social media reveals life behind bars. prisons want to block it
kill switch
Kaleidoscope
4.7 • 635 Ratings
🗓️ 10 December 2025
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:13.7 | The first time I'm seeing social media, I was at the wind unit in Huntsville, Texas. |
| 0:20.0 | I think it's like around 2011. |
| 0:25.4 | Jeremy Busby is 48 years old. |
| 0:27.7 | We talked back in October about the internet and social media. |
| 0:30.8 | But what's different about this interview is that Jeremy's calling me from a prison in |
| 0:34.7 | Huntsville, Texas. |
| 0:36.7 | Jeremy's been in prison since 1999. |
| 0:39.7 | Back then, the internet was a different place. |
| 0:42.3 | I didn't know anything about Facebook or Twitter, |
| 0:45.0 | but I knew about MySpace, |
| 0:46.9 | because when I was pre-society, |
| 0:49.0 | My space was just becoming a ding. |
| 0:51.1 | So I knew about that. |
| 0:52.8 | Jeremy didn't really have any contact with social media until the early 2010s. |
| 0:56.8 | A few years after Facebook was already popular. |
| 1:00.0 | A friend of mine had a country band cell phone. |
| 1:03.4 | He was fresh from the free society. |
| 1:05.0 | He had just come to prison. |
| 1:06.7 | And so this was this whole entire livelihood. |
| 1:09.4 | Social media. |
... |
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