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Posting from Inside · Never Post

• 0:10
  Mike Rugnetta: Friends, hello, and welcome to Never Post, a
• 0:13
  podcast for and about the Internet. I'm your host, Mike
• 0:15
  Rugnetta. This intro was written on Monday, 12/15/2025 at 09:06PM
• 0:22
  eastern, and we have a remarkable show for you this
• 0:25
  week. Recently, Neverpost had the opportunity to introduce the
• 0:29
  folks at the tech podcast kill switch hosted by journalist
• 0:34
  Dexter Thomas to Jeremy Busby, a writer, journalist, and activist
• 0:39
  who has served over twenty five years of a seventy five year
• 0:44
  sentence at a maximum security facility in Beaumont, Texas. In
• 0:49
  this episode, we've included the entirety of Dexter's
• 0:53
  conversation with Jeremy about the work Jeremy's done
• 0:56
  advocating for both prisoners and prison guards using his
• 1:01
  contraband mobile phone largely from solitary confinement.
• 1:07
  It is an incredible conversation that we're really happy to have
• 1:11
  had a small part in co producing. Right now, we're
• 1:16
  gonna take a quick break. You're gonna listen to some ads unless
• 1:18
  you're on the member feed. And when we return, we're gonna talk
• 1:21
  about a few of the things that have happened since the last
• 1:23
  time you heard from us. Sweet dreams are made of this.
• 1:27
  Who am I to disagree? I travel the world in the seven seas.
• 1:31
  Everybody's looking for four stories this week. Zillow has
• 1:38
  removed climate risk scores from more than a million listings
• 1:42
  according to the New York Times. The online real estate
• 1:45
  aggregator previously displayed information about property's
• 1:48
  susceptibility to fire, flood, heat, wind, and air quality
• 1:52
  disaster, but no longer.
• 1:55
  After complaints from the California regional multiple
• 1:58
  listing service from which Zillow aggregates data
• 2:01
  properties for sale. Agents had also noted that the ratings were
• 2:05
  hurting sales as perhaps they should. But what do I know?
• 2:12
  Zillow will continue to link to sources of the data, namely
• 2:16
  First Street, a climate and financial risk modeling start
• 2:19
  up. And insurers will likely continue to use their data when
• 2:23
  considering coverage, but scores will no longer be displayed
• 2:26
  directly on listings.
• 2:30
  Young men hate gambling. This according to Pew Research's
• 2:34
  surprising findings for 2025. Quote, forty three percent of US
• 2:39
  adults say legal sports betting is a bad thing for society.
• 2:43
  Continuing, one of the biggest shifts in attitudes has occurred
• 2:47
  among men 30. In this group, forty seven percent say legal
• 2:52
  sports betting is a bad thing for society, an increase from
• 2:56
  22% in 2022.
• 3:04
  Americans aren't buying smartphones as often as they
• 3:08
  used to. In 2016, Americans would get a new phone every two
• 3:11
  years. These days, about every two and a half. The Federal
• 3:14
  Reserve warns that an extended timeline for upgraded technology
• 3:18
  could mean productivity losses. And when it comes to
• 3:22
  institutional upgrades at schools or businesses, shifted
• 3:25
  investment patterns that could harm the economy as if anyone
• 3:28
  looking contentedly at their iPhone 14 gives a shit.
• 3:31
  TikTok: Oh, no.
• 3:35
  Mike Rugnetta: Disney, in our last story today, has struck a
• 3:38
  surprising deal with OpenAI to bring its IP into Sora, their
• 3:44
  video generation model. According to a press release
• 3:46
  quote, Sora will be able to generate short user prompted
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  social videos that can be viewed and shared by fans, drawing on
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  more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters.
• 3:58
  And a selection of these fan inspired Sora short form videos
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  will be available to stream on Disney plus, end quote. Disney
• 4:06
  CEO Bob Iger said, bringing together Disney's iconic stories
• 4:09
  and characters with OpenAI's groundbreaking technology puts
• 4:12
  imagination and creativity directly into the hands of
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  Disney fans in ways we've never seen before, giving them richer
• 4:19
  and more personal ways to connect with the Disney
• 4:21
  characters and stories they love. A surprising thing to hear
• 4:24
  from a company whose copyright stance up until this point could
• 4:27
  best be summed up as hands off the mouse punks.
• 4:30
  TikTok: Oh, no.
• 4:31
  Mike Rugnetta: For more on this surprising partnership, Hans
• 4:34
  talked with Michael Weinberg, the executive director of the
• 4:37
  Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law.
• 4:43
  Hans Buetow: Thanks, Mike. Michael, so glad to have caught
• 4:47
  you. Where where am I catching you?
• 4:49
  Where are
• 4:49
  you right now?
• 4:49
  Michael Weinberg: I am currently in Berlin, Germany.
• 4:51
  Hans Buetow: On the road, but, like, this is critical. Let's
• 4:54
  figure this out together.
• 4:56
  Michael Weinberg: Let's figure it out.
• 4:57
  Hans Buetow: Okay. This surprising ass three year deal
• 5:01
  in which, as far as I can tell, OpenAI gets 200 Disney
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  characters to put into their AI video engine, and Disney gets
• 5:10
  the opportunity to pay OpenAI $1,000,000,000 as an investment,
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  plus a promise from OpenAI that the character voices won't be
• 5:19
  used. And don't worry, kids are forbidden by OpenAI from using
• 5:22
  Sora, so no kids allowed in this Disney product. So my first
• 5:26
  question is, are we in the literal upside down? Like,
• 5:29
  understanding of copyright law is that, like, 80% of modern
• 5:33
  copyright law is in service of keeping Disney characters out of
• 5:38
  the grimy hands of a greedy public.
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  The reason there is so little in the public domain is them
• 5:43
  wanting to control Mickey. So, like, is this a reversal?
• 5:46
  Michael Weinberg: It certainly is a change. They are in the
• 5:48
  business of no when it comes to using their intellectual
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  property, their characters, their shows, their anything. And
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  so, yes, this was a this was a super surprise to see Disney,
• 6:00
  which basically defines pulling things back to be kind of
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  opening things up potentially a little bit unclear. Maybe
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  they're just not doing anything. We don't know.
• 6:08
  Hans Buetow: We know very little. We have this one press
• 6:12
  release and not a lot other information. So since we don't
• 6:16
  have a lot of answers right now, let's outline some of the
• 6:19
  questions that you, as a copyright expert, have when you
• 6:22
  read this announcement and you hear the details of it.
• 6:24
  Michael Weinberg: I have so many I have so many questions, none
• 6:26
  of which are gonna be answered in the short term. Some of which
• 6:29
  will be answered when they roll out the terms and service, and
• 6:31
  some of them will be answered with them in the month
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  afterwards when people do all their crazy stuff. But Yeah.
• 6:36
  Lots of questions. But the first one is is kind of a meta
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  question.
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  Right? Like, whatever Disney is doing here, they are not saying
• 6:42
  do whatever you want with whatever characters we're we're
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  putting in here. What safeguards have they written in? Where are
• 6:49
  their bright lines? And where are their bright lines in the
• 6:52
  agreement with OpenAI?
• 6:53
  Right? There's some sort of contract. What are their bright
• 6:55
  lines gonna be in the user agreement? And then what are the
• 6:59
  technical systems they're putting in place to enforce
• 7:03
  those bright lines? We've all seen the Internet take take
• 7:06
  these kinds of rules and be like, thank you for these rules.
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  I'm gonna go in every possible direction that no one who was
• 7:13
  cutting the deal anticipated. Disney knows that. Right? That's
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  not a mystery. That's not a a thing that people don't
• 7:19
  understand.
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  And so what are their contingency plans? What are they
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  doing? Even if they're gonna be using this as a learning
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  experience, to get better at understanding what's coming out
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  of these AI models, what are they gonna do when the first
• 7:33
  weird things start coming out? What are they gonna because
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  you're gonna get a lot of traffic if you are the first
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  person who has some, un Disney approved activities happening
• 7:43
  with Disney characters
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  Hans Buetow: That's right. Coming out There's
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  Michael Weinberg: a huge incentive for people to be
• 7:47
  working on it.
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  Hans Buetow: So then what happens? Right? Are there things
• 7:49
  in place in this agreement?
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  Michael Weinberg: Yeah. If there are, who is in charge of of
• 7:54
  doing something about it? I mean, what can you do? Once the
• 7:57
  video exists, then it exists. And so if it's pulled out and
• 8:00
  it's floating around the Internet, well, okay, OpenAI can
• 8:02
  shut down that person's account.
