Stories From the Inside: Rashmi Mukherjee on Teaching Behind Bars, Breaking Stigma, and the Book She Can't Stop Writing

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.

Transcript

Mario 0:05

Welcome to Reform and Real, where we take a journey with our people fresh out of prison and we want to find out how the community around them really feels. My name is Mario Hernandez. I'm one of the afflicted people that got released back into the community, and we're here to try and figure out how this looks.

Wayne 0:20

And my name is Wayne Burke, curious onlooker who wants to know about our prison system, get to know the stories beyond the stigma of incarceration, and because, like Mario, I believe all stories count.

Mario 0:31

Yeah, we haven't been able to say that for a minute.

Wayne 0:33

Four weeks, I think. I know. I know. I'm I'm pretty rusty. I think we we gotta get warmed up here.

Mario 0:38

The stories still count, though.

Wayne 0:40

Yeah. Well, I think we we we're coming back really strong because we have a really dazzling guest today. Yes, we do. Ashmee Mokerji, Associate Professor of Literature, Humanities, and Culture at Boise State University, but also the director of the Inside Out program, B S U I D O C.

SPEAKER_04 0:57

Thank you, Mario. Thank you, Wayne. So, yes, um, I designed the program in the likeness of Inside Out, but we haven't had the opportunity to formalize it with that. So, when you said director of the program, that's why I looked at you because yes, I do all the work and more possibly, but I haven't had the resource to formalize it. But that's exactly what we're doing.

Wayne 1:22

All right. Well, welcome to Reforming Real.

SPEAKER_04 1:24

Thank you very much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

Wayne 1:26

Welcome.

Mario 1:27

First of all, I mean I met you on on my Facebook.

SPEAKER_04 1:32

That's right. That's right. Um, I contacted you on Messenger. But um, and I did that not just because I was looking through someone too, but I had heard about you, Mario, a lot in the at ISCI, which is Idaho State Correctional Institution. That's where I teach uh one class, sometimes two a year, but I also have started my own program, uh, you know, small projects that I do with the residents there. And I take uh Boise State students inside, that's the Inside Out program, and we do storytelling, we do leadership building cohort, but I also am editing a book right now. So we and so we quite literally uh go and collect stories. So I'm a story collector when I'm not a teacher there.

Mario 2:22

So the ISCI, that's my old home. As an inmate.

SPEAKER_04 2:33

So last semester I taught a class on film and literature, and for two weeks, um, and I was teaching the same class, the version another version of the same class at BSU as well. So the Shawshank Redemption, both the novella and the film was part of the curriculum. And I had time, I had scheduled it in a way where Boise State students would go inside, go to ISCI, and my IDoc students and BSU students would sit together, watch it, discuss it. Now, this was part of, you know, for Boise State, it was part of a service learning thing. And for ISCI, you know, um, anytime you take people inside, you know, it's it's it's always good to have that. So, you know, discussion. From my point of view as an educator, um, I thought, you know, I'm selfish, I'm very selfish when it comes to these kinds of stuff. I really want, I had discussed this before in other classrooms, and I just wanted it to be new. And I, you know, it was interesting for me to see how they would talk about it. So BSU students, all most of them had seen the Shawshank Redemption, Boise State. Um, some of the students, my iDoc students, have not seen that. So that was a bit weird, huh? That is weird. And these are two of the younger ones who had just gotten to ICI, you know, six months, one year. The BSU students who had seen it, they went in. So, but they tell me they saw it in a different way. And so that led to class discussion, and we thought we would record it. And that's why they're, you know, media department, and that's where your name kept coming back up. I saw the work that they do, it's fantastic. You know, some of them said we could be learning more here in this space than we do on campus. And so I just thought it would be nice to get in touch with Mario, and I didn't know how to do that. They kept saying, Oh, it's learning how to live, learning to live, and it is somewhere on Orchard and this and that. And then suddenly I saw your face on my Facebook profile. I said, Is this the Mario? And that's how I contacted you.

