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This week on Reformed N' Reel, Mario and Wayne sit down with Rashmi Mukherjee, Associate Professor of Literature, Humanities, and Culture at Boise State University — and the woman who has been quietly doing some of the most human work inside Idaho State Correctional Institution. For the last several years, Rashmi has been bringing BSU students inside ISCI to take classes alongside the men who live there. She calls herself a "story collector." What she's built is something closer to a bridge.

The conversation opens with how she first heard Mario's name — not from a colleague or a nonprofit brochure, but from inside ISCI itself, where the men in her classes kept saying "learning to live" and pointing in his direction. From there, she walks us through the Inside Out program: BSU students and incarcerated students watching The Shawshank Redemption together, writing and reading each other's personal stories aloud, and what happens when a 19-year-old college student reads the story of a man who's been locked up for twenty years and cut off from his children. "It's a very heavy, very emotionally heavy experience," Rashmi says. "That was the point."

The emotional center of the episode is a story told by a student named Chris — a man who, at six years old, ran to his teacher's house to borrow money for a loaf of bread so his hungry sister could have something on Christmas Eve, and came back with sprinkles from the gas station attendant. Rashmi didn't know what to do with it. "I don't care if this is true or false or what," she told him. "It's a fantastic story." That story opened the floodgates. Men started writing. Stories started stacking up. Rashmi started going home at night and crying. Her husband told her she had to do something with them. A book was born.

She's honest about the transformation that happened inside her, too. She came in careful. She left more forgiving. She says the conversations she has inside ISCI are "the best conversations I can have as an academic — I don't have that kind of intellectual stimulation outside." Mario reflects on why that is: men in a box with nothing but time and themselves tend to think deeply. Rashmi calls them Zen Buddhists. Mario calls them broken souls who just want to be normal.

The episode ends on a challenge to all of us: "People have to look at the human inside and not just get stuck by the space like prison." The book is almost done. The stories keep coming.

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This week on Reformed N Reel, Mario and Wayne sit down with Laura Watson, licensed clinical social worker who runs the Behavioral Health Unit at the Idaho State Correctional Institution. That's a 240-bed mental health unit inside ISCI, and Laura has been doing this work for 17 years — long enough that many of the residents call her "Mama Watson." She's seen the department change. She's helped change it. And she came on the show to talk about what it actually looks like to do real mental health work behind the walls.

We get into the hard parts. More than a third of IDOC's population is followed by mental health at some level — and Laura puts the number of people carrying real trauma at 90 to 95 percent. Idaho is one of only four states without an insanity plea, which means the most severely ill end up in her unit instead of a hospital. She's honest about why prison therapy is so brutal: "It always gets worse before it gets better," and you're asking someone to go through that sober, without supports, and with no safe room to go cry in afterward. We also dig into the cruel paradox of the system — that access to therapy is easier inside prison than outside, where waitlists run three months and transportation and money get in the way.

Mario reflects on still calling himself "one of us" even after release, and Laura tells him why that matters. The episode lands on a line worth sitting with: "True public safety doesn't happen until people get better." Laura's call to listeners is simple — start normalizing mental health conversations in your own family. Especially with the men in your life. Make "are you doing okay?" a normal thing to ask.

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This week on Reformed N Reel, host Mario Hernandez and co-host Wayne Burt sit down with Tony and Stetson — two of Mario's own Learning How 2 Live Media employees, both currently residents at the Treasure Valley Community Reentry Center.

What follows is the part of the conversation that most "lock 'em up" coverage never gets to — the part about what actually moves the needle.

Tony's blunt assessment of the warehouse model: "You take somebody like me and you give me seven years and I'm in a cell the whole time, after that seven years you're just hitting the pause button. You're going right back out to where you were." The fix isn't a longer sentence. The fix is what happened next: a friend pulling him to a minimum-custody facility, a CRC bed, a job at LH2L Media, a reason to show up.

For Stetson, walking away from the gang in custody — months of what he calls psychological warfare on the tier — opened the door to a five-month leadership development course. He talks about his grandma, who he hadn't seen in years, walking into his graduation on a walker. His parents calling him "son" in front of his classmates. Breaking down crying in front of everybody he'd spent the last decade trying to look hard for. He now facilitates that same course for incoming students, and he stands at IDOC's Central Office during new-employee orientation telling his story to the staff who are about to spend their career working with people like him.

The conversation lands somewhere people in corrections don't expect it to: on trust. When you have nothing to lose, no fence is high enough. When you have something to lose — a job, a wife and kids at home, a sergeant who treats you like a person, a manager who hired you on purpose — the fence stops doing the work. The motivation comes from inside.

Stetson, paraphrasing the line that opens the back half: "Acquire what you admire."

Tony, on what changed: "For somebody to reach in and give you an opportunity is kind of everything when you don't have anything."

Content warning: This episode contains a first-person description of a suicide attempt. If you or someone you know is in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text.

Learning How 2 Live — learninghow2live.org

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