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  If they wanted to go kind of nuts, they could potentially sue
• 8:08
  the user for violating the terms and conditions. That seems like
• 8:12
  a bad idea. We have had we learned about that. Yeah. Disney
• 8:15
  could do the same thing.
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  I assume Disney is not excited about that prospect. And so do
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  they just eat the rep what they see as reputational damage when
• 8:24
  the first weird things come out and just say this is the cost of
• 8:27
  doing business? Yeah. And if that's the case, why this time?
• 8:31
  Right?
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  There have been rounds and rounds of technologies where
• 8:34
  there's been sort of, you know, user generated content. Right?
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  People fan fiction, all these things Right. Where there's been
• 8:41
  an Internet community built up around properties that they
• 8:44
  love, characters they love, stories they love, and Disney's
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  reaction historically has been no. What is it about generative
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  AI that caused someone at Disney to say, well, maybe this time,
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  why not?
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  What could possibly go wrong?
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  Hans Buetow: What happens when we start to see the first user
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  generated things to come out? What happens with outputs? Like,
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  when people start making Disney things, who owns those things?
• 9:12
  Michael Weinberg: Yeah. So here's one of the the kind of
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  the crazy things about these generative AI models that that
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  people I think we're just beginning to kind of wrap our
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  minds around. When you use a model to create something, to to
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  generate an output, in The US, no one owns the copyright in
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  that output. So you as the prompter have no copyright
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  interest in the output. Now, doesn't mean it's totally free
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  of copyright.
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  Right? If you, you know, whatever. If you if you have
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  Darth Vader in your output, you don't own any copyright on
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  whatever you've created.
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  Hans Buetow: Okay.
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  Michael Weinberg: But Disney still owns the copyright of
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  Darth Vader. It doesn't erase existing copyright, but there's
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  no new copyright. And so this, like, new fan video exists in
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  the public domain. And so there's this very weird right
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  situation where if you if you wrote fanfic or you made a a
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  video and uploaded it to YouTube, right, you would own
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  the copyright in the video. You would own the copyright in the,
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  you know, the the fanfic writing that you did, and Disney would
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  own the copyright in the characters.
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  And so there'd be some kind of tension between, you know, the
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  two of you. In this case, at least legally, there's no real
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  tension. You own nothing. Disney owns something. Now there are
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  non legal reasons that Disney might want might wanna, you
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  know, work something out with you before they feature it on
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  Disney plus or whatever.
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  But the legal posture is very weird and very different.
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  Hans Buetow: Do you think this is
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  gonna affect the terms of service of using Sora and
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  OpenAI?
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  Michael Weinberg: I mean, it may. I you know, on some level,
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  I assume that I I would expect that there's gonna be some kind
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  of path that if you use SOAR and OpenAI and use Disney
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  characters, you are explicitly giving Disney rights to do some
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  number of things. Even if you don't have any rights to give
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  them, Disney's lawyers are conservative. They're gonna make
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  sure there's an additional layer of the agreement there. And so
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  this is another thing that we don't know.
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  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
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  Michael Weinberg: Right? We don't know what you are giving
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  to Disney in return for being able to incorporate their
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  characters into whatever you generate.
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  Hans Buetow: What is gonna be your first prompt that you're
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  gonna put into Sora?
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  Michael Weinberg: I don't mean, you know, like, I just wanna you
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  really gotta you, like, look down the list of the characters
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  and find the deepest cut and then the weirdest thing and
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  really kind of go nuts. I mean, the beauty of this, the beauty
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  of the Internet, when we're still thinking about the
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  positive parts of the Internet, is there's gonna be a lot of
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  people who stress test us better than I would. So I can just
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  kinda sit back and watch what happens for a while. I don't
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  have to drive the train. I can just watch it go by.
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  Hans Buetow: It's gonna be fascinating to see what happens
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  when Disney shuts down with the full force that Disney comes at
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  something, something the Internet has fallen in love
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  with.
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  Michael Weinberg: Totally. I mean, this is this is going to
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  be I mean, we see this we see this regularly with things on
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  YouTube. Right? Where there's a community that is built up,
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  people love it. You know, Disney has has no real experience with
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  the fan community in this way.
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  And if Disney starts changing its position, it's gonna take
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  time for everyone to renormalize around it. And a thing that you
• 12:26
  see sometimes in these fan communities is a sense of
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  exploitation. Right?
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  Hans Buetow: Mhmm.
• 12:30
  Michael Weinberg: We are generating all these things.
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  We're generating the energy. We're generating the new ideas.
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  We have this new stuff. Disney, you swoop in and you take what
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  you want, and then you say no to other things.
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  Yeah. And that could be a moment for people to really kind of
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  reevaluate how they think about the fairness of that
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  relationship and how Disney is as a steward of what is a shared
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  cultural property in a lot of ways.
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  Hans Buetow: Well, Michael Weinberg, in terms of fandoms,
• 12:59
  I'm a fan of yours. And I really appreciate you popping in from
• 13:03
  Berlin emergency style to help us understand what to look for
• 13:07
  as this thing develops. So thanks so much for joining us.
• 13:10
  Thank you. Alright, Mike.
• 13:12
  Back to you.
• 13:15
  Mike Rugnetta: Alright. That's the news we have for you this
• 13:16
  week. In this episode, Dexter Thomas from Killswitch talks
• 13:20
  with Jeremy Busby about his tenuous connection to the
• 13:23
  outside world via the internet from prison. Dexter, thank you
• 13:45
  so much for joining us. We're huge fans of yours and of the
• 13:49
  show, so it's great to have you on Neverpost.
• 13:52
  Dexter Thomas: Oh, my gosh. Thank you so much for having me
• 13:54
  on here. This is amazing.
• 13:55
  Mike Rugnetta: We're gonna hear a Killswitch episode,
• 13:58
  essentially, as a Neverpost episode. Just so folks sort of
• 14:02
  like know what they're about to hear and have some context, I
• 14:04
  just wanna ask you a few, like, really broad questions both
• 14:07
  about yourself and about the story that we're about to hear.
• 14:11
  Sure. Because you mentioned in what we're about to hear that
• 14:15
  you're a journalist, you've reported on prisons in the past,
• 14:19
  you've reported on the Internet in the past. So I'm just curious
• 14:21
  like, what has that work been for you and how did it lead you
• 14:25
  eventually to Killswitch?
• 14:28
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. Killswitch, the podcast we work on now, is
• 14:31
  basically a podcast about living in the future and how the future
• 14:36
  has arrived. Nobody wants it. It sucks. But how did we get here,
• 14:40
  and is there anything we can do about it?
• 14:42
  So the back end of that is that I used to work at Vice, and a
• 14:50
  lot of my reporting was broadly speaking, it was like culture
• 14:53
  reporting. So, you know, I'd be in China hanging out with
• 14:56
  rappers. I'd be in South Africa talking to people about
• 14:59
  elections. I'd be in Ohio talking about opioid epidemics.
• 15:04
  So for me, all of that is culture.
• 15:07
  And increasingly, you know, a lot so much culture is online
• 15:11
  where even saying that is kind of redundant, like saying online
• 15:15
  culture, like, of course, everybody's online. Who doesn't
• 15:17
  have a phone? For me, I've always been really interested in
• 15:20
  technology. You know, I'm one of those people who, like, I daily
• 15:24
  drive Linux. If you don't know what that means, good.
• 15:27
  Your life is you're living a healthy, normal adjusted life. I
• 15:31
  don't recommend that as a life choice for anybody.
• 15:33
  Mike Rugnetta: Not a rabbit hole to fall into. Just stay away
• 15:35
  from the edge of that one. Yeah.
• 15:36
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. It's fine. You you don't you don't need to
• 15:38
  do that to yourself. But I'm just really interested in how
• 15:41
  people use technology to do unexpected things. And
• 15:46
  Killswitch, we were really clear that, alright, this isn't just
• 15:49
  gonna be like iPhone reviews.
• 15:51
  This is gonna be what does technology mean in every part of
• 15:54
  your life for everybody. And I mean, and this is actually the
• 15:58
  second episode we've done about what we're gonna talk about
• 16:01
  about prisons, and people who were incarcerated also use
• 16:06
  technology whether they're supposed to or not.
• 16:09
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. What you mentioned, you know, people
• 16:11
  doing strange things with technology, but you also do a
• 16:14
  lot of stories about technology appearing or unexpected pieces
• 16:18
  of technology appearing in maybe what for a lot of people are
• 16:21
  unexpected places.