Wayne 4:40

Oh, well, that's a good thing. Trolling people on Facebook finally paid off. Yeah. That's funny. That's funny. How first a couple years ago did you get originally get involved with ISCI? How did that happen?

SPEAKER_04 4:56

So I was um I did a story exchange uh with a class. Uh with so I was contacted by someone who was teaching a class uh there at ISCI through BSU. And um she she and I got to know each other through the Wasmuth Center at that point, that's where she was. And um one thing led to the other, and I was looking for something for my students. And uh she said, Do you want to do something? I'm looking for someone to do something extra, you know. I said, You know, why don't we do this story exchange? So we engaged in a story exchange. So my students, um, at that point in time I couldn't go inside. I we didn't have permission to take students inside. Um I was I could go in only twice, and I that I went afterwards. So I thought the good thing would be first they write the stories, the exchange, and then they recorded the stories. So for example, if Mario and I were exchanging the stories, when we are recording it, I recorded saying, Hi, my name is Mario and this is my story. And Mario would record it a hi, my name is Rishmi, and this is my story. Um the goal or the objective of that exercise was empathy building. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:13

You know, when you read a story, when you are my favorite word empathy. It is. I love that word. It is.

SPEAKER_04 6:20

So, you know, even if I don't want in that moment, I'm reading four pages of Mario's life story. It was a daunting exercise for both groups. You know, he th there was, I think Tanner, you know, was reading a story from a 19-year-old girl who had a heartbreak. And Tanner was like, Oh my gosh, why are you putting me like you know, and then the 19-year-old is reading a story about somebody who had been incarcerated for 20 years.

SPEAKER_03 6:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 6:49

You know, no connection with children, no connection. So, you know, it was it was a very heavy, very heavy experience for all the emotionally heavy experience. So that's what got started. And then I I went there finally at the end of the semester. The space, you know, ICI as a space, it's it's something different. So the, you know, people, their staff and the teachers, they tell me this is a very real and unreal space. I honestly, the first time I went in and then, you know, kept talking, and I'm like, these people are all Zen Buddhists in themselves. There's such deep philosophy, you know. When you have I again, you know, these are all things I've heard. I'm not making it up, but when you have so much time with yourself, and when you're thinking, it's you just get that um opportunity, um dive deep in self-reflection.

Wayne 7:46

The term I keep thinking of is self-examination. And I think if there's a thread through many of the people we've interviewed, it's that.

Mario 7:53

Yeah, the time and space that they have is uh important to them. And I'll tell you, when you're in uh let's just call it a box for lack of a better word. When you're in a box, uh you have a lot of time to reflect and to think about like yourself and you know where you've been, who you are, who you want to be, uh, you know, where you're going. Um so with that in mind, you're gonna meet some pretty interesting people with some pretty good perspective. Uh and unfortunately, you know, the the choices that they made that I've made um have put me in that position. Um, but when I when I when when we're in there, it's like, you know, who am I? And the first person that gets to talk to him that doesn't know what people are like that are incarcerated, they see something different. They're like, oh, this person really cares or this person really loves just like everybody else, and this person wants to, you know, walk, breathe, cut grass, all that stuff just like everybody else does, uh it unfortunately they're hurt. Uh I call them broken souls. Um we're broken. Uh and uh with that brokenness, uh, you know, you when you get inside of an uh an institution, you're thinking, oh, everything that you can do to get better. And uh and that's what you hear in those words when people write those words and wr when they write those stories, when they sing those songs, when they edit those videos, when they do that work inside a prison, it's everything they got.

SPEAKER_04 9:18

Yeah, yeah.

Mario 9:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:20

I absolutely, you know, as you were saying this, I it yes, you know, deep time, uh time with yourself. As an academic, um, you know, I was just blown because there are things that we read theoretically in philosophy, books. So many a times I actually asked them, Did you read a Nietzsche? Did you read a Foucault? Because it feels like you did. Where did this come from? And it's all, you know, so um as a student of philosophy, literature, history, culture, for me it was fascinating to see that yes, art imitates life, and life imitates art. You know, the philosophers were not just talking from you know, just the air. There is something about this space.

