The Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton won five awards last month, including first place honors for its newsletter and magazine at the 2025 American Penal Press Contest.
Twenty-one prison publications in nine states, including Oregon, submitted entries to the contest which is organized by the Pollen Initiative and Southern Illinois University.
A staff of six adults in custody at EOCI write and edit the content published in the prison’s monthly newsletter, The Echo, and its quarterly magazine, 1664, as part of a prison work program. East Oregonian reporter Berit Thorson serves as the program’s advisor, offering feedback on articles and teaching journalism training sessions on skills such as how to conduct interviews.
Philip Luna is the editor-in-chief of The Echo and 1664. Kurtis Thompson is a staff writer who joined the EOCI news team last year. The Echo and 1664 won first place in the “Best Newsletter” and “Best Magazine” categories of this year’s American Penal Press Contest. Recent examples of Luna’s and Thompson’s writing can be found in the “Artist in Custody” edition of 1664, which includes profiles of an incarcerated former music producer who teaches music at EOCI and a band of women musicians at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. Luna and Thompson join us to talk about their award-winning work and how journalism is helping them amplify voices within incarcerated communities.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. We turn now to two award-winning Oregon publications. The monthly newsletter Echo and the quarterly magazine 1664 were both named the best in the country in a recent journalism contest. If you have not heard of them, it’s probably because they’re made by adults in custody at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton as part of the prison’s work program. The awards they won are from the 2025 American Penal Press Contest. Philip Luna is the editor in chief of The Echo and 1664. Kurtis Thompson is a staff writer who joined the prison’s news team last year. They both join us now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Philip Luna: It’s great to be here.
Kurtis Thompson: Yeah, absolutely.
Miller: Philip, first, why did you want this particular job?
Luna: Well, often I think jobs in the prison setting are not super exciting. And then most of the jobs that we can get that’ll teach you valuable skills, job skills for after you release, are in trades. But I have a longer sentence, so I was looking for something that I could do when I’m older and I get out rather than working in welding or plumbing because they have apprenticeship programs here in the prison for that. It’s a little harder when you’re older to start in those careers, but there was a job ad for a clerk, for a newsletter clerk, and I always enjoyed reading, so I thought that would be a good viable skill for the future for me if I learned to write and then put together a newsletter. So I started seven years ago and have been doing it ever since and love it.
Miller: How much did you know about journalism when you started?
Luna: I didn’t know anything about journalism actually. Yeah, I taught myself to write articles by reading newspapers and just sort of analyzing what I was reading. So I was learning to write leads and structure news just by not actually knowing what I was, but just analyzing the things that the other writers were doing. And so you just kind of build that up over time and then I started buying some books and studying on my own.
In the last couple of years, we’ve connected with the Prison Journalism Project, which is a nonprofit that teaches journalism to incarcerated people. We’ve also connected with Pollen Initiative, which is our sponsor now, and they have some journalism education stuff. And then we gained an advisor. So we have Berit Thorson, who’s a journalist for the East Oregonian, the local newspaper. For the last year, she comes in every two weeks and she does workshops with us and advises us on our publications, so we’ve kind of built it up organically over time. And now we have these other resources coming in because of all the work we’ve done, and they’re really helping us fine tune it and get some more formal education.
Miller: You know, I’m fascinated by the idea of before that – before you had those, every two weeks, lessons from a professional journalist who actually has been on our show before – you said that you were learning sort of by reading things and copying them. How much access to journalism, whether it’s print or online or or broadcast, do you have inside a prison?
Luna: Yeah, so it’s a little more difficult to get access, because so many things are going digital now and then they’re online and it’s harder to get access to that, obviously. But there are newspapers you can buy print versions of, or magazines that still do print versions. And it’s personal subscription. I’m buying personal, my subscription to that and then it’s delivered through our mailroom. And usually if I buy a newspaper that prints weekly, I might get it a week late just because there’s a process for it to come into the prison, but I can still subscribe to a newspaper while I’m here.
Miller: Using your own money that you earn through working.
Luna: Absolutely, yes.
Miller: I’m just curious, how much money you have to spend, because one of the things we’ve heard over the years is based on prison rules, adults in custody earn very little per hour. Do you get a gigantic discount on a subscription which actually could be pretty pricey?
Luna: No, I don’t get a discount on subscriptions. That would be nice. I would like a discount on subscriptions, but no. So the average incarcerated person here or in Oregon makes between $60 and $70 dollars a month. For us, you know, we, we kind of make most of us make about that or more. You can make up to $106 if you have a lot of days of work. But we work, Monday through Friday, 7 to 4, and sometimes we cover events or things on the weekends. So we work a normal job, but I guess the counterpoint to that would be we don’t have to pay for rent or utilities or or food really, things like that. But obviously it’s not enough money to save, it’s not enough money to really do much with besides buy essentials like hygiene products. And then I just budget money for subscriptions to newspapers. So for the East Oregonian, it’s $14 a month, which is like a pretty good chunk of my paycheck.