• 16:23
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah.
• 16:23
  Mike Rugnetta: And that's actually the next thing I wanted
• 16:24
  to ask was, you mentioned in the story previous reporting that
• 16:27
  you did about tablets in prison. And I was wondering if you could
• 16:31
  talk a little bit about what that was.
• 16:33
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. So that was actually a colleague of mine,
• 16:37
  Gabby Kaplan, who we interviewed about this, and basically, I
• 16:41
  talked to her about the fact that there have been tablets. I
• 16:46
  mean, just think of very, very cheap, not very well equipped
• 16:51
  iPads that are available for purchase
• 16:54
  Mike Rugnetta: Of course.
• 16:55
  Dexter Thomas: In some prisons. Right? In some prisons and in
• 16:57
  some jails, and they cost a bunch of money, but you could
• 17:01
  pay money to, for example, send a message to the outside world
• 17:04
  and receive a message, you know, with their mom on the outside
• 17:07
  Yeah. Or their kids on the outside. And then all of a
• 17:11
  sudden that's shut down with no real explanation.
• 17:15
  And if you look at it, this is kind of like a consumer
• 17:18
  technology story, which is like, yo, you bought this product and
• 17:22
  then the company disabled the main feature. But then also,
• 17:26
  what does it mean when you've got a population of people who
• 17:31
  because the jails, you know, and the prisons keep going on
• 17:33
  lockdown, which means that you're not able to leave your
• 17:35
  cell. These people have to come home at some point. Yeah. They
• 17:39
  do ten years in a completely different society, a very
• 17:41
  violent and dangerous society, and they come back outside and
• 17:45
  they haven't spoken to anybody, do you think they're going to be
• 17:49
  able to reintegrate into society very well?
• 17:52
  It's gonna be very difficult for them. So this is a safety issue
• 17:55
  even for the people on the outside, really.
• 17:57
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. It's a consumer technology issue that
• 17:59
  has a lot of ripple effects.
• 18:01
  Dexter Thomas: Yes. Yes.
• 18:02
  Mike Rugnetta: So we heard this story and we had just to provide
• 18:06
  some background for the audience, Neverpost has an open
• 18:10
  line of communication. We go back and forth with the Freedom
• 18:11
  of the Press Foundation. And they had actually mentioned to
• 18:15
  us, they were like, hey, we know this guy, Jeremy Busby. Would
• 18:19
  you be interested in talking to him? He's a journalist that is
• 18:23
  incarcerated on a seventy five year sentence.
• 18:26
  And we were like, we would love to hear what conversation Jeremy
• 18:31
  would have with Dexter, which is sort of how how we ended up
• 18:36
  doing like 2% of co production for this. Much more than that.
• 18:42
  I'm so excited for everybody to hear it. So this is what
• 18:45
  everybody is about to hear. It's this conversation between you
• 18:49
  and Jeremy who has already served is it twenty five years?
• 18:54
  Dexter Thomas: I think in about there. Yeah.
• 18:56
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. And while being incarcerated during this
• 19:00
  time, he's become a journalist, which he's really only been able
• 19:04
  to do because of what is effectively an illicit Internet
• 19:08
  connection that he has in prison. And I was wondering if
• 19:12
  you could just like paint a little bit of a picture for us
• 19:18
  about what what internet access tends to look like in prison,
• 19:25
  and just maybe the smallest little teaser about how it's
• 19:28
  different for Jeremy or or how he fits into that.
• 19:33
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. Well, the funny thing is Internet access
• 19:35
  in prison has changed a lot. You know, one of the things that we
• 19:39
  don't talk about in this particular episode is what
• 19:44
  people call prison talk as in like TikTok and prison talk. So,
• 19:48
  you know, you got like book talk, which is book, you know,
• 19:50
  people making TikToks about books.
• 19:53
  Mike Rugnetta: The sort of subgenre marker.
• 19:55
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. Exactly. There's this prison talk, which
• 19:58
  is all over the place, but a lot of people know it as somebody
• 20:04
  will have a phone on the inside, which again, they're not
• 20:07
  supposed to do this, but they make it inside anyway. And
• 20:10
  people are doing all the things that you would expect somebody
• 20:14
  to do on TikTok normally. There's people doing dance
• 20:16
  challenges.
• 20:17
  There's people cooking is really common, people showing how they
• 20:21
  cook a ramen, make burritos, make anything. But then also
• 20:26
  talking about conditions on the inside. What is more unique
• 20:32
  though is what Jeremy is doing, which is actually functioning as
• 20:36
  he's he's just a journalist. Realistically speaking, he and I
• 20:40
  are colleagues. We're colleagues, and he's just doing
• 20:45
  it under much much more difficult conditions than I've
• 20:49
  ever had to deal with.
• 20:51
  But he also has a degree of access that I could never have.
• 20:54
  Listen, I've tried. I have I've gone through all of the proper
• 21:00
  outlets. I've done the things where you ask the warden, where
• 21:04
  you write an email, where you make phone calls and you say,
• 21:07
  hey, we would like to report on this, we'd like to interview
• 21:10
  this person and it's oh, hey, this isn't a good time, hey,
• 21:13
  we're short staffed, hey, we're busy, hey, just no.
• 21:17
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah, I'm sure.
• 21:18
  Dexter Thomas: What Jeremy is able to do, and I really want
• 21:20
  people to understand this, some of the things that Jeremy has
• 21:24
  exposed and some of the things that Jeremy has genuinely
• 21:27
  changed about the inside and for people, not only himself, but
• 21:30
  other people who are in the system, including the guards,
• 21:37
  potentially improving the lives of the guards, not just people
• 21:40
  who are incarcerated. These are things that I could never do. If
• 21:45
  you're listening to this, more than likely you could never do.
• 21:50
  Mike Rugnetta: And I mean, this comes through in the in the
• 21:52
  story, but like, it really seems like he's got a force of will
• 21:58
  that is unparalleled. Mhmm. He is doing things in just
• 22:03
  unthinkable conditions that like are unbelievable. It's
• 22:07
  unbelievable to hear what he pulls off.
• 22:10
  Dexter Thomas: Yeah. There are a couple moments. It gets super
• 22:14
  real super quick because just the conditions you were made
• 22:18
  aware of it a couple of times. This what it's like when you
• 22:23
  communicate with somebody who's locked up, is you're constantly
• 22:27
  being interrupted and you're constantly being reminded that,
• 22:32
  for me, this is just a this is a phone call, But for them, this
• 22:36
  is much more dire than that.
• 22:39
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah. Alright. Well, I'm excited for everybody
• 22:42
  to hear this conversation.
• 22:43
  Dexter Thomas: Same. So let's
• 22:44
  Mike Rugnetta: Yeah.
• 22:45
  Let's let's stop keeping them from it. Yeah.
• 22:54
  Jeremy Busby: The first time I've seen social media, I was at
• 22:56
  the wind unit in Huntsville, Texas. I think it's like around
• 23:01
  2011.
• 23:05
  Dexter Thomas: Jeremy Busby is 48 years old. We talked back in
• 23:08
  October about the Internet and social media, but what's
• 23:11
  different about this interview is that Jeremy's calling me from
• 23:13
  a prison in Huntsville, Texas. Jeremy's been in prison since
• 23:18
  1999. Back then, the internet was a different place.
• 23:21
  Jeremy Busby: I didn't know anything about Facebook or
• 23:24
  Twitter, but I knew about Myspace. Because when I was a
• 23:27
  free society, Myspace was just becoming a thing. So I knew
• 23:31
  about that.
• 23:32
  Dexter Thomas: Jeremy didn't really have any contact with
• 23:34
  social media until the early twenty tens. A few years after
• 23:37
  Facebook was already popular.
• 23:39
  Jeremy Busby: A friend of mine had a contraband cell phone. He
• 23:43
  was fresh from the free society. He had just come to prison. And
• 23:46
  so this was his whole entire livelihood, social media. It was
• 23:50
  all about social media.
• 23:51
  Dexter Thomas: Since Jeremy's been locked up, social media has
• 23:54
  gone through a few different phases. It went from this weird
• 23:56
  hobby that college kids and computer nerds were into, to
• 23:59
  this new hopeful way to spread democracy, to now a more
• 24:03
  pessimistic view of this thing that gives us short attention
• 24:05
  spans, causes addictive behavior, and makes politics
• 24:08
  more polarized. But in prison, the situation is a little
• 24:12
  different.