Mario 10:05

Uh Rashmi, I do have a question for you. So um tell me about when you felt like the stigma of the let's say inmate slash resident inside a prison, uh, slash criminal, slash everything that else that everybody thinks about in the community, when that stigma broke in your head, if you have one situation.

SPEAKER_04 10:26

Um, that's actually a great question. You know, I have been wanting to talk about this, but I it's a hard one to answer as well, because you know, you are in that space, you're teaching, and everybody who knows me, and you know, I'm always careful which student of mine is going to listen to this. But yes, um, you know, I don't want to be a hypocrite, I am a human being. And as I was talking when I was talking about the volunteer training, and um there there are some you know inhibitions that you carry when you go inside because at the end of the day, um it is true, and they tell you that you are going to teach a class of convicted felons. And uh yes, this country incarcerates the maximum number of people, Idaho being one of the top states in that too. You know, when you're teaching a class, when you're sharing knowledge, it's about respecting your students as well. It goes both ways. I believe in the whole student. You know, for me, a student's life does not begin and end in my classroom. There's a life outside, there's a life after. And that's what helps me teach them, teach the way I do. Um, so here I was with a group of people, and even though, you know, I had information about them, which is available in the public domain, I didn't, I I just don't like looking at them because I don't think that does anything. You know, that's very super like that's just one part of their life. Anyway, so the the the class that I was teaching, and this was November 2024, and it was a class on storytelling. And I was teaching a short story by Margaret Atwood, Canadian author, The Bread. It's a very short story, and it's a one and a half page story with four different stories of bread, you know.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Oh, awesome.

SPEAKER_04 12:17

Yeah, you should read it, it's just fantastic. So one is in a in a camp, one is in a prison, one is so you know, it has four different spaces from where and what does bread mean to us? So, of course, I go to my class with all my passion and I start talking about it. I just wasn't feeling it from the other side. Right. And I also just didn't, you know, know how to make conversation because when I teach, I bring in life context, I bring in this, I bring in that, um, and just so that my students can engage in a productive way. Here I had no idea, and also I was careful, I think, you know, what I say and what I don't say, because this was bread, and most of them had family in it, most of so, you know, everybody was in it, but not in it at the same time. And suddenly somebody said, I mean, you know, I looked at them and said, Let's take a break. And then they came back after the break. And just like that, I had not planned it. I said, Okay, let's see what is your bread story. Do you guys have bread stories of your own? Somebody said, Oh, I remember, you know, the smell of the bread because uh my grandmother used to walk in work in a bakery somewhere in northern Idaho. We were really poor, we didn't have money to buy this, so my grandmother would walk to go and get fresh bread, the bread that they would throw away from the bakery. Um, somebody said something else, and then the next day he wrote a story, a breath story. Um, he said something in the class to the point where, you know, um I he was six years old and um had a sister who is autistic savant, um, mom drug addict, dad was in prison the night before Christmas, and his world was his sister, everything that his sister said. So his life, you know, he never grew up in that sense because his reality was his sister's reality. And so she said, she told him, Do you think Santa is going to be upset if we asked for bread? Um, because they were hungry, they hadn't had food. And then she went off to sleep. And sh he ran to his um class teacher's house at eight in the night, Christmas Eve, and he was upset. But you know, who had told him that you come to me if you need anything? And he went to borrow some money. He got some money from him, went to the gas station, and the money that he had, he could only afford like a loaf of bread or something, half a loaf. And he just gave him some sprinkles for free. You know, you put those on cake and all. He got that back home and he waited the whole night for his sister to wake up just to put the bread and sprinkles on top of it. And his sister was so happy, the smile on her face. And for him, that's the biggest, you know, Christmas, he would ever. And so the moment he said that I said, you know what? I don't care if this is true or false or what, it's a fantastic story. And then I said, Um, his name is Chris. I said, Chris, do you write do you write stories? And Chris said, Yeah. Do you want me to give you this story? I said, Can you write it for me and give it to me? The next day Chris wrote a story. Fantastic story. And you know, it opened up a means of communication for them, for me, where I was not just I didn't have the single story of convicted felon. Now I had the other story. And that really helped me broke down. And you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't think they all lie when they say this, but if you go to ISCI and if you ask anybody who has been in my class, you ask them about me. And I think most of them have very positive experience. And one of the reasons why I think I keep going back and they like me and they keep having me back is because of this um connection that we have been able to, and stories have helped me in that. And then after that, the stories started coming. And then I went back, I would go back home with this stack of paper on my bedside table. I would read them. That became my favorite bedside story, you know, crying myself to sleep every night because those were very intense emotional stories, very sad stories. And then it kept piling up. And my husband told me, What are you going to do about with those? Because it just made me so guilty. You know, in now in today's day and age, we all have digital copies of everything. We just don't have papers like that. I couldn't throw them away. And he said, You need to, this is because when you share a story with someone, you are you you embody a part of them. You know, you're reading it and they're trusting you with that truth. Whatever it is, you know, in that space. And I'm like, I have to do something. And that's where the um idea for the book came, that the stories have to go somewhere. You know, stories about you know, somebody who works in the in the um, you know, in the clinic. It's not a hospital, but hospice care, you know. That man's story. And he's writing about how, you know, you you get connected to the human there. And then the moment they die, you're asked to pack up and walk back to your cell. And so I have a story about someone who is talking, his story is about walking back to his cell at four o'clock on a December morning when his friend just died. And you know, and and him thinking that the officer who is following him to his cell in that small cart never asks him to, it's very cold. And he's thinking, um, can she be like you know, can I I hope I wish he asked me to hop into that cart because I'm really not being able to walk right now. But then at the end of the story, he forgives her because he knows, and it's called the line in between us because he understands that she's doing her job. You know, these kind of stories I think made me a much more forgiving person, a patient person. That's what I see there, you know. I asked this thing to someone like Lawrence, what gives you hope? You know, Brian, what gives you hope? I see the smile, I see um most important, you know, empathy, humanity.