Miller: A quarter of your paycheck is going to the East Oregonian subscription?
Luna: So yeah, sometimes depending on how much I make per month.
Miller: Kurtis, what about you? So, Philip has been doing this for what, seven years or so now, so a good chunk of time. As I noted, you’re about one year in. What attracted you to journalism?
Thompson: So, I’ve always liked to write ever since I was a kid in a narrative style, and when I saw the advertisement in the Echo that they were looking for new writers, I figured I would throw my hat in the mix, and they brought me down for an interview and hired me shortly after. And I gotta say, AP style writing is vastly different than narrative, writing books. And I definitely feel like I’m still a baby in all of this. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Luna and Berit Thorson and staff from the Prison Journalism Project and others, but it’s been a learning process for sure, yeah.
Miller: Philip, could you tell us about a recent article you did? It’s called Unbroken.
Luna: So I wrote an article called Unbroken for the magazine 1664. It was an article about a group of women at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. They formed a band and they’re part of a recreation department, and they play music and perform concerts in the facility and perform at different events. And so that was a little challenging because I was interviewing people that are at a different prison, of a different gender as well. So, I did a lot of my interviews over video or correspondence, but it was really rewarding because I felt like they had stories to tell and they don’t have a news publication there in their facility, so they’re not covered. And it’s our only women’s facility in the state of Oregon, only state facility, but, it was very rewarding.
It was a little challenging because it was hard to build rapport like you normally when you interview people, you take some time to get to know them and kind of build out a story, especially of their profiles. It was essentially a profile of their band and the members of their band. So it kind of felt a little bit like parachute journalism. I was just sort of dropping in and saying, ‘share all your emotions and stories with me.’ So that was a little challenging. It was really hard to kind of to build a report and to do that in a way that was I think effective and appropriate, I guess. But it was incredibly rewarding to write.
Miller: Do you mind reading us an excerpt from that piece?
Luna: Absolutely.
When Harris was a girl, still living at home with her parents in Illinois, music was a weekly tradition. Harris’s mom would clean their house and do laundry every Sunday while playing music loudly. Her father would barbecue for their family. “It brought us closer,” she said. “I know songs that are way out of my age group, but they mean something for me.” So when Harris, who was born in 1995, recognized the song from 1990, she was not surprised. She was surprised, however, to find how deeply nostalgic she became. The song pulled on her heartstrings, bringing back a wave of motions and memory. “It’s the simple things you miss the most,” she said.
It was there sitting on an itchy on itchy wool blankets atop a lumpy mattress as the overpriced radio siphoned the last remaining pennies from her account, and while she thought of the memories made with her parents on Music Sundays, and the memories she wasn’t making with her sons that Harris broke down. Halfway through the song, I remember becoming so emotional, literally sobbing uncontrollably. She said, “I was completely shocked by how a two minute song was able to bring out months and months of suppressed emotion.” In December 2024, Harris joined the band.
Miller: You know, listening to that, after hearing the way you described the challenges of doing these intimate interviews via Zoom with women you’d never met before, hundreds of miles away in a different prison, you said it’s a little bit like parachute journalism. I’m wondering about the flip side of that. If you think that because you’re in prison yourself, it was easier for the two of you to connect, then say if somebody who has not experienced that, had jumped, had parachuted in themselves.
Luna: Yeah, actually there are some of these things that I think as an incarcerated person writing stories, I have unique access to experiences and people’s experiences. So when I’m talking to Harris, I’m asking her about what she was doing and she’s talking about I know what it feels like to have my money siphoned through paying for music so we can listen to it. Like it’s very expensive and it just kind of eats up your funds, especially when you don’t make very much. And like you said, 25% of that goes to a newspaper. So I understood what she was talking about. I didn’t have to ask for clarity on those things. I know what mattresses are like. I know what all the things I’m describing, I already understand those things. That made it really easy, But getting her to talk to me about the emotional part of not seeing your kids, that the feeling she gets from not seeing your kids, that was a little more challenging, just talking to the stranger and saying, “Tell me your emotions.”
Miller: Kurtis, you also wrote about music and a musician recently, a profile of a man named Marvin Harley. Who is he?