• 24:14
  Jeremy Busby: In 2020, when the pandemic hit, Texas prison
• 24:19
  system had no protocol on how to deal with the COVID nineteen
• 24:23
  pandemic. My cellmate had two cell phones. He was like, man,
• 24:28
  listen. You can use another phone. He's just sitting right
• 24:30
  there, man.
• 24:31
  I pay the bill. You can use it if you wanna use it. And so,
• 24:34
  finally, man, I grabbed the phone, and the first thing I did
• 24:37
  is I went to YouTube, and I googled how do you set up a
• 24:42
  Facebook page. So I learned Facebook. I learned Instagram.
• 24:47
  I learned Twitter. I learned how to edit videos. I learned how to
• 24:51
  make slides. I learned how to get the message out on
• 24:54
  Instagram, how to get the message out on YouTube. And
• 24:57
  that's how me and Trey end up on live.
• 25:00
  Dexter Thomas: In 2020, during the peak of the COVID nineteen
• 25:02
  pandemic, Jeremy went live on Instagram with a rapper named
• 25:05
  Trey the truth to talk about the conditions inside the Texas
• 25:08
  state prison. That put a lot more eyes on what was happening
• 25:11
  in there.
• 25:12
  TikTok: What unit is can't tell you the unit, bro, but I can
• 25:16
  tell you I'm in Texas. It's getting serious down here, man.
• 25:19
  Brother, you know, they dying from this corona, man. You said
• 25:23
  they cut the phones off. They're not dangling y'all car home?
• 25:27
  No. They got everything racked up, man. They got I think it's,
• 25:30
  like, 35 units on lockdown. For everybody on here, what's the
• 25:35
  what's the best way for us to do? We need to write Huntsville.
• 25:38
  We need to call Huntsville.
• 25:39
  Dexter Thomas: Social media is giving us unfiltered access into
• 25:42
  prisons, something that we'd never had before. But we may not
• 25:46
  have it for much longer.
• 25:47
  Jeremy Busby: You gotta look at prison like in the same context
• 25:50
  as you look at the slavery. Not only do these people try to
• 25:54
  control what goes out the prison, they try to control what
• 25:57
  comes into the prison.
• 26:29
  Dexter Thomas: Before we get into Jeremy's experiences with
• 26:31
  social media, we should probably do some backstory. The reason
• 26:34
  that Jeremy's in prison starts when he was 21 years old. It was
• 26:37
  10/01/1998 at a motel in Dallas County. Here's how Jeremy
• 26:41
  explains it.
• 26:42
  Jeremy Busby: I pulled up in a motel about four or 05:00 in the
• 26:46
  morning. There was a couple of guys out in the motel selling
• 26:49
  drugs, and so they tried to sell me some drugs. And so we got
• 26:52
  into an argument in the middle of the parking lot because they
• 26:55
  was persistent. The argument turned into threats, he took his
• 26:59
  shirt off like he was gonna try to assault me or whatever the
• 27:01
  case may be. His friend tried to hold him back.
• 27:04
  He wasn't able to. And so when he ran towards me, I pulled a
• 27:08
  gun. I shot him one time, and that was in 1998 and that
• 27:13
  resulted in me getting a seventy five year prison sentence for
• 27:15
  murder.
• 27:16
  Dexter Thomas: Jeremy is now on his twenty seventh year of a
• 27:19
  seventy five year sentence.
• 27:21
  Jeremy Busby: My mistake was I left the scene of the crime.
• 27:24
  When it happened, I panicked and I fled. And that was the biggest
• 27:28
  mistake that I could have made because when they came down to
• 27:30
  my trial, that's pretty much what the DA relied upon was the
• 27:34
  fact that, you know, if mister Busby really felt like that this
• 27:38
  theft defense, why he didn't just wait for the police to
• 27:40
  come, why did he flee and all of that, how the kid is from the
• 27:44
  hood. And, you know, we don't really deal with the police too
• 27:47
  much when something like that happen. It's just a natural
• 27:49
  reaction to flee.
• 27:51
  But nevertheless, instead of crying out with spilled milk, I
• 27:54
  decided to come to prison and identify the areas where I went
• 27:57
  wrong that possibly led me to come into prison for the
• 28:00
  sentence and then making all of the necessary steps that I
• 28:04
  needed to make to ensure that this doesn't ever happen to me
• 28:07
  again. Right? Which includes my problem solving skills, my
• 28:11
  conflict resolution skills, my coping mechanisms, all of these
• 28:15
  things that I wasn't taught during my youth.
• 28:18
  Dexter Thomas: Pretty soon after Jeremy arrived in prison, he
• 28:21
  realized that he had something that the other incarcerated men
• 28:24
  around him didn't have.
• 28:25
  Jeremy Busby: When I first got to prison, one of the things
• 28:28
  that I noticed despite the fact that I had dropped out of school
• 28:31
  in the eighth grade, I could read and write and comprehend
• 28:36
  better than the majority of the people that was in Texas prison.
• 28:40
  And so as a result of that, I became like a person that would
• 28:44
  help people write letters to their families. I was going down
• 28:47
  to the La La Berry to help people because I'm working on my
• 28:49
  own personal case. But as I was learning, I'm helping them
• 28:52
  interpret and learn the law. And then finally, I got in contact
• 28:57
  with an attorney named Dunya Witherspoon.
• 28:59
  Poon. We became real good friends. And she started writing
• 29:02
  me because she had heard about my case and she wanted to help
• 29:05
  me out. And so all of these letters that I was writing to
• 29:08
  her, she eventually say, Jeremy, listen. I wanna take some of
• 29:13
  these letters and start sending them to the newspaper because
• 29:16
  you're a real good writer and the stuff that you're writing me
• 29:19
  is about prisons.
• 29:20
  And a lot of people on the outside don't understand
• 29:23
  everything that you understand and you do such a good job
• 29:26
  articulating this.
• 29:28
  Dexter Thomas: So with Danya's encouragement, Jeremy began the
• 29:30
  next phase of his life as a journalist, just one who's
• 29:33
  reporting from inside the prison. In general, even if a
• 29:36
  journalist like me tries to go and observe things, prison
• 29:39
  officials can be very restrictive of what you can do.
• 29:42
  So having a journalist on the inside like Jeremy means the
• 29:46
  people in the outside world can get a more unfiltered look at a
• 29:49
  world that was almost invisible to most of us before.
• 29:53
  Jeremy Busby: They already have this tedious tedious process of
• 29:59
  of open records act like a person like you wanted to file
• 30:02
  to get something on me. They'll put you through so much stuff to
• 30:05
  try to get it, and then you might not even get it. And then
• 30:08
  they might repack whatever you get and all of that crap. And so
• 30:12
  it's all a universal game of censorship.
• 30:15
  Dexter Thomas: Jeremy knew that he could provide information to
• 30:17
  people on the outside. He just didn't know if anyone would care
• 30:21
  what he was saying. It turned out, some people did.
• 30:24
  Jeremy Busby: Back in, 2003, I wrote an article for the San
• 30:29
  Francisco Review about the heat in Texas prison system and how
• 30:33
  we don't have any air condition here. They don't give us any
• 30:36
  type of relief as far as, like, cold water or any type of cold
• 30:40
  showers or anything like that to negate the extensive heat in the
• 30:44
  prison system. Of course, everyone knows detectives has
• 30:47
  very hot summers. And most of these structures that we have
• 30:52
  was built in the mid eighteen hundreds, early nineteen
• 30:55
  hundreds. They're all out of brick and steel, and they don't
• 30:59
  have any type of modern ventilation or anything of that
• 31:02
  nature.
• 31:03
  And so if you don't have family members on the outside that can
• 31:07
  send you money to buy a t shirt or buy a pair of gym shorts or
• 31:10
  buy a pair of tennis shoes, then you gotta wear your state
• 31:13
  uniform the whole entire time. It makes you even hotter.
• 31:17
  There's been temperatures recorded inside of the cell
• 31:21
  block inside of these buildings sometimes that have exceeded
• 31:24
  over a 165 degrees in certain places. In order to combat the
• 31:29
  heat, this is what I used to have to do. I go in my cell, and
• 31:33
  I have to put, like, maybe a couple of gallons of water on
• 31:36
  the floor.
• 31:37
  And I had to strip all the way down to my boxer shorts, and I
• 31:40
  had to lay in that water. And you have to repeat that process
• 31:45
  over and over and over and over again just to maintain a body
• 31:50
  temperature that prohibits you from having a heat stroke. And
• 31:54
  you have some guys that are, like, put their shirts in the
• 31:58
  water, they and wear their shirt while it's wet because we don't
• 32:01
  have a shower that you can just go walk and get into the shower.
