I have to be careful here. Very, very careful.
I go up for my next parole hearing in September. I will be appearing for the fifth time. I’ll have 35 years in on a 20 to Life sentence, and if my name were *not* Sean Swain, the Ohio prison system would have long ago adopted me as their poster child — 3 published books, 11 years of radio commentary, art on exhibition in Sweden, thousands of hours of community service, no drugs or alcohol, no violence. But, my name *is* Sean Swain, and the Ohio Department of Retribution and Corruption has “Swain Derangement Syndrome.” It’s a diagnosable illness, you know, and, unfortunately, the Ohio parole board isn’t immune.
They troll me online like a disgruntled ex.
My last time up for parole, they decided that my campaign slogan when running for governor was a secret plot to get the governor assassinated. The slogan was, “Turn your ballot into a bullet and blast it through the brainpan of the body politic.”
It was clearly a metaphor. And it was clearly hyperbolic. As I intended it, I was the “bullet” getting blasted through the “brainpan of the body politic.” It was a pretty obvious metaphor, I thought, to everyone but the parole board. They interpreted the slogan as a call for political violence, that voters should fold up their ballots to really fashion them into bullets and cram them into real guns, as if guns would expel actual origami bullets. So, to the parole board, a slogan that didn’t mention any actual violence and didn’t even reference their imagined target of the violence was a dog whistle for political assassination.
It was so stupid I didn’t even know how to respond.
They gave me 5 years.
So, you see, I have to be very, very careful. Swain Derangement Syndrome is a dangerous thing.
The irony, of course, is that, in all likelihood, the same people who interpreted my protected political speech in a public forum as a dog whistle for political violence voted for Donald Trump, a convicted felon whose own incitements sent rightwing crackpots to attack the capitol and smack cops in the head with fire extinguishers. But, if you present that reality to them, they will stare at you blank eyed like cows staring at a passing train, unable to discern any connection between speech and the consequent violence.
They can only see the connection when the violence *doesn’t* happen.
I guess the lesson here is, if I had an orange badger pelt stapled to my scalp, the parole board wouldn’t have long ago released me, they would have driven me home. But I don’t.
Swain Derangement Syndrome.
I have to be very, very careful.
In fact, I may have already insulted them, may have offended their sense of propriety. I might have to send them “I’m Sorry” Hallmark cards and flowers and chocolates. Sufferers of Swain Derangement Syndrome are very sensitive. Very fragile. They have *feelings,* lots of *feelings.*
So, anyhow, my apologies — you won’t find any caffeine fueled rants here about how the world would be better without the crime-factories they call prisons. No mention of abolition. I won’t even use the a-word.
I have to be careful. Parole in Ohio is now reduced to a popularity contest. I need the parole board to “like” and “friend” me. I have to win Ms. Congeniality.
I certainly won’t win the swimsuit competition.
So, let’s just talk about what I’ve been doing recently…
I sued the ODRC over its unconstitutional legal mail policy, and even though the case isn’t over yet, the ODRC has now abandoned its unconstitutional legal mail control number nonsense. In the process, Director Annette Chambers Smith had to send me $100 for violating a court order; I sent her a thank you card with my commissary receipt for $100 in Raman and coffee that she bought me.
I’m not ungrateful.
I sued the parole board. That’s currently on appeal and if I end up winning, the parole board will have to radically alter how it operates.
I sued the ODRC over unconstitutional interstate transfers. If I win, they’ll have to bring back dozens of prisoners thy exiled without consent and they’ll have to end interstate compact.
I sued the ODRC over its unconstitutional gang profiling policy that makes every prisoner communication “gang” activity. If I win, tens of thousands will get removed from the gang list and the ODRC will lose millions in Department of Justice bloc grants.
Over the past year or so, I’ve also been taking advantage of the Public Records statute. Did you know all internal emails of ODRC employees are subject to disclosure under public records? Yup. So, I’ve amassed, so far, 1348 pages of ODRC internal emails now posted online at mongoosedistro.com as “The ODRC Oppression Files.”
They’re really revealing, not just about multiple criminal plots hatched by ODRC top officials to blacksite, rendition, and silence me — although that’s in there — but what they also reveal is interagency collusion and thought control, not just to suppress prisoner voices but to undermine and neutralize citizens in the free world and any groups who have a thoughtful critique or objection to the way the ODRC operates. There are emails from “intelligence analysts” who spy on nonprofits and reform groups.
Super creepy.
At mongoosedistro.com/2026/03/30/sean-swain-prea-archive, you’ll find my 80 minute deposition and more than a hundred pages of documents that prove that prison officials, for years, used my views and commentary as an excuse to carry out repression that was really in response to me reporting a prison lawyer for groping me.
I reported a Prison Rape Elimination Act event.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act, or PREA, forbids sexual misconduct, but it also prohibits intimidation of any prisoner who reports a PREA event, or retaliation against that prisoner, or concealment of a PREA event or its reportage. Intimidation, retaliation, and concealment are also PREA events.
