Oregon State Penitentiary’s debate club were hungry for a big win at their annual college debate tournament this year.

Four teams faced each other in the championship round on Oct. 13. Two teams were from the maximum security prison’s own debate club, The Capitol Toastmasters. The other two teams were made up of students from Lewis & Clark College in Portland.

Their topic: whether to eliminate all social media with the push of a button.

“Our team line basically is, hell yes, push the button!” Andy Chappell, an adult in custody, told a panel of judges, as a crowd of 150 incarcerated adults watched from OSP’s activities room.

For seven minutes Chappell argued the benefits of a social media-free world, hitting points on cyberbullying, addiction and misinformation.

Chappell himself doesn’t have that much experience with social media. He’s been incarcerated at OSP since 2017. But he does know how to analyze information, listen to different perspectives and discuss ideas respectfully — all skills Chappell gained while in prison.

“People come in here and they learn how to communicate,” Chappell said about his time with the club. “They learn how to be leaders.”

As political divisions grow in the United States, civil discourse is getting harder to come by. But the art of debate is thriving in an unlikely place: prisons. People who are incarcerated say engaging in debate has been invaluable to them, in everything from resolving conflicts inside prisons to advocating for themselves in hearings.

Chappell said debate has taught him how to organize and present ideas logically. More importantly, he said he’s learned how to listen. Chappell said listening intently is key to communicating with other people. That’s not something he was able to do in front of a judge about 15 years ago. At the time, he was appealing a 30-year sentence related to property crimes.

“The judge asked me, ‘Do you have anything you want to say about the sentence I gave you?” Chappell recalled. “I was a pretty angry guy and I told her, ‘Yeah, why don’t you come down off that bench and fight like a man?’”

The two obviously did not see eye to eye.

But five years later Chappell was back in that judge’s courtroom and the tenor was different. Chappell successfully argued to have his sentence reduced.

“I told her the things that I’ve been doing with this club and in my own personal life, with my education and with my work,” Chappell said. “And due to the skills and communication that I had learned in this club she ended up giving me 10 years off my sentence.”

Research shows that practicing debate helps people develop critical thinking and communication skills.

These skills have a lot of benefits in a prison setting where people are in close quarters around the clock. Some members of the Capitol Toastmasters said the club has taught them how to use logic to talk about problems, rather than revert to physical violence.

“If there’s less violence because we’re communicating, then that’s safer for the staff. It’s safer for volunteers. It’s safer for other prisoners because now we can talk about it instead of fighting about it,” Kyle Headquist, policy associate with the Oregon Justice Center, said. “It benefits the whole community.”

Headquist is a past president of OSP’s debate club. He was released from the prison in 2022 after then-Gov. Kate Brown commuted his life sentence.

Many of the club’s members have a shared interest in deliberately improving their lives while in prison. And they credit the club for giving them the tools to advocate for themselves and others.

“There’s a lot of people who are genuinely trying to transform and make amends for all the things that led them here,” said OSP inmate Theron Hall, who is preparing for a parole hearing in the coming months.

Hall said debate has taught him how to consider perspectives from all sides. He’s had to argue in favor of ideas he didn’t really believe in.

“I think that takes a skill, legitimately, to say, ‘You know what, I don’t really agree with this position but let me try to understand’,” Hall said.

The Capitol Toastmasters is among the more established clubs at the state penitentiary, starting out as a simple debate club more than 50 years ago. In the year 2000, the group filed paperwork to become an official member of the nonprofit debate organization Toastmasters International.

That same year Headquist reached out to a local university to see if students were interested in some friendly competition.

“I thought that we really had our stuff together and I challenged Willamette University’s team to a debate inside the Oregon State Penitentiary,” Headquist said. “They wholeheartedly accepted.”

OSP has hosted a tournament nearly every year since then, attracting college debate teams from across the U.S. and internationally. This year, eight colleges sent teams to take on the prison debaters.

“I think they blend rhetoric and matter in a way that a lot of debaters on the outside do not,” Lewis & Clark senior Isabella Moore said. “They’re more willing to recognize and acknowledge their opponents’ arguments as valid and then weigh out those arguments in comparison to their own.”

This is Moore’s second time competing in the OSP college debate competition. She said the opportunity to debate with inmates has been a valuable experience.

“We share this common language and are able to have really high quality discussions using the skills that we’ve learned in the language of debate,” Moore said.

Back at the tournament, the teams did not hold back, passionately arguing for and against the elimination of social media. After an hour of debate, the tournament’s judges awarded the two top prizes to the Capitol Toastmasters.

Chappell and his teammates were ecstatic; they hadn’t taken first place since before the pandemic. But ultimately Chappell said the debate is not really about winning — it’s about incarcerated people like himself taking steps to change their lives.

“I don’t see myself as a prisoner or a convict,” Chappell said. “I see myself as somebody who’s reforming their life and trying to be a better citizen upon release.”

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/26/oregon-state-penitentary-prison-debate-teaching-civil-discourse/