoning? |
| 2:03.6 | I'm Jesse Weber. |
| 2:04.8 | Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus. My mother's from Nigeria. |
| 2:24.3 | She grew up during the Nigerian Civil War. |
| 2:28.3 | It's not even something I realized until I was in my 30s, |
... |
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