Community Notebook > Our Community, Our News

Voice of the Incarcerated
BY Valerie Linet photos by megan mcquade

My goal is to provide a voice for the voiceless," says DJ Julie, referring to "The Fancy Broccoli Show." What began as a jazz radio program six years ago has since morphed into something extraordinary. Tune into Vassar College Independent Radio's WVKR (91.3 FM) on alternate Sundays from 3 to 6pm and you might just hear some Miles Davis. More likely, though, you'll catch Julie or one of her volunteers reading letters from local prisoners over the air. It could be a shout-out from one of her regular correspondents, like "Minister Divine" or "The Voice of Freedom"—two of the 8,500 people incarcerated in state prisons in Dutchess and Ulster counties. Or perhaps you'll hear Julie interviewing a local prison activist about parole restoration. You might tune in while she's talking with Sister Helen Prejean, the famed death-penalty-abolitionist nun and author of Dead Man Walking. Maybe you'll catch editorials pre-recorded from Death Row by Mumia Abu Jamal. "The Fancy Broccoli Show" has come a long way since its inception in 1997, when Julie responded to WVKR's call for community DJs.

Grassroots
In 1999 a series of events conspired to help Julie answer a question that had begun forming in her mind: How can I use my radio program to make a difference? First, there was Columbine, the Colorado high school shootings that shook the nation. A week after the shootings, Julie visited Zen Mountain Monastery, a Buddhist practice and training temple, and spoke to the abbot. "I told Daido [the abbot] that I had no idea what to do, and he said, 'Well, you've got a radio show. You've got a voice. You can respond.'" The next week on the air, Julie began talking about Columbine—how she felt about the incident and what she had been thinking. Several listeners called in and thanked her for expressing her views. They seemed relieved and grateful. "Funny things happen when you're on the radio," says Julie. "People think you're some kind of authority."

Not long after, Julie was inspired by a segment on npr's "This American Life" that highlighted the work of a man named Ray Hill, a gay, Texan ex-con whose Pacifica Radio show created an educational forum for the general public through his discussions about prison issues. Hill had won the ear of prison officials and the larger media, and was responsible for exposing some very controversial stories. The show also served as a bridge between family members and prisoners: Folks would call in and send live messages to their loved ones behind bars.

One day Julie received an unsolicited letter from prison. She'd done an hour of Nat King Cole and someone wrote in to thank her. "And later that week I got a phone call from a woman right at the end of my show, and she said, 'Can you send a shout out to ______ at Fishkill? He and his boys listen to your show every week.' So that was two messages from the universe saying, ‘You've got a prisoner audience.’ I didn't know anything about prisons before I started the show." Julie began giving out WVKR's address on a regular basis, inviting prisoners to write in. They haven't stopped writing since.

"If you look at a map of where prisons are in New York state," Julie says, "there's a cluster right around Poughkeepsie. So it's actually quite fortuitous that the Vassar station is within listening range of eight prisons. There's no other part of the state that would reach that many with such a small radio station."

Writers Behind Razor Wire
Although most of her letters are from local prisoners, Julie occasionally gets them from out-of-state listeners or those outside the station's range. These men (to date, she has not received any mail from female inmates) have begun to feel a bit like family. "I feel very close to some of the guys, even though I don't actually write back to them and I try not to comment a whole lot on the air. I try to just say thank you."

The content of the mail is wide-ranging. "It's all over the map, ranging from daily shit that goes down, to people who have really thought-out policy papers, to people making pleas about their own innocence, to people who clearly have mental problems. There are others who have written about medical issues and the difficulty they've had getting proper treatment. People have written in on religious-freedom issues, aging in the prisons, youth in the prisons." It is not uncommon for dialogues to get started through letters. Over the course of a couple of shows a theme will emerge, and different inmates will respond to one another via mail. "I'd say the bulk of [the content] is exhortations to others to do something with their lives—'Educate yourself, help the guy in the next cell.'"

A former inmate at Green Haven Correctional told Julie that when he was inside, he'd walk down the row and hear the show in cell after cell. She’s been told that prisoners skip recreation time—a limited daily pleasure—in order to hear it. And, though they do not write-in, the guards listen too. Julie gets letters from inmates saying that corrections officers tell them they've heard their letters read on the air. It's hard to know what the ripple effects of a tiny independent radio show are, but the implications of guards listening to inmates express their opinions and thoughts on the radio give one hope.

Prisons in Our Backyards
Although most of her feedback and communication is with prisoners, one of Julie's prime objectives is to reach out to the general public about prison issues. Interviewing knowledgeable people has been one way that Julie has educated listeners. Her guests have included former inmates such as Eddie Ellis, a one-time Black Panther and founder of the Community Justice Center in Harlem, and Latif Islam, a Poughkeepsie community activist and head of Family Services at the Family Partnership Center. "[The guests who have made the] biggest impressions on me are the former prisoners—people who just had rough lives, spent a long time in prison, got an education while inside, and then got out and have wanted to give back to their community." In addition, Julie has interviewed a Brooklyn senator, a local poet who teaches creative writing at a number of prisons, and the mother of a murdered child.

The goal of the show, says Julie, is "to educate the people on the outside who don't necessarily know anything about prison, who've never thought about the fact that Fishkill is in their backyard or Green Haven is in their backyard, and just what life is like behind those walls."

To reach DJ Julie at "The Fancy Broccoli Show," write to The Fancy Broccoli Show, Vassar College, PO Box 926, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604. Or catch her at WVKR at (845) 437-7178.