• 32:05
  It's like one shower per day room. I think we was averaging
• 32:09
  something close to, like, ten to fifteen heat related deaths
• 32:13
  every single summer in Texas prison.
• 32:16
  Dexter Thomas: Oh my gosh.
• 32:17
  Jeremy Busby: It felt like the numbers can be a lot more
• 32:19
  because they'll come back after the autopsy or whatever and say,
• 32:23
  this guy died from complications of diabetes or he died from
• 32:26
  complications of hypertension. But the truth of the matter is
• 32:30
  there was the heat that triggered all of it and it was
• 32:32
  the heat related illness that caused death. And so I had wrote
• 32:36
  this long article to the San Francisco Bayview, and I
• 32:40
  basically said, listen. There's nothing for these people to
• 32:43
  bring down coolers and fill them up with ice every morning and
• 32:47
  allow us to be able to drink cold water throughout the day.
• 32:49
  And that could possibly save one, two, maybe ten, maybe a
• 32:53
  hundred lives.
• 32:54
  Right? When I wrote that, some days later, they came with a
• 32:58
  whole big cart full of yellow igloo coolers that was filled up
• 33:01
  with ice, and they put one on every single set of block.
• 33:05
  Dexter Thomas: Wow. That immediate.
• 33:07
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah. That immediately. And then my editor
• 33:09
  at the time was Mary Ratcliffe at the San Francisco Bayview,
• 33:13
  and she told me that they politely sent her a letter
• 33:16
  asking her if she can retract my article because they had solved
• 33:19
  the problem.
• 33:21
  Dexter Thomas: We reached out to the Texas Department of Criminal
• 33:24
  Justice about Jeremy saying that they'd asked for his article to
• 33:26
  be retracted. They declined to comment. After Jeremy wrote his
• 33:30
  article on the heat inside prisons, he's also reported on
• 33:34
  overdoses and suicide in prison, experiencing executions
• 33:37
  happening near his cell, and what happens when the prison
• 33:40
  goes on lockdown. His works appeared in places that
• 33:42
  specialize in reporting on prisons like the Marshall
• 33:45
  Project, but it's also been in publications that the general
• 33:48
  public reads, like Slate Magazine or the Columbia
• 33:51
  Journalism Review. But getting those articles out isn't always
• 33:55
  easy.
• 33:56
  Jeremy Busby: As an incarcerated journalist, I have this hill
• 34:00
  that I have to climb with these legacy media outlets. I have to
• 34:05
  cross all of my t's. I have to dot all of my i's. I damn near
• 34:09
  have to put them in contact with the warden for the warden to
• 34:12
  say, yeah. Everything that Jeremy wrote is legit.
• 34:16
  And so a lot of times, some of the stuff that the people write
• 34:20
  being incarcerated, they write to these media outlets, that
• 34:23
  stuff never gets to the press because some editor somewhere
• 34:27
  saying, hey, man. I can't find what we can substantiate this. I
• 34:31
  don't know if this really is going on or whatever the case
• 34:35
  may be. So it ends up in somebody's shredder. Now as you
• 34:38
  know from being on the outside in journalism, when you got
• 34:42
  social media, you can skip the whole entire legacy media outlet
• 34:47
  process.
• 34:48
  You have a a unobstructed avenue to put the information out that
• 34:53
  you wanna put out.
• 34:55
  Dexter Thomas: The ability to communicate directly with the
• 34:57
  outside world is crucial for Jeremy. But how does he do it?
• 35:01
  So there are two main ways that incarcerated people can
• 35:04
  communicate through social media. The first one is directly
• 35:07
  through a contraband cell phone. These are against the rules, but
• 35:10
  they make their way into prisons all the time.
• 35:13
  The other way is to call or write to someone who's on the
• 35:15
  outside and have them post on your behalf. Jeremy's done both.
• 35:19
  Either way, social media gives Jeremy a way to show his
• 35:22
  perspective from prison directly without being filtered through
• 35:25
  prison officials or waiting for a local media outlet who
• 35:28
  believes his reporting or hoping that some outside reporter would
• 35:31
  take interest and cover it for him. The best example of this is
• 35:35
  when COVID hit. His cellmate had a contraband cell phone, and so
• 35:38
  Jeremy was able to directly broadcast what was actually
• 35:41
  happening and get immediate responses to help the
• 35:43
  incarcerated people around him.
• 35:47
  Jeremy Busby: I'm researching this COVID nineteen coronavirus
• 35:49
  and all of the precautions that we need in order to safeguard
• 35:53
  ourselves from contracting it. One of the main two things that
• 35:57
  they ask you to do, well, it's really three things. They ask
• 36:00
  you to social distance, to wear our n 95 mask, and to properly
• 36:05
  sanitize your hands. Right? So Texas prison system, what they
• 36:09
  did, they cut up a bunch of sheets and put little springs on
• 36:12
  the side of the sheets, and they was issuing those sheets out to
• 36:15
  us.
• 36:16
  It's like an n 95 mask. It's a cut up sheet.
• 36:20
  Dexter Thomas: It's bed sheets. Okay. Yeah.
• 36:21
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah. It's bed sheets. Secondly, they wasn't
• 36:24
  passing out any type of sanitation chemicals, like hand
• 36:27
  sanitizer or anything of that nature. And then thirdly, it was
• 36:31
  impossible for us to social distance because they got us
• 36:34
  locked in a cell with another person. So my reporting on all
• 36:38
  of that and social media got us the n 95 mask.
• 36:41
  They got us the bleach. They started passing us real food out
• 36:44
  for our nutrition like bananas and apples and grilled milk.
• 36:48
  Dexter Thomas: Again, we asked the Texas Department of Criminal
• 36:50
  Justice about this and they declined to comment. Ask most
• 36:55
  people what they think about social media and they'll tell
• 36:57
  you that there's good parts, but also a lot of bad parts. Echo
• 37:00
  chambers, misinformation, all that. Jeremy's aware of this
• 37:04
  stuff, but he's also aware that social media is how a lot of
• 37:07
  people get their news. For him, that's an opportunity to speak,
• 37:12
  but also to learn.
• 37:13
  Jeremy Busby: One of the things that social media did for me is
• 37:17
  that when I even had an idea of an article or if I wrote the
• 37:22
  article out itself, all different type of people will
• 37:25
  start sending me additional information to either support or
• 37:28
  negate or to advance the topic matters that I found
• 37:32
  interesting. Right? And what I realized about social media is
• 37:36
  that I can reach people all around the world just opposed
• 37:39
  to, like, if I write for a local publication, I might reach
• 37:42
  people right here in Texas. If I write for a national
• 37:44
  publication, I might get 30 to 35% of the nation. But when I
• 37:49
  post something on social media, I can circulate that all over
• 37:53
  the world and even translate it into all different type of
• 37:56
  languages.
• 37:57
  I was talking to people as far away as Switzerland about the
• 38:01
  situation in Texas prison. I know now that I don't
• 38:05
  necessarily have to put one of my articles in a publication. I
• 38:08
  can just drop it in the thread on egg, and it'd have the same
• 38:12
  value that it would have if I had dropped it in competition
• 38:16
  like the Imperial.
• 38:18
  Dexter Thomas: Once Jeremy found a way to use social media, he
• 38:21
  suddenly had access to a whole world that he didn't before. But
• 38:25
  that's starting to change. Cell phones have always been
• 38:28
  contraband, but now prisons across the country are really
• 38:31
  cracking down on social media access. We'll get into how and
• 38:35
  why after the break.
• 38:45
  Jeremy Busby: One of the first things that they told me when I
• 38:48
  became a journalist in prison, the warden called me up, and he
• 38:51
  talked to me about those two fence that surround the prison,
• 38:55
  the perimeter fence with the barbed wire. And he asked me, he
• 38:58
  said, Buster, why do you think we got those two fence out there
• 39:02
  with the barbed wire? And I said, well, that's to keep
• 39:04
  people from escaping. He said, no. That's the wrong answer.
• 39:08
  We're not worried about anybody escaping. That's to keep the
• 39:12
  public out of here. And when you write what you write and give
• 39:16
  these people entry to come into my prison, you're bringing them
• 39:20
  over my damn fence, and I don't like that. That's what the
• 39:24
  warden told me. And so the social media ban prohibits
• 39:29
  people from bringing the general public over the fence.