Thompson: So Marvin Harley has been here at EOCI for a while, been incarcerated for a while, and he is what you would call the lead of the music room here at EOCI. And he on the streets was a music producer, had his own unofficial studio, and did a lot of work in that. And now he’s a man of faith. He spends a lot of close time with people that he works with and tries to help people become better musicians while they’re here.
Miller: Do you mind reading us an excerpt from your profile of him?
Thompson: Of course.
Harley is incarcerated at Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution, where he is known by his peers for his ability to quickly match melodies to lyrics. He’s an instructor for the prison’s music program. When someone brings him song lyrics, he asks for an idea of their sound. From that small input, he can quickly craft the first rendition of music for their song. Harley can write a melody in three to four minutes. Most people can’t even cook a ramen soup at three to four minutes.
For Harley, music is similar to speaking, like a second language, or perhaps his first. To the listener, even when he’s playing something unfamiliar, it sounds like an articulate and candid conversation, but with music. There’s an organic flow, with pauses and changes in pitch and tone that are leading to a specific purpose. His childhood home was full of talented musicians. His Aunt Brenda and Uncles Maynard and Carl encouraged his interest and taught him the drums, bass guitar and piano. If they weren’t playing for the church, they were making music at home.
Miller: Hm. Kurtis, how do you think about your audience, about who they are, about what they want, about what they need?
Thompson: So, when I’m looking at a story, I would say I’m probably more of an emotional writer and that’s actually been kind of a challenge in writing news, right, is trying to separate myself and be objective. But when it comes to these kinds of profiles, I am visualizing the person reading. What I want, I want them to read the story and feel like they’re shaking that person’s hand and meeting them. I want them to feel like this is Marvin Harley, they know who he is now because they read the story.
Miller: Hm. An even more basic way to ask that is, is your audience in your mind, are they fellow incarcerated people?
Thompson: That’s a tough question. Yes and no. I am thinking of the incarcerated population, but the intention of 1664 is more to try to give the outside population a window into prison, so that way we can have a better understanding of the human beings that are incarcerated.
Miller: Philip, what does the title mean, 1664?
Luna: So at the time that we established the magazine back in February of last year, there were 1,664 state and federal prisons in the United States. And so we kind of understand as incarcerated people that I think the way society has come to understand prisons is through numbers. We understand prisons through recidivism rates and crime rates and, you know, all these different things, we quantify them, but when we do that, maybe it makes it easier to understand the overall picture, but we sort of lose the human component of that.
And so for 1664, the number of state and federal prisons, that number increases and tomorrow it’s 1665, but nobody is gonna notice. But that one more prison represents thousands of people that are incarcerated and thousands of victims of crimes and thousands of families who have an incarcerated loved one and hundreds of children who have an incarcerated parent, and that’s really significant. And so with the magazine, we really want to show, instead of numbers, we want to replace those numbers and statistics with faces and names. We really want to show the human component, and that’s why a lot of our stories are profiles and they’re really focused on people who are incarcerated.
Miller: It’s striking to me, having heard those two excerpts from those two different articles that the two of you wrote, that both of them – and it happens to do with the pieces, that the chunks of the pieces that we asked you to read – but both of them refer to the previous lives that that those folks led, their lives before their crimes, lives before their incarcerations. How much of what you focus on would broadly fall in that category as opposed to life within prison?
Luna: Well, we balance it. I don’t know that we focus necessarily on their life before. We try to find whatever the story is that completes the picture. I think mainstream media, you know, they sort of cover prisons as they cover the violent stuff, the jarring stuff, the sensationalized version of it, but we really don’t have the component that’s everyday life. So, it’s easy to look at a person and say they committed this crime, and that’s who they are. But they had a life before this where sometimes they have families and children and they had a life after they came to prison and they had experience as well. So we’re really trying to balance and give a complete picture of a person.
Miller: Philip, how much control do prison or DOC officials have over what you can cover or how you cover it?
Luna: Yeah, so our publications are DOC publications, so obviously that creates some challenges, but we have a pretty supportive group here at East Oregon Correctional Institution. Our admin and our superintendent and the staff we work with really try to help us cover stories. But there’s some things like lawsuits or things like that where it’s really challenging for us to cover that as a news story because it creates a problem for… Like, a person filing a lawsuit can use that in their litigation because it’s a DOC approved publication. And so we have a harder time covering things that can create a legal situation for the Department of Corrections or in any other type of situation. But for the most part, covering things that are uncomfortable, they’re pretty open to us covering things that are uncomfortable. But we’re not really trying… We’re trying to cover things balanced and in a fair way. We’re not trying to cover things that are slanted or make the Department of Corrections look bad. We try to cover things honestly.
Thompson: And just to be a little bit more specific, I have personally never been asked to write or print something that was dishonest, which, you know, in this closed situation, that might be somewhat of an assumption to some listeners out there, some readers out there, but that’s not the case.