My deposition and the documents I reference prove that some of the ODRC’s top officials conspired in a years-long plot to conceal, intimidate, and retaliate against me for bringing a PREA claim against an ODRC attorney — weaponizing their disciplinary process, artificially elevating my security, blacksiting me and renditioning me out of state without process. When my counsel, Eric J. Allen, looked over all of this, he sent a mass email to 18 different ODRC officials, formally reporting PREA violations and demanding investigation.
Nothing happened. None of those officials complied with federal law and caused an investigation.
That’s a PREA violation in itself.
Rather than addressing PREA claims, they circled the wagons and then ceased providing me public records, seemingly to stop turning over evidence of their crimes. Now I’m suing them to turn over the records they conceal, as many as 2000 pages that will, sooner or later, be added to The ODRC Repression Files, online.
Does any of this plot line sound vaguely familiar? Sexual misconduct committed by someone powerful… others in power colluding to protect the predator and conceal the sexual misconduct… attempts by powerful conspirators to discredit and silence the victim(s)… and concealment of the volume of files that implicate lots of officials…?
To be clear, I’m not comparing myself to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein. What they experienced over years and decades was horrific and unimaginable. All I experienced was a coked-up lawyer grabbing my junk and making weird demands. It’s not comparable. But I’m not trying to compare the instances of abuse here; I’m talking about power’s responses to it. Systemic responses. The relationship of systems of power to rape.
In my own experience, rather than holding one lawyer accountable, other ODRC lawyers and administrators actually developed an elaborate scheme to destroy the accuser by any means necessary. And over the course of enlisting and recruiting allies to help carry out that scheme, at every decision point, as more and more officials were informed that all of this was PREA related, they chose to conceal, intimidate, retaliate. They chose to create an maintain a permission structure, not just for rape, not just for sexual misconduct, but for weaponizing their processes and unleashing state terror upon the victim reporting the misconduct.
The “Epsteinization” of power.
What the Jeffrey Epstein saga demonstrates is that there is a relationship between state power and rape, but I think we haven’t quite understood it properly. I don’t know that state power is so much a permission structure for the Jeffrey Epsteins as state power *is* a Jeffrey Epstein. Those in power see subjects as objects — objects to be exploited. So, wherever we have state power, we have a vast class of exploitables and power continues, noseblind to its own Epstein-ness.
I’m suggesting that the ODRC and Jeffrey Epstein are cut from the same cloth. All governmental power is. Jeffrey Epstein was not a *consequence* of how power operates, he was a *reflection* of how power operates. He’s not an isolated event, but an analogy for the system writ large.
I can picture any of the ODRC officials [1] who subjected me to years of PREA retaliation eating lunch with Jeffrey Epstein on KiddieFuck Island and seeing nothing wrong with it.
At any rate, in the months leading to my parole hearing, my counsel will be looking to give ODRC officials one last chance to take an easy way out — expunging the retaliatory frameups and adjusting my security downward to where it should have been, if not for the retaliation. Such a resolution would fairly allow me to go before the parole board without the contrivances they would otherwise rely upon to give me more time. I would legitimately be a great candidate for parole.
I don’t know how the ODRC rape collaborators will respond to my counsel’s generous offer. They have Swain Derangement Syndrome. It’s in their nature to double down and triple down for their rapist colleague who no longer works for the ODRC [2]. I can’t imagine any of them having the capacity for introspection, to question their own lowdown ways even when they read their own confessions… in their own words… posted online.
My sense is, between now and my parole hearing, deputy directors, bureau chiefs, administrators, and even former directors involved in covering up sexual misconduct will have to face investigation by the Correctional Institutions Inspection Committee, the Ohio House and Senate, the Ohio Inspector General, the Department of Justice, the Franklin County Prosecutor, human rights groups, and the media. The attorneys instrumental in directing the retaliation campaign would also face disbarment in the Ohio Disciplinary Counsel.
Swain Derangement Syndrome could prove to be quite costly to careers of rape apologists.
And then I’ll see the parole board.
Hopefully, by then, the ODRC Repression Files will be 2000 pages bigger and regulatory agencies and groups will have even more evidence of ODRC administrators’ crimes, and the question for the Ohio parole board will be whether I have completed my work here and can move on, or whether they need me to expose more corruption and rot before they set me free.
We’ll see.
***
[1] I name many of the rape collaborators in my deposition. In ODRC Legal Services, there’s Chief Counsel Stephen Gray, Assistant Counsel Vencot Brown, and Assistant Counsel Margaret Moore; from the Chief Inspector’s Office there is Roger Wilson, Paul Shoemaker, and Antonio Lee; from the Bureau of Classification there is Bureau Chief Jeff Mustard, former Chief Brian Wittrup, Interstate Coordinators Earlena Shepherd and Tracy Reveal, and Administrators Karrie Hupka and Angela Hill; from the Director’s Office you’ve got former Directors Gary C. Mohr and Annette Chambers Smith, former Assistant Director Edwin Voorhies, and former Regional Director Rob Jeffreys. All
of them actively concealed a prison rape event and/or participated in retaliation against the prisoner reporting it, based on their own internal documents now posted.
[2] Former ODRC Counsel Trevor Matthew Clark now works at Wexler Medical Center, Ohio State University. Ironically, the medical center is named for Les Wexler, a former friend and associate of financier Jeffrey Epstein. Small world. You really can’t make this stuff up.