• 39:34
  Dexter Thomas: In 2016, the state of Texas where Jeremy's
• 39:37
  incarcerated added a brand new rule to the state's prison
• 39:40
  handbook. The rule essentially banned incarcerated people from
• 39:44
  having any personal social media pages run-in their name, meaning
• 39:48
  that no one outside of prison is supposed to even run an account
• 39:51
  on Jeremy's behalf. Similar bans have also been put in places in
• 39:55
  other states like Alabama and Iowa. And last year, the US
• 39:59
  Federal Bureau of Prisons proposed a rule like the one in
• 40:01
  Texas, but that would apply across the entire federal prison
• 40:04
  system. If an incarcerated person was found to have a
• 40:07
  social media account, that violation would be treated as a
• 40:10
  high severity level offense.
• 40:12
  That's the same category that's applied to things like fighting
• 40:14
  in prison.
• 40:16
  Jeremy Busby: That barrier that the prison administration had to
• 40:19
  continue the status quo no longer exist for them. And so
• 40:23
  therefore, they gotta do whatever they gotta do to put
• 40:26
  that back in place. So they got their social media bans.
• 40:29
  Dexter Thomas: Back in 2016, when the Texas Department of
• 40:31
  Criminal Justice put their social media ban in place, they
• 40:34
  told Vice News that, quote, offenders have used social media
• 40:37
  accounts to sell items over the Internet based on the notoriety
• 40:41
  of their crime, harass victims or victims' families, and
• 40:45
  continue their criminal activity. The department went on
• 40:47
  to say that they would, quote, take all of the necessary steps
• 40:51
  to prevent that from happening. We contacted them to ask whether
• 40:54
  that's still the reason for the ban today. They declined to
• 40:57
  comment. But, again, there's another side of this.
• 41:01
  If we wanna talk about criminal activity, we have to acknowledge
• 41:04
  that social media is exposing allegedly unlawful activity that
• 41:08
  the outside world should know about.
• 41:10
  Jeremy Busby: Now you can take a picture or shoot a video about
• 41:14
  what's going on here at the prison system and put that on
• 41:18
  Facebook or Instagram, and it's gonna go viral, and it's gonna
• 41:21
  cost people their jobs. So that scares the hell out of prison
• 41:25
  officials. It scares the hell out of them. Right? Because now,
• 41:30
  like, what happened with me, the No Way Out documentary when I
• 41:33
  worked with Carrie Blackinger behind the COVID You have one
• 41:35
  minute left.
• 41:36
  Okay. Damn. When I went live with Tray the Truth, I was able
• 41:42
  to do all of that unrestricted without having to wrestle with
• 41:46
  any type of mega media outlet or anything like that. We just
• 41:49
  dropped it. And it caused a whole bunch of backlash.
• 41:53
  Let me call you back one more time.
• 41:55
  Dexter Thomas: Okay. Phone calls in Jeremy's unit are limited to
• 41:59
  thirty minutes, so we had to reconnect a few times during the
• 42:02
  interview. That's why you might hear Jeremy rush through
• 42:05
  sentences sometimes. He's just trying to get out as much as
• 42:07
  possible before he gets cut off. But what he's getting at here is
• 42:11
  important.
• 42:12
  When word gets out about conditions on the inside, it can
• 42:15
  make things hard for the officials who work there. Jeremy
• 42:18
  thinks that the bans are partially there to stop that
• 42:20
  from happening. But banning stuff from making rules is one
• 42:24
  thing. The next step is the current Trump administration
• 42:27
  wants to make it physically impossible to communicate
• 42:30
  directly with the outside.
• 42:31
  Jeremy Busby: Brandon Carr now from the FCC, they're going
• 42:34
  around trying to pass this new law where they can put cell
• 42:38
  phone jammers up outside of privilege.
• 42:40
  Dexter Thomas: Cell phone jammers are devices that can
• 42:43
  block cell phone signals within a certain range. These devices
• 42:46
  in general are illegal, partially because they're
• 42:49
  dangerous. I mean, think about it. If cell signals can't get
• 42:52
  through, you can't call the paramedics or they can't find
• 42:55
  you. So obviously, the general public can't have them.
• 42:59
  But for that same reason, in general, even state and local
• 43:02
  law enforcement can't legally use them. But recently, the FCC
• 43:06
  is considering letting prisons use these jammers to block
• 43:09
  contraband cell phone use.
• 43:11
  Jeremy Busby: They want people to think that people utilizing
• 43:13
  these phones to organize criminal activity. And you might
• 43:16
  have a handful of people that might utilize the country band
• 43:19
  cell phone organized criminal activity. But from being
• 43:22
  incarcerated almost thirty years, I'm a tell you that the
• 43:25
  majority of the people that using country band cell phones
• 43:28
  are trying to connect with long lost family members, loved ones,
• 43:32
  childhood friends, and other people like myself are utilizing
• 43:36
  it to report on the conditions of the prison. And then you got
• 43:39
  third demographic of people that just wanna watch porn and movies
• 43:43
  and videos and things of that nature. Right?
• 43:46
  There's very few people that utilize the phone to organize
• 43:50
  criminal activity, but the prison officials, they're that
• 43:54
  the person that's incarcerated is gonna take the phone and
• 43:58
  expose them, and so that's the reason why they're pushing this.
• 44:02
  Dexter Thomas: Despite all these attempts to block incarcerated
• 44:04
  people's access to social media, Jeremy's been able to report out
• 44:08
  what's going on in prison. But when he has, he says he's been
• 44:12
  retaliated against.
• 44:14
  Jeremy Busby: The nature of my career is when I write
• 44:17
  something, it don't take very long for them to come down and
• 44:20
  talk to me or try to or intimidate or, you know, and all
• 44:24
  of that. I'm public enemy number one with these people. If you
• 44:28
  say anything that people don't like, they can go look through
• 44:32
  your files and possibly subject you to some type of political
• 44:35
  prosecution or or file a lawsuit on you or smear your name or
• 44:39
  come kick in your door or or lock you up and spray you with
• 44:42
  chemical agents and all that. I've been through all of that.
• 44:45
  But you don't have as many people like myself that's really
• 44:49
  speaking out against these people because they're come
• 44:52
  after you.
• 44:52
  Right? They're take all of your property. They're gonna transfer
• 44:55
  you to different units. They're gonna put you in solitary
• 44:58
  confinement. Last year, I've been transferred to four
• 45:01
  different units.
• 45:02
  Each time I get to the unit, I'm spending days in the cell with
• 45:05
  no mattress, no sheets, no blankets, no basic necessities
• 45:09
  like soap, toothpaste, and deodorant. This is the stuff
• 45:12
  that you go through. And so for the majority of the people in
• 45:15
  prison here, hey, man. Just put your head down and don't say
• 45:19
  nothing. And they don't come after you.
• 45:22
  I have never took that approach because I understand what that
• 45:26
  approach does to a person. When you put your head down for so
• 45:29
  many times after so many years, that becomes an intricate part
• 45:33
  of your character and who you are. And I don't wanna live like
• 45:37
  that. And so I resist. And I do it in the best of manners.
• 45:40
  Right? I don't never write anything ever that I don't try
• 45:45
  to work with administration first on and say, here's the
• 45:48
  problem right here. I'm thinking about writing this, but if we
• 45:51
  can solve this problem, will I forget about writing it? It's
• 45:54
  only when they're not interested in solving a problem that I know
• 45:57
  I can write and get the problem solved. So as a result of that,
• 46:02
  Jeremy Busby is public enemy number one.
• 46:06
  I'm the number one agitator, whatever they wanna call me,
• 46:09
  but, you know, I I don't really, you know, I don't really call it
• 46:12
  agitation. Right? I call it's like good trouble, like John
• 46:15
  Lewis called it good trouble. Right? This is good trouble.
• 46:19
  Dexter Thomas: Earlier this year, when the Columbia
• 46:21
  Journalism Review asked Texas prison officials about Jeremy's
• 46:24
  claims that he's being retaliated against, they denied
• 46:27
  it. When we asked them, they declined a comment. Right now,
• 46:32
  as we record this episode, Jeremy's in solitary confinement
• 46:35
  for what he says is a response to his reporting. More on that
• 46:40
  after the break. So hold on.
• 46:48
  Jimmy, you're in solitary right now?
• 46:51
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah. I'm in solitary confinement right now.
• 46:54
  I'm talking to you from a solitary confinement cell. My
• 46:57
  cell is about the size of your king-size mattress. That's the
• 47:02
  whole size of my cell.
