Behind Gray Walls by Anthony MulParry and Skye Cranney (review)

“Behind Gray Walls” is a podcast produced by employees of the Old Idaho Penitentiary, a division of the Idaho State Historical Society. As the name—a nod to the biography of a former inmate, Patrick Charles Murphy—indicates, hosts MulParry and Cranney center inmate stories and voices to bring humanity to the people once incarcerated at the historic site.¹ Explaining in their first episode that their audience will learn new things about the “humans, not just the criminals, who lived behind gray walls,” MulParry and Cranney spend each episode detailing the lives of two inmates, one male and one female.²

The hosts explain in the opening episode that the first eleven inmates arrived at the Old Idaho State Penitentiary on March 21, 1872. This penitentiary replaced a territorial prison and opened its doors in a time when the penal system in the United States was changing. Rather than operating on the Pennsylvania System, which stressed separate confinement and reform through self-reflection, the Idaho State Penitentiary operated on the Auburn System.³ This system focused on putting inmates to work during the day and leaving them to solitary confinement at night. As the prison’s population grew, so too did its structures and opportunities for employment. Old Idaho State Penitentiary’s doors closed in December of 1973, offering podcast listeners and site visitors the opportunity to see one hundred years of the history of prison development in the United States unfold.

The cover image of Behind Gray Walls, featuring its hosts, Anthony MulParry and Skye Cranney.

The hosts’ commitment to the historic site itself, and the stories of the people who once lived there, is compelling. Drawing primarily from prison records, including intake reports, social histories taken at the time of individuals’ incarcerations, and oral histories, the hosts reconstruct not just inmates’ time in prison, but their everyday lives. They are transparent about the limits of their sources and speak openly about the ways in which the historical record reflects biases. For example, Cranney notes while discussing the first female inmate, Henebe, how frequently newspapers used derogatory language to describe her—including likening Henebe to a bear—because she was a resident of the Fort Hall Reservation.⁴ When possible, the hosts add context to each story through Ancestry.com records, articles from the Idaho Daily Statesman, and the Chronicling America newspaper database. In doing so, MulPerry and Cranney reveal how frequently offenders’ complicated lives impacted the choices that brought them to prison and approach these stories with both compassion and enthusiasm. Approaching issues of gender, race, and class with sensitivity and insight, the hosts encourage their listeners to consider complexities that historians are used to contemplating but do not always communicate to the public.

Although their initial audience seemed to be visitors to the “Old Pen” and other Idaho residents, as their listener base evolved, they added contextual information to make the podcast accessible to people beyond Idaho’s borders. Moreover, the hosts stress their desire for community involvement, offering a Facebook page where listeners can dialog with the hosts themselves. They often encourage descendants of inmates to reach out to them for more information and reference the research work of penitentiary volunteers and other interested community members. Collectively, this approach fosters not just an interest in the historic site, but generates community buy-in.

“Behind Gray Walls” is a dynamic way to give visitors to the historic site more information than can be conveyed in a museum exhibit or on a walking tour. Further, it offers the chance for site employees to put their extensive research on display and share it with an invested public audience. By talking through their research efforts, including the frustrations of a document trail that runs cold, or an inmate who disappears from the census after leaving the prison’s walls, MulParry and Cranney pull...