Reformed N' Reel

Mario Hernandez & Wayne Birt
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Society & Culture

Reformed N' Reel is a weekly conversation bringing together voices from every corner of the community to talk about corrections, reentry, and reform in Idaho's prison system. Hosted by Mario Hernandez, a formerly incarcerated and fully reformed individual who now leads a reentry-focused nonprofit called Learning How 2 Live, and Wayne Birt, Program Director and Production Manager of Radio Boise. Wayne brings the perspective of an average citizen, and considers himself a curious moderator seeking to understand the system from the outside looking in. Together, Mario and Wayne sit down and talk with a wide range of guests: formerly incarcerated people, social justice advocates, charity foundation leaders, and even directors from the Idaho Department of Correction. Reformed N' Real brings all different perspectives together to better understand the correctional system and how it affects us all.

  1. Aug 19

    No Riding the Fence: Carl Freeman on 20+ Years in the System and the Sunday Calls That Rebuilt His Family

    Send us Fan Mail This week Mario sits down with someone he's known for nearly 20 years — Carl Freeman, a friend he first met on the inside back in 2007. Carl's story starts in Kansas City, where he was exposed to drugs, violence, and things no kid should ever see — including watching his own uncle kill a police officer when Carl was just six years old. Carl talks about how alcohol quietly took over his life — from a beer at the dinner table as a kid, to weekends, to skipping work, to losing the job entirely. At 20, after a year and eight months in county, he walked into the Idaho prison system carrying a warning from an officer that a Black inmate had just been killed there — and a mindset built for survival, not for his kids waiting on the outside. The turning point? A letter from his mom. After Carl got busted making alcohol in his cell and thought it was funny enough to send her the pictures, she wrote back: "When does your family and your children become more important than being Mr. Big Man in there?" Then she didn't take his calls for 90 days. That silence changed everything. Carl opens up about taking a two-year flop from the parole board and using it to reassess — education, anger management, parenting classes, and letters home. He shares the moment his brother, who refused to help him for years, hugged him at his two-year mark and said "I'm proud of you." And he talks about the relationship he's most committed to rebuilding: his oldest daughter, now 27 and a teacher, who gave him another chance. He calls her every single Sunday — no exceptions — because being dependable and consistent is how you earn back love. Now just days away from three years out — the longest he's been free since he was a teenager — Carl explains why this time is different: no riding the fence between the old life and the new one. His advice to anyone coming home: "Believe in you. Because when you believe in you, you open the door for others to believe in you."Support the show

  2. Aug 12

    I'm Done: Jim Niederheiser on Federal Time, Lost Years, and Starting Over at 55

    Send us Fan Mail Send us Fan Mail: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2556884/fan_mail/new In this episode, Mario reconnects with an old friend — Jim Niederheiser, a 55-year-old Twin Falls native who just walked out of federal prison after nearly four years, his sixth stint behind bars overall. Jim is staying at Port of Hope halfway house and working at Learning to Live, taking it one day at a time. Jim opens up about a life shaped by absent structure, a drug addiction that started at 13, and decades of cycling in and out of the system on parole violations. He talks candidly about the regret of being an absent father, losing his mother on Christmas Day 2023 while he was incarcerated — and the gut-punch of not getting to say goodbye. But Jim also brings something rare: genuine conviction. Not a sales pitch, not a broken record — just a man who sold himself on change before he ever hit that gate. What makes this episode special is the history. Mario and Jim go back to age 15. The fact that Jim's first call out of federal prison led him straight to Mario — without either of them even knowing it — is the kind of full-circle moment that reminds you why this show exists. They also get into the real barriers facing returning citizens in Idaho: finding housing as a felon is harder than finding work, and the community has a role to play in changing that. Jim's message to anyone still inside or sitting in a halfway house: "Be hopeful. Feel blessed for every little good thing that comes your way. Have faith, be confident, and work hard." Support the show: https://www.buzzsprout.com/ReformedNReal/support Support the show

  3. Jul 29

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

    Send us Fan Mail 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. Support the show

  4. Jun 24

    Laura Watson: Inside the BHU at ISCI — The Trauma Behind People In Prison

    Send us Fan Mail This week on Reformed N Reel, Mario and Wayne sit down with Laura Watson, licensed clinical social worker who runs the Behavioral Health Unit at the Idaho State Correctional Institution. That's a 240-bed mental health unit inside ISCI, and Laura has been doing this work for 17 years — long enough that many of the residents call her "Mama Watson." She's seen the department change. She's helped change it. And she came on the show to talk about what it actually looks like to do real mental health work behind the walls. We get into the hard parts. More than a third of IDOC's population is followed by mental health at some level — and Laura puts the number of people carrying real trauma at 90 to 95 percent. Idaho is one of only four states without an insanity plea, which means the most severely ill end up in her unit instead of a hospital. She's honest about why prison therapy is so brutal: "It always gets worse before it gets better," and you're asking someone to go through that sober, without supports, and with no safe room to go cry in afterward. We also dig into the cruel paradox of the system — that access to therapy is easier inside prison than outside, where waitlists run three months and transportation and money get in the way. Mario reflects on still calling himself "one of us" even after release, and Laura tells him why that matters. The episode lands on a line worth sitting with: "True public safety doesn't happen until people get better." Laura's call to listeners is simple — start normalizing mental health conversations in your own family. Especially with the men in your life. Make "are you doing okay?" a normal thing to ask. Support the show

  5. Jun 10

    From the Black Box to Central Office — Tony & Stetson on Addiction, Being Locked Up Out of State, and the People Who Reached In