• 47:04
  I got a toilet and a sink a steel combo right here. I got a
• 47:07
  desk, and I got a metal bunk that I lay on. And I'm confined
• 47:11
  to this cell twenty four hours a day. There are no windows. I
• 47:16
  can't tell you if it's nighttime or daytime.
• 47:19
  The only thing that I can see is directly in front of myself when
• 47:22
  somebody walked past. It's got a solid steel door with two
• 47:26
  plexiglass windows on the front of it and a solid steel door
• 47:30
  that goes all the way down to the bottom, so I can't even
• 47:32
  slide anything out of the bottom. I don't even have any
• 47:35
  communication with anybody except for the guard. So it's
• 47:39
  mentally crippling, and everybody understands that it's
• 47:41
  mentally crippling because it cuts you all the way off from
• 47:44
  human to human contact.
• 47:46
  Dexter Thomas: If you remember our episode on tablets in
• 47:48
  prison, Jeremy says that they were recently given one of those
• 47:51
  state issued tablet devices that lets them watch religious and
• 47:54
  educational programming. And from 2PM to 8PM daily, he can
• 47:58
  pay to make phone calls if it's to a number that has registered
• 48:02
  to receive a call from the prison. How long you been in
• 48:06
  there?
• 48:06
  Jeremy Busby: I've been in Sanitary confinement since June
• 48:09
  2024.
• 48:11
  Dexter Thomas: Over a year?
• 48:13
  Jeremy Busby: Over a year. No disciplinary cases. Nothing. The
• 48:16
  guards always ask me all the time, hey, man. Why they got you
• 48:19
  in here buzzed me?
• 48:21
  And I tell them just Google me. And then they come back and say,
• 48:23
  okay. I know why they got you in here. Right? Then I even had a
• 48:27
  have someone come to me say, hey, man.
• 48:28
  Won't you just quit being a journalist so they can let you
• 48:31
  out of here? And I'm like, you know, there's certain trade offs
• 48:35
  that I'm just not willing to make. Right? And these people,
• 48:39
  they they continue to try to harass me and police and, you
• 48:42
  know, do a lot of things that they do because of of my
• 48:45
  journalism then, hey. That's just to hear that I'm a down.
• 48:48
  Right? That's to hear that I'm down. Because I didn't have very
• 48:51
  much Dexter when I came to prison. You know, I grew up. My
• 48:54
  mom I lost my mom when I was four.
• 48:56
  My dad has always been a deadbeat. I dropped out of
• 48:58
  school when I was eight, and I was running the streets and all
• 49:01
  of that. And so all of the meaningful things that I was
• 49:04
  able to obtain for myself during my incarceration, I'll be damned
• 49:09
  if I'm a give that back to anybody.
• 49:12
  Dexter Thomas: You were talking about the Was somebody knocking
• 49:18
  back there?
• 49:18
  Jeremy Busby: Hey. No. I ain't got it.
• 49:20
  Dexter Thomas: So in the middle of our interview, we were
• 49:22
  interrupted by a guard knocking on Jeremy Seldor.
• 49:25
  Jeremy Busby: Hey. Hey. Look out. Hold on. Shut up, screaming
• 49:29
  for a minute.
• 49:29
  Hey, man. I wish you would quit doing that. I'm on the
• 49:32
  telephone. I asked you I asked you to quit doing that, but I'm
• 49:36
  on the telephone. You what?
• 49:38
  I asked you to quit beating on the door because I'm on the
• 49:40
  telephone. You're in the rest of my telephone call. I asked you
• 49:43
  that privilege. That's the fifth time you did that today, and I
• 49:46
  asked you to quit doing that. I I know you didn't get that the
• 49:49
  time.
• 49:50
  Okay. I'm stupid. I'm sorry about that. Now you got you got
• 49:57
  some officers that he's sitting here, he's shit as long as the
• 50:00
  phone, so he just gonna come and just beat on the door, beat on
• 50:03
  the door, beat on the door. But anyway, I'm sorry about that.
• 50:05
  Dexter Thomas: It's all good. It's all good, man. Who was
• 50:08
  that? What happened just now?
• 50:10
  Jeremy Busby: That's a guard. No. He's a guard. Right? What
• 50:13
  they do is they come by every five, ten, fifteen minutes and
• 50:17
  just beat on the door with the bar thing that they got.
• 50:20
  He done that times today. He's trying to antagonize me. He's
• 50:24
  trying to get the reaction that he just got to know that he's
• 50:27
  getting up under my skin. They do stuff like that. And so but I
• 50:31
  talked to him politely, you know, first couple of times.
• 50:34
  I say, hey, sir. If you don't mind, and you come to the door,
• 50:38
  you can see me in the door, my light is on. I'm moving around
• 50:41
  in my cell. Why do you feel like you have to beat on the door for
• 50:46
  five minutes? He has a language barrier.
• 50:49
  His English is not very good. And so he came back and did it
• 50:52
  again. And I said, hey, man. Do you understand you disturb
• 50:55
  people's peace when you're doing all of this? But, anyway, so
• 50:58
  here it is.
• 50:59
  He came to work at 07:00 this morning. It's 03:00, and this is
• 51:03
  the fifth time that he's been to my cell and done this crap.
• 51:06
  Dexter Thomas: Oh my gosh.
• 51:07
  Jeremy Busby: I'm sorry about that Dexter, Rick.
• 51:09
  Dexter Thomas: No. You don't got to apologize to me.
• 51:12
  Jeremy Busby: Alright.
• 51:13
  Dexter Thomas: Hearing what Jeremy has to go through just to
• 51:16
  survive is a lot. I can't imagine what it's like to be
• 51:20
  doing journalistic reporting. And then on top of that
• 51:24
  Jeremy Busby: We did a no kings protest real quick. So I don't
• 51:27
  have to deny the No Kings protest. Right?
• 51:30
  Dexter Thomas: You know Jeremy, you organized a No Kings protest
• 51:33
  in there?
• 51:34
  Jeremy Busby: Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Jeremy. Hey, man. This
• 51:40
  this stuff is serious, bro.
• 51:41
  I'm a tell you how I organize it. Okay? Because I like the
• 51:44
  dudes that's down the road from me, he sent me a letter and
• 51:47
  telling me that his niece came home and her mom and her dad had
• 51:51
  been picked up by ice. No. So his niece came home from school
• 51:55
  and her parents was gone.
• 51:57
  Then I got this other guy. He's telling me about how his mom
• 52:01
  been working for the federal government in Houston at NASA
• 52:04
  for all of these years and the government shutdown then
• 52:07
  furloughed her. Right? So she's not able to send any money for
• 52:10
  his commissary and put money on his phone. So when I got
• 52:14
  thinking about all of this, I'm telling all of these dudes over
• 52:16
  here where I'm at, like, hey, man.
• 52:18
  This thing that Trump got going on is affecting all of us. And
• 52:21
  we need to protest and stand in solidarity with the people on
• 52:25
  our side. Okay, Jeremy, what you got in mind? Okay. Listen.
• 52:29
  For this Saturday, we're gonna not accept our food. If anybody
• 52:32
  need food, let me know. I'll send you some food to eat, And
• 52:35
  we're put signs on our door that say no food, no talk, no keys.
• 52:41
  Dexter Thomas: Wow.
• 52:42
  Jeremy Busby: We did that.
• 52:43
  Dexter Thomas: Oh my gosh.
• 52:45
  Jeremy Busby: So it was peaceful all the way up to about 08:00 at
• 52:49
  night. They wanted the guys that we recruited. He's not all the
• 52:53
  way there. And so he started talking like, you know, man,
• 52:57
  damn. Just deny my food.
• 52:59
  I'm ready to split it off. So he said there's, like, three alarm
• 53:02
  fire in his cell. Right? And this other guy manipulated the
• 53:05
  lock on his cell, and he bust out the cell and just started
• 53:08
  ripping the TVs off the wall. But what I'm showing you is
• 53:11
  this.
• 53:11
  Okay. These guys the guy that ripped the TV off the wall, that
• 53:14
  don't hurt the prison officials. Those TVs are for us. And so now
• 53:18
  all the TVs that you'd have ripped off, people can't watch
• 53:21
  the news or whatever it is that they wanna watch. You're hurting
• 53:23
  the whole community.
• 53:24
  It it it they just tells you the mental deficiency that most
• 53:28
  majority of the people could have and it's not mild.