Miller: Well, Kurtis has taking on this job, has becoming a journalist – and I think you said you’re still a baby journalist, I forget your exact words, but you know, starting out still – but I’m wondering if it has affected the way you interact with the other incarcerated men around you, just broadly, even when you’re not interviewing them for your job.
Thompson: So honestly, it’s kind of increased my interactions with other people just naturally because people will ask me about the work that we do down here. Oftentimes I’m asked how can I get involved, how they can have their writings perhaps submitted to the magazine or the newsletter. But I do have some deeper conversations with people when they’re asking about things going on inside the facility in a legal sense or whatnot. I wouldn’t say that it’s negatively impacted. It’s just more increased interactions.
Miller: Philip, you did a profile last year of someone you’re serving time with who has a tattoo of Adolf Hitler on his back. What made you want to talk with him?
Luna: Well, I didn’t want to talk with him at first because of the tattoo on his back, which maybe was a little judgmental on my part. Everybody has a past, right?
Miller: A little judgmental, but I think it’s a form of judging that I think is relatively common in society, right? Maybe I should say I hope it’s common in society.
Luna: Yeah, yeah. You know, I’m a mixed race person, so for me those were the people I avoided in prisons. Kind of oddly, prison is a segregated place and it’s just what it is. But, I had a friend who knew him and talked to me about him, and he spent some time up in Washington serving time and then he came down here to Oregon to finish his sentence and he was serving life. He wasn’t gonna get out of prison, and my friend told me his story was really interesting. He thought he’d make a great profile. So, I approached him and I talked to him a little bit and he talked about how he was young and he went to prison. He got sucked into this gang life and this culture that he didn’t believe in. And he was like, it took me decades of my life to realize I’m not a racist. I don’t believe that. Why am I following these people?
And, but now he’s got these tattoos that you can’t remove, at least while you’re incarcerated. And yeah, and he just really kind of changed his life and did a lot of stuff and so I interviewed him, I think, six times. And then I worked with the Prison Journalism Project to publish a story about him and a profile about him. And it was pretty interesting. He really was… He’s very good at being vulnerable and just kind of opening up, and he talks a lot about just putting aside the toxic masculinity. Those are his words. Toxic masculinity is his big thing. But he’s made a lot of changes in his life and so it seemed like a really good story to write, but it was a little challenging for me at first because I had some sort of preconceived bias about some of the history that he had, but yeah, overall it was a really good story to write, very rewarding.
Miller: It’s fascinating because to me, one of the great parts about being a journalist is that it gives you license to ask people questions about their experiences, about their lives, that otherwise would be off limits or awkward. Without the job giving me the ability and the license, I don’t think I would do it. And then they are just practical things, like I wouldn’t be talking to the two of you if it weren’t my job to do this. And it seems like in a way that was your experience with this guy who you thought was still an active white supremacist, but because of this job, you were able to connect with him and to learn more.
Luna: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we’re friends now. It’s been a while, so now we maintain pretty good contact and he actually filed for early release, and he’s getting out and he got approved for that and he’s getting out this year, actually. So he’s had some really big changes and there were positive results from that. So, yeah, I think it’s really interesting that journalism allows us to connect with people in that way and to ask questions we wouldn’t normally ask. You know, you have to sort of dive into stories to understand them, and that means you can’t judge a book by its cover, to use the cliché and his cover was a tattoo of Adolf Hitler.
Miller: I should say that last year, that profile of him also got an award from this prison journalism contest. And as we’re talking now, is just a reminder, both the quarterly magazine and the monthly newsletter both won essentially best in the country awards this year. Kurtis, what does it mean to you to get these awards, this national recognition?
Thompson: Well, it’s pretty significant. I remember when we were watching the award ceremony and my name got announced. I was kind of in shock and for a couple of reasons. One, just because I won. You know, that’s great and all, but the other thing was I had to stop and think about my life and I was like, man, this is the first time I’ve ever been recognized for anything in a professional capacity. And I thought even harder about it. I was like, man, I haven’t really done anything with my life. This is the first time I’ve actually tried to commit to something and give it my all. And so when I got that award, it was just confirmation that I was going in the right direction with my life for the first time. And I’m 41 years old now. It’s been a long time coming, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.
Miller: Kurtis Thompson and Philip Luna, thanks very much for joining us. I really appreciate it.
Luna: Thank you.
Thompson: Thank you.
Miller: Kurtis Thompson and Philip Luna are adults in custody at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution. They both work on the monthly newsletter, The Echo, and the quarterly magazine, 1664, both of which won recent prison journalism awards.
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