    Send us Fan Mail This week on Reformed N Reel, host Mario Hernandez and co-host Wayne Burt sit down with Tony and Stetson — two of Mario's own Learning How 2 Live Media employees, both currently residents at the Treasure Valley Community Reentry Center. What follows is the part of the conversation that most "lock 'em up" coverage never gets to — the part about what actually moves the needle. Tony's blunt assessment of the warehouse model: "You take somebody like me and you give me seven years and I'm in a cell the whole time, after that seven years you're just hitting the pause button. You're going right back out to where you were." The fix isn't a longer sentence. The fix is what happened next: a friend pulling him to a minimum-custody facility, a CRC bed, a job at LH2L Media, a reason to show up. For Stetson, walking away from the gang in custody — months of what he calls psychological warfare on the tier — opened the door to a five-month leadership development course. He talks about his grandma, who he hadn't seen in years, walking into his graduation on a walker. His parents calling him "son" in front of his classmates. Breaking down crying in front of everybody he'd spent the last decade trying to look hard for. He now facilitates that same course for incoming students, and he stands at IDOC's Central Office during new-employee orientation telling his story to the staff who are about to spend their career working with people like him. The conversation lands somewhere people in corrections don't expect it to: on trust. When you have nothing to lose, no fence is high enough. When you have something to lose — a job, a wife and kids at home, a sergeant who treats you like a person, a manager who hired you on purpose — the fence stops doing the work. The motivation comes from inside. Stetson, paraphrasing the line that opens the back half: "Acquire what you admire." Tony, on what changed: "For somebody to reach in and give you an opportunity is kind of everything when you don't have anything." Content warning: This episode contains a first-person description of a suicide attempt. If you or someone you know is in crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by call or text. Learning How 2 Live — learninghow2live.org Support the show

  6. Jun 3

    Tristen Maes on Addiction, Brotherhood, and Showing Up for His Daughters

    Send us Fan Mail Tristan Maes is 43, lives in the Treasure Valley, runs his own painting business — and as of April 6, 2026, has been sober from the addiction that has tracked him since he was 12 years old. This week on Reformed N Reel, host Mario Hernandez sits down with co-host Wayne Burt and his old friend Tristan to talk about the long road from juvenile detention to a fresh sobriety date. They met inside Idaho's prison system around 2006 — both running with people they probably shouldn't have, both trying to "make a name." They've been in and out of each other's lives ever since. Tristan is candid about all of it: starting weed and drinking at 12, escalating through county jail and a prison stretch from 2006 to 2010, the relapse that came one day after he'd put together a month sober, the felony drug charge that finally got his attention, and the rehab program that started turning things around. And in the middle of it, a story he keeps coming back to — Mario, asking no questions, taking over Tristan's truck payment while he was in treatment so he wouldn't lose it. That kind of loyalty doesn't show up in the gangster movies. It shows up here. The conversation moves from prison stories to what real recovery looks like — his daughters Patience (18) and Malia, whitewater rafting on the river the Sunday before recording, jiu-jitsu training at 43, reading Psalms in the morning, and the two rules he's trying to live by: time, and consistency. If you're early in recovery, mid-relapse, or watching someone you love try to find their way out, this one's for you. "You learn more from a loss than you do a win. So just remember that — if you fall, don't give up." — Tristan Maes Need a paint quote in the Treasure Valley?   Tristan owns and operates Amazing Painting (interior + exterior, residential + commercial). Reach him at 208-761-8793. Support the show

  7. May 27

    Mario's Worst Prison Story — and Why It Ended Up Being a Good Thing

    Send us Fan Mail Most episodes of Reformed N Reel follow the climb back — addiction, prison, recovery, return. This one goes the other way: deep into what actually happens inside. Host Mario Hernandez tells co-host Wayne Burt the worst story of his last prison term — eight days in solitary at Orofino for something he didn't do. Mario was keeping his head down, working a video editing job in the prison school, aiming for a dorm placement. Then an inmate connected to the tier's correctional officer decided Mario "thought he was better than everyone." Days later he was surrounded, cuffed, and dropped in the hole on a fabricated disciplinary report — with no one willing to back the claim. He fought it the only way he could: by writing over the facility's head to IDOC Central Office, which investigated and dismissed the charge. It was the lowest point of his time inside — and the moment that proved standing on the truth, even from a cell, still works. The chapter that should have broken him ended up being the one that confirmed he was already on the way out. Support the show

  8. May 6

    Generational Struggle, Generational Healing

    Send us Fan Mail Mario and Wayne sit down with Kelsey Korvela, who 21 years ago walked into the Boise Rescue Mission as a homeless woman — not staff. Shaped by both parents' addiction and her own felony past, her turning point came when her father became the first in the family to get sober, sparking a ripple of recovery and faith. Today, Kelsey is an intake coordinator at that same mission, meeting people at their lowest with understanding instead of judgment. Generational struggle, transformed into generational healing. Support the show

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Reformed N' Reel is a weekly conversation bringing together voices from every corner of the community to talk about corrections, reentry, and reform in Idaho's prison system. Hosted by Mario Hernandez, a formerly incarcerated and fully reformed individual who now leads a reentry-focused nonprofit called Learning How 2 Live, and Wayne Birt, Program Director and Production Manager of Radio Boise. Wayne brings the perspective of an average citizen, and considers himself a curious moderator seeking to understand the system from the outside looking in. Together, Mario and Wayne sit down and talk with a wide range of guests: formerly incarcerated people, social justice advocates, charity foundation leaders, and even directors from the Idaho Department of Correction. Reformed N' Real brings all different perspectives together to better understand the correctional system and how it affects us all.

Information

  • Creator
    Mario Hernandez & Wayne Birt
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    25
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Reformed N' Reel
  • Show Website
    Reformed N' Reel