Oliver Loughlin
speaker
153 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Oliver Loughlin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Calvin's take on being sent there though was pretty extraordinary to me.
He describes Angola as a paradise in comparison to what he endured at the parish jail, which as I said was just notoriously violent, notoriously harsh.
And the reason he described it that way is because he would have access to a law library.
The prison has one of the largest law libraries in the whole of the United States.
And to him, this would be the tool to unpick
the locks, basically, to ensure his freedom eventually.
I would not be able to list all of the extraordinary things that Calvin did over his two decades in prison in a single podcast.
So he earned his GED, which is basically a qualification for people who didn't graduate high school to then show that they're now at that level.
He almost immediately then moved into
the programme to become an inmate council substitute, which to outsiders is essentially a jailhouse lawyer, which is a programme that exists in many prisons across the country that allows people who are incarcerated to be represented by those who they are incarcerated with.
So he spent his first few years working on the mental health unit, and then he moved over to the prison's death row, where he spent almost two decades working with people who were facing execution.
So one of the things that Calvin kind of quickly came to understand while he was working as a jailhouse lawyer was that access to your own records is such an incredibly important and powerful tool to relitigate your case and in many instances to secure your own freedom.
And, you know, in numerous instances, you will speak to people who have spent years, sometimes decades, trying to get hold of their old records in order to, you know, re-examine them to potentially relitigate the case.
In 2005, after Hurricane Katrina, thousands and thousands of records were destroyed and lost at the criminal courthouse.
There's been a recent scandal where dozens of boxes were sent to landfill accidentally.
And so this is an office, in Calvin's opinion, that has been in need of dire reform for many, many decades.
So it took Calvin a very long time to try and get hold of his own records.
You know, the rights that incarcerated people have to file public records requests in Louisiana at the time was extremely restrictive.
It also cost a lot of money.
One of the highest sort of paying programs in prison was a blood plasma program where inmates would essentially donate their own blood plasma for a fee.
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