• 53:31
  According
• 53:34
  Dexter Thomas: to Jeremy, the conditions of the system only
• 53:36
  exacerbate the problems that he sees in prison. Along with
• 53:39
  mental illness, he says that the prison system in Texas suffers
• 53:42
  from problems with violence, drugs, and suicides. And to him,
• 53:46
  these problems and the social media bans that they wanna put
• 53:50
  in place, it's all related.
• 53:53
  Jeremy Busby: It always been my position that when you destroy
• 53:55
  family bonds and make it impossible for the families to
• 53:59
  communicate, then that puts the person in bad situation. And
• 54:03
  sometimes, in order to get out of that situation because of
• 54:06
  what's going on in prison, you have to turn the door. My whole
• 54:11
  thesis is, like, instead of putting money into further
• 54:14
  destroying family ties, as far as taking people's own
• 54:18
  privileges away, and putting them in a position to where they
• 54:21
  can become more depressed and become more mentally disturbed
• 54:24
  to where they have to increase their drug usage. Let's take
• 54:28
  that same energy, those same resources, that same money as
• 54:32
  let's put it towards trying to repair family bonds. Let's put
• 54:35
  it towards trying to help people accumulate meaningful things
• 54:38
  like so they can receive substance use.
• 54:41
  Let's put it towards like putting people through
• 54:43
  rehabilitation.
• 54:45
  Dexter Thomas: I'm just gonna say this as a journalist who's
• 54:47
  reported on prisons. I would never be able to bring you this
• 54:52
  kind of insight. Jeremy's work provides something that's really
• 54:55
  rare. It's a look at what's actually happening inside this
• 54:59
  prison. But also, his work isn't just on behalf of the
• 55:03
  incarcerated people.
• 55:05
  There's one of your pieces that I was reading earlier today, and
• 55:09
  it was an article, this is for the Chronicle. I wanna quote you
• 55:12
  here. You said, for nearly three decades, I've watched this
• 55:16
  broken system break people, both staff and the incarcerated.
• 55:20
  Instead of returning prisoners back to their communities a
• 55:23
  better version of themselves, prisons return them more
• 55:26
  psychologically damaged, disenfranchised, and poor than
• 55:29
  when they entered. I've seen staff members lose their
• 55:32
  families, their drive to succeed, and even with suicide,
• 55:36
  their lives.
• 55:37
  I think people might be surprised to hear that you're
• 55:41
  also advocating for staff members, for the guards.
• 55:45
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah.
• 55:46
  Dexter Thomas: Like the person who just came by and beat on
• 55:48
  your door.
• 55:49
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah. And that comes from my mentor is a
• 55:52
  retired senior warden, Vernon Pitman. And one of the things
• 55:57
  that Warren Pitman taught me about is that, hey, listen,
• 55:59
  gentlemen, we all are human beings, whether if you made a
• 56:02
  mistake and you in prison or if you made a mistake and you
• 56:06
  worked for the prison, because everybody that worked for the
• 56:08
  prison, they made a mistake. The people that work in prison and
• 56:12
  the people that are in prison all come from the same
• 56:14
  socioeconomic demographics. The majority of them either made it
• 56:18
  through high school and went to the military and couldn't make
• 56:21
  it.
• 56:22
  Some of them dropped out of high school and got their GED and
• 56:24
  started working at a low local fast food restaurant or
• 56:27
  something. But it's very few people inside a prison that has
• 56:32
  a college degree that works here. Very few people.
• 56:35
  Dexter Thomas: I mean, it it really could be people who would
• 56:38
  have been neighbors otherwise, and I guess they're neighbors
• 56:40
  now.
• 56:41
  Jeremy Busby: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course they're neighbors.
• 56:42
  They of course they're neighbors.
• 56:43
  And I'm telling y'all, let's just say this. The people that
• 56:45
  work here are not the brightest people that you're find on
• 56:48
  earth. So they easily manipulate it. And the same deficiencies
• 56:52
  that I came to prison with, which is a lack of coping
• 56:55
  skills, no conflict resolution, no constructive decision making
• 57:00
  processes, or any of that. The same things that I came to
• 57:03
  prison with the majority of these guards worked in the
• 57:06
  prison with those same deficiencies.
• 57:09
  Dexter Thomas: I gotta ask you this. Are you concerned about
• 57:12
  talking to me about this?
• 57:13
  Jeremy Busby: No. No. No. No. No.
• 57:15
  Because I talk about this every chance that I get. None of this
• 57:18
  is any secret. These people know what's going on. These people
• 57:22
  done so much to me. There's nothing else that they can do.
• 57:26
  I'm not worried about them killing me physically. Right?
• 57:29
  There's nothing else that they can do to me for my journalism
• 57:34
  that haven't already been done.
• 57:39
  Dexter Thomas: So my conversation with Jeremy had me
• 57:41
  thinking about another conversation I had a few months
• 57:43
  ago with Gabby Kaplan. She's the journalist who's reported on the
• 57:46
  tablets that have been issued in prisons across the country and
• 57:49
  the federal government's efforts to limit the communication
• 57:52
  abilities on those tablets. If you haven't heard that episode
• 57:56
  yet, definitely check it I'll leave a link in the show notes.
• 57:59
  But if you look at the comments online about her reporting, you
• 58:03
  might see people arguing that, well, if you're in prison,
• 58:06
  having a tablet or social media is a luxury. You shouldn't be
• 58:09
  able to have that kind of luxury period.
• 58:12
  Okay. That's an opinion. But I can read you an argument that
• 58:16
  Jeremy Busby himself wrote in a recent article, and I'm just
• 58:19
  gonna quote him here. Regulations that rob
• 58:22
  incarcerated individuals of the ability to expose cruelties and
• 58:26
  human rights violations and hold prison officials accountable
• 58:29
  hurt more people and cause more negative societal consequences
• 58:33
  than they prevent. Just ask those whose lives were saved or
• 58:37
  drastically improved by reporting only made possible
• 58:40
  with the use of contraband cell phones.
• 58:43
  And then he closes that article with a request. Quote, give
• 58:47
  journalists meaningful access records. Give incarcerated
• 58:52
  people the tools to communicate with the outside world and
• 58:55
  document abuses without censorship and retaliation, and
• 58:59
  I'll never use a contraband cell phone again. Or better yet,
• 59:03
  don't commit those abuses at all, end quote. Special thanks
• 59:12
  this week to the Freedom of the Press Foundation and to the
• 59:15
  Never Post podcast who introduced us to Jeremy and
• 59:18
  helped make this whole episode possible.
• 59:22
  And thank you once again for listening to Kill Switch. Kill
• 59:25
  Switch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena
• 59:29
  Ozaki, Darlauk Potts, and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me
• 59:33
  and Kyle Murdock, and Kyle also mixed the show. From
• 59:37
  Kaleidoscope, our executive producers are Osvalashin,
• 59:40
  Mangesh Hadigador, and Kate Osborne.
• 59:42
  From iHeart, our executive producers are Katrina Norville
• 59:45
  and Nikki Itur.
• 59:47
  Jeremy Busby: Thank you for using Securus. Goodbye.
• 1:00:09
  Mike Rugnetta: That is the show we have for you this week. We're
• 1:00:12
  gonna be back here in the main feed once more in 2025 and when
• 1:00:16
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• 1:00:21
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• 1:00:25
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• 1:00:29
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• 1:00:33
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  Oh, hold on. I gotta go find a poem.
• 1:01:28
  Will Tuttle. Bill Tuttle? Here we go.
• 1:01:48
  This is too much to carry, he thought. I've ascertained how
• 1:01:51
  far our minds made up. Drift like a crow now or a gorge or a
• 1:01:56
  braid. So like slow water, depending on rain, depending on
• 1:02:00
  ice declines the slope, distributing what verse gets,
• 1:02:04
  what talk, whose motion, of whose hand, what pressure, what
• 1:02:07
  tensile, what upholds. The center stuck out like a sick
• 1:02:11
  thumb on what the hard map depends, the going price
• 1:02:15
  eventualities.
• 1:02:17
  The entry said be careful. Scattered walls of the wrecked
• 1:02:19
  city would soon come into view. To him returned, a car rests on
• 1:02:23
  wet sand. Read it inside many times before it actually came to
• 1:02:27
  pass. In the very middle of resting, of approaching, just
• 1:02:31
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• 1:02:31
  Certainly, one of those things that would come to pass. His
• 1:02:35
  hand bends to greet you. Excerpt of a map folded by Bill Tuttle.
• 1:02:43
  Never Post is a production of charts and leisure and it's
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  distributed by Radiotopia.