Concrete Mama is a bold, unfiltered podcast recorded inside Washington State Penitentiary, where hosts Demar, Anthony, Red, Vik, and Rachel confront prison stereotypes through real-life stories and lived experience.
Season One made waves across the country, hitting #2 in Apple Podcasts' Documentary category, #14 in Top Series, and reaching 104,000 downloads. It was covered on the front page of the Seattle Times, and was featured in other local and national media.
Through partnerships with the Edovo app and the Securus tablets, it is also available to the incarcerated population in 48 states across the US.
RED
VIK
DEMAR
ANTHONY
RACHEL
COMMUNITY CELEBRATION RECAP
Our first ever Concrete Mama Community Celebration was a huge success — all thanks to our donors, sponsors, family, friends, and YOU! Here’s a recap in case you missed it, and thank you to everyone who came out and supported. Keep an eye out for Season 2!
1970
2024
Since the coining of the “Concrete Mama” moniker by a group of inmates in the 1970s, the Washington State Penitentiary has undergone significant development and renovation — expanding the surface of its grounds by over 500%.
The history of the name is explored in detail in John McCoy and Ethan Hoffman’s book of the same name, chronicling a radical, first-of-its-kind social experiment which placed authoritative power in the prison in the hands of the inmates.
Hoffman, auteur of the photojournalism portion of “Concrete Mama,” paints an intimate portrait of life within WSP in the mid-to-late 1970s. Our podcast serves as a present-day expansion of Hoffman and McCoy’s noble project — a portrait of the prison, by and for those housed within.
