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STARTING YOUR OWN PODCAST
Starting your own podcast
In conversation with Oonagh Ryder WIP’s Jodie Beck and Hareem Ghani sat down with The Lockdown co-host Oonagh Ryder to discuss her motivations for creating a podcast and her advice on how to start your own!
‘W
hen I was at university, I got involved with a lot of anti-capitalist activism and climate activism,’ Oonagh Ryder recalls as we huddle around a wooden table in her kitchen. ‘Through that work I came into contact with the police,’ she says. Oonagh, a 31-year-old Sociology graduate from Leeds, first became interested in the criminal justice system following violent clashes between the police and civilians at the Group of 20 (G20) protest in 2009 where 4,000 people took to the streets of London to protest about climate change and the global economy. ‘I was at that protest,’ she remembers, ‘the police were very violent and scary.’ In the aftermath of the two-day protest, more than 180 protesters – some suffering from concussions and broken bones – formally accused the police of excessive force and unprovoked assaults. ‘Those experiences at the protest,’ she recalls, ‘got me thinking this is really horrible, and I wonder what it is like for those communi-
ties where the criminal justice system and the police are really present.’ Graduating from the University of Leeds two years later, Oonagh began volunteering as an ‘Appropriate Adult’ for Catch 22 - someone who supports young people and adults with mental health problems in police custody. Having spent two years volunteering in Lewisham Police Station, Oonagh went on to work for various charities and frontline groups ranging from Clinks, an organisation representing over 500 voluntary organisations working in the criminal justice sector, to the West Yorkshire Community Chaplaincy Project, a small-scale community group located directly opposite HMP Leeds. Subsequently, Oongah became interested in prison abolition. Prison abolition, a concept popularised by former Black Panther Party member Angela Davis, academic Ruth Wilson Gilmore and activist Mariame Kaba, argues all prisons should be eliminated. Instead, abolitionists believe we should
