Maggie Freleng is reshaping criminal justice journalism, bringing punk rock ethos and an unfiltered lens to the wrongfully convicted.
One of the words that is sometimes used to describe Maggie Freleng is “badass.” It’s a term that seems apropos on a couple of levels.
From the moment you see her, Freleng gives off a fiercely cool vibe. There are the abundant tattoos, the pierced septum, and the black eyeliner with a distinct Goth look. But what’s really badass about Freleng—and what speaks to her uniqueness—is that she’s one of the most prominent journalists currently working in the area of criminal justice reform.
After cutting her teeth with podcasts like Suave and her own Unjust and Unsolved, Freleng began cohosting the award-winning Wrongful Conviction series alongside Jason Flom. Wrongful Conviction—which kicked off its fourth season on Lava for Good in September—tells the stories of people who were convicted of crimes they did not commit. The podcast currently airs twice a week: the Monday episodes are hosted by Freleng and the Thursday episodes by Flom.
Wrongful Conviction was recently honored with the Social Impact Icon Award at the iHeartPodcast Awards. Freleng has also received a Pulitzer Prize and an International Documentary Award for her work on Suave. In 2019, when she was barely 30 years old, the Ford Foundation put her name on its “50 Women Can Change the World in Journalism” list. She is an adjunct professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY and has been an onscreen journalist for both Oxygen and Vice.
I recently caught up with Maggie Freleng over coffee for BUST. She may be a badass, but she’s also witty, open, and refreshingly down-to-earth.
Let’s [start with your background]. You went to UMass Amherst. Tell me about how you got into journalism in the first place.
Yeah! So I was studying English as an undergrad. [There’s a] long history of my family being public school teachers. My grandfather was an English teacher. I loved English [and] literature. [But] when it comes down to creative writing, I’m very bad at that! I did not wanna write poetry [and] I did not wanna do creative fiction. So that kind of led me to journalism. I found myself very interested in real life and what’s happening in the world and [the] human condition.
So I switched from [being] an English major to a journalism major pretty quickly.
How did you meet Jason [Flom] and come to host Wrongful Conviction?
I was working at NPR’s Latino USA.
I was doing prison reporting on this man named Suave [who] wound up not having committed the crime. And I got really interested in wrongful convictions. That was something I had never really thought about. Here I am with this person who served 32 years and I just found out they didn’t do this crime; he didn’t even admit to it. So I was kind of shocked.
At that moment, I actually had this opportunity. A friend came to me and said, “I’m starting a podcast network. I want you to have your own podcast. What would you do it on?” So I was kind of looking in the podcast world, [asking] what needed to be there. This was also 2018 [or] ’19, so it was not as saturated as it is now. I started thinking about wrongful convictions. When I looked, Jason’s podcast was the only one. There were a couple of others, but there was a void. So I did my own. It was called Unjust and Unsolved. And Jason actually reached out to me. [He] said, “We are doing the same thing. I love what you’re doing. Let’s do it together.”
There are a lot of people out there who are wrongfully convicted. How do you decide who to cover and who not to cover?
It’s really difficult. When I was doing it on my own, I would look for cases that were more vetted. I was doing a lot of my own research then. Now we do have a protocol; they need to be represented by a pro bono attorney. We need to have the attorney as someone who can kind of do the fact checking. Being a pro bono attorney for us [means] that this person is dedicating their time for free because they believe in the innocence of this person. They have looked at all these documents, read the case over and over again, and they’re gonna work for free. To us, that’s a really strong indicator that this person is very likely innocent.
So those are the cases we cover. I personally look for people who are currently incarcerated and [also are] women. I really wanna elevate women’s stories in prison. I think there’s a void there. So often we see these shows about men in prison [but] we very rarely see women in prison.
Tell me a little about the issues that are unique to incarcerated women that you’ve encountered.
There’s a show that’s out right now called The Perfect Couple. And there’s a moment in it that probably goes over a lot of people’s heads. But to me, it really stood out. A woman is getting arrested, one of the main characters, for a murder—and she’s pregnant. They’re handcuffing her [and] she goes, “But I’m pregnant. You can’t do this.” And the cop goes, “Yeah, that’s not a thing.” A lot of people don’t realize that women do have to give birth in prison. If you are arrested [or] convicted, if you are in jail, if you are in holding—you’re not going to a nice hospital. You’re going to a prison hospital—and those are horrifying. When you’re giving birth, you’re shackled, you are still cuffed, and you have guards watching you. You’re fortunate if you have a female guard that is watching you while you’re handcuffed and giving birth. But often there’s two men standing there during your most vulnerable, painful experience—what should be a beautiful moment, [and usually the woman is] —in positions that are not conducive to giving birth.
So just off the top of my head, that’s something that people don’t think of. You know, when we built prisons, we also weren’t incarcerating women. So prisons are not built for women. They’re not built for privacy. They’re not built for menstruation. They’re not built for those kinds of things. When women need tampons, it’s at the commissary; you have to buy that. So if a woman is poor and doesn’t have a family, how is she getting proper healthcare [and] feminine products? It’s really barbaric.
The flip side of that—have you, as a woman, experienced any challenges in this particular field?
I always say this: If I have, I either don’t remember or I didn’t notice. I’m sure there have been many. But I’m just the kind of person [who] will be like, “Fuck you. I’m gonna keep going!” [Laughs]
When I started doing this, I would be speaking to these people on the phone. Or in the case of Texas death row, they do not have access to the phone so [it was] just letters. I was writing letters with this man named Hank Skinner. I’ll use him as an example. Hank Skinner’s story is tragic. He survived a couple of stays of execution and died of a brain tumor. So the state never killed him, just their poor healthcare did! Hank was [initially] kind of short with me. He didn’t wanna open up [and] he was kind of a jerk, to be honest. [But] when we finally met, it all connected. And he said—talking in the prison across the glass—“If I knew this is what you looked like, I think I would have been more open with you.”
What that meant to me was, like, he thought I was gonna be some buttoned-up, kitten heels, right-to-business [woman]. And I think what Hank saw was a person like him. Someone with tattoos. Someone who has human struggles. Someone who was willing to share those struggles with him, to create a connection. I think that would be the barrier—trying to create trust with these people who are the most untrusting people because of what the world and the government and journalists have done to them. So that would be the barrier.
What women have inspired you? They could be journalists, they could be rock singers, they could be family members.
Of course, my mother. [But] a lot of it was musicians. When I was a kid, Courtney Love was, like, my idol. I think it was the fact that she was unapologetically herself. Courtney Love was just, “Fuck everybody. I’m gonna do me.” And she’s successful at that. I was [also] a huge fan of Kathleen Hanna. Just these chicks that said, “Fuck it.” I think those were the women I wanted to be like. These rocker chicks who were not gonna conform to what society wanted them to be. I always looked up to them.
Photos By: Ismael Quintanilla lll