Mario 18:36

So it's kind of where you least expect it, right? Absolutely. Or what peop where people would think you'd least expect it, right? Absolutely. And I think that's uh that's that stigma that people think that uh and I I think I harp on this a lot that people don't understand that there's real people walking inside of the gates. And uh people that have been hurt, people that have hurt people, uh people that uh they want change and they want to be understood and uh they want to be able to break that uh hard shell around their heart so they can, you know, feel normal again and feel like a human being again. And uh, you know, it's it's uh it's a crazy place and I think it's getting a little better. Uh when we got people like you that go inside the institutions and and make people feel normal again. I think that that's part of rehabilitation, that's part of growth, that's part of you know, b uh, you know, feeling like you're human, um, because most of the people in there don't have the experience with uh real life. Um have spent their whole lives in addiction or abusive uh growing up or you know, their own personal family or you know, lots of trauma. And I think that every person that goes in there, like yourself, uh changes just a little bit in somebody that they meet. And it's great.

unknown 19:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 19:56

And I changed myself, you know, it's it's both ways. So some of the conversations that I have inside are the best conversations as an academic that I can have. But I'm no qualms in saying I don't have that kind of intellectual stimulation outside. And mind you, you know, I'm a university professor. This is a bubble, you know, you you you should be having the best conversations in that space. I do, but uh that space teaches me just because uh it's so organic. You know, when people speak, there is no computer, there is no cell phone, there is no distraction.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:29

Even my students, when they go inside, I see a very different side to them. One student in particular in my class in Boise State, like sh her head is always down during class because she's doing something.

Wayne 20:41

Well, some of it is the lost practice of listening, I think. Yeah. And uh you experience a situation where there's a greater abundance of it, it sounds like which is so important to all of us. Yeah. Mario and I don't chew the scenery. We chew the scenery less and less in these episodes. Yeah, I think. Because people have vast stories to unwind, right? And that's important to get that stuff out there.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Yeah.

