Washington state’s legislative session isn’t over yet, but meaningful opportunities for criminal punishment reform are. Ralph Dunuan walks us through the bills we were following at CHOICES Media, and what it means for folks on the inside and outside of prison walls.

It’s 2025 and the Washington state legislature is in session! Incarcerated organizers know better than most people that the state isn’t always here to help us. In this episode, we explain what abolitionist reforms are and how some folks use them to realize the promise of liberation. We focus on the Judicial Discretion Act, a bill that began with incarcerated leadership and seeks to build solidarity across different incarcerated communities, victims/survivors, judges, lawyers, and outside community members.

This episode includes Charles Longshore, Azias Ross, WA House Representative Tarra Simmons, Amanda Knight, and Senator Noel Frame

We look back to recent history of Washington prison activism to show why we need directly impacted people to have collective voice and leadership in fixing the problems in our criminal punishment system. Amongst so many stories untold to those on the outside, we hone in on the TEACH program at Clallam Bay Corrections Center from 2013 - 2018 and Judicial Second Look coalition formed in 2024 around a bill initially written by Native incarcerated leaders and judges on the outside. We’ll think about lessons learned for inside-outside prison solidarity.

Incarcerated people and their loved ones navigate a complex system of guidelines, grids, indeterminate sentencing review boards, and more. We’ll learn about Washington’s draconian sentencing practices and laws that doubled its incarceration rate, instituting life and long sentences, disproportionately affecting Indigenous peoples and people of color. This episode features an interview with Dan Berger, a historian and co-curator of the Washington Prison History Project.

Ralph Dunuan was incarcerated in 1999, in the era of pagers. Co-host and friend Megan Ybarra interviews Ralph to learn about how he builds from his experiences to understand how Native communities are impacted by the criminal punishment system and his perspectives on family, abolition, and why prisoner-led media is important.

Please read and share Annie Nichol’s powerful op-ed published in the Everett Herald on January 25. She writes from the perspective of a victim’s family that was promised harsh sentencing laws that ended up prioritizing punishment over survivors’ wishes. She writes, “I urge Washington’s lawmakers to pass the Judicial Discretion Act. Survivors deserve a system that listens to us, supports us and prioritizes safety in ways that punitive policies never have. Justice is not about locking harm away and throwing away the key. It’s about breaking the cycle of harm so that no one else has to suffer the same kind of loss we have endured.” This is a call to support survivors in seeking accountability, safety and healing.

#JDA #SecondLook #CriminalPunishment #Advocacy