Mario 21:07

Um, you know, uh, Reshmi, uh we're ready to wrap this up. We've had a uh we've we've gotten uh a lot talked about here and uh we appreciate you. One thing I want to ask you is one more thing. Like this is in my perspective, is always trying to get out your perspective of the people that are behind bars, because um we want people to like you know get their toes wet a little bit and kind of feel what we feel um with the people that are in there, the good people that are in there. So uh if you had one takeaway, something you want to tell people that are out there, um uh what to think and what to feel and how to like um you know how to you know how to perceive what what's going on in there.

SPEAKER_04 21:46

I think you know, people have to look at the human inside and not just get stuck by this space like prison. Um there's a reason that it is so far away from uh social, like from Boise, you know. Everyone anyone who's driving there, they can see the green fade away and suddenly it gets very grey. Um and it is m not our hyperbully. You know, it it is true and it is done by design. But that space in it's it's so I talked about my students, our education, our exchange, but there is there there are things being made inside prison. These are people who are contributing to the society and we reap the benefit of that. We just choose to not think of the people who are making that. You know, be it music, be it documentary, be it number plates, you know, there are factories and they get paid so little doing what they do, the labor, right? So we have to we are taking their labor but we are not considering the human inside. I think there has to be more engagement, more stories from outside for the outside world because we call it the correctional institution, which means there's some correction, you know, these people are going to re-enter the society. They're they have to be uh accepted, welcomed. They have to find a space. And and now that I work with my students who are outside on parole and I see the hardships that they go through every day. And the other thing is one in three families have someone who was incarcerated or is incarcerated in Boise at least I mean this has been a shock to me. And the good side of that is now I'm friends with the family. Many mothers, sisters, you know, ex-girl friends. And that's just fascinating to see how you know um so I think my one takeaway I want to continue to do the work that I do. Go inside and teach but I also want to you know be a bridge. I think there has to be more and more voices who speak up. So there's one inside out there has to be an outside in kind of a program as well.

Mario 23:45

And um you know just the more stories we get out there, the more we talk about it the more Yeah well metaphor I tell people all the time is like when uh if you have a let's say say you have Burger King, right? And you hire ten people um half of them aren't gonna work out. Right? It's got nothing to do with convicted felons. Yeah. No. You know what I mean? And that's everything that we do in this world. It's every job, every place, every school, everything we go into, not everybody makes it and I think that when people stop uh I guess let's just say judging that situation right I think we get better when you just realize that oh they're just like my neighbors over there but they did something different and they're in there and it's it's okay. Yeah um my job is to make sure that when they come out here that they're gonna be our neighbors right and you said it perfectly they have to come out sometimes. Most of them most of them have to come out. Absolutely and when they do do we want uh well uh educated um they've got you know their their emotions are back to where they should be and uh they can you know they can uh uh be a a productive member of society or do we want people that come out just a shell because the shell doesn't get anywhere yeah we have to talk about residuism you know and and that we have to take responsibility of a society for that yeah yeah so I mean um I I mean I just want to end with one thing that I have gotten a lot of love a lot of respect in that place and um I value that a lot.

Wayne 25:23

That's great. When's the book coming out?

SPEAKER_04 25:26

Never ask an academic that question. That's why I asked I'm a reformed academic myself that's why I asked well soon very soon I'm trying to make the introduction as informative as possible and I'm writing that all the things that I said you know I'm talking about um you know how philosophical that space is and the collection of the story itself the method of collection itself has been a huge revelation the challenge good and bad both has been stories don't stop coming it's continuously coming in and we had to go back to do a couple of workshops so that's what I did writing workshops all summer we did writing workshops and my students Boise State students helped me in that so it's it's been a good collaboration and we are almost there we are done wrapping up right now um it's a matter of just sending it to the publishers and good all right well uh thank you Reshmi for for joining us today it's been a great conversation and again we when I say we uh I used to be in prison myself uh thank you for all you do for people that are incarcerated and and how that helps us get better and uh understand ourselves and you know be respected as people and uh and I thank you for that thank you for all you do thank you pleasure to have you thank you and uh thank you for joining Reformed and Real my name is Mario Hernandez and I'm Wayne Bird and uh we'll see you guys uh next time