Ear Hustle: Human Stories Of Incarceration
If you’re like me, you like learning about new perspectives. Lately, I’ve been learning about the world of incarceration. It’s an element of society that I have almost no experience with. True, some of my uncles had regular law enforcement interactions. At least one uncle had a special bracelet and restricted movement but none of them were incarcerated.
I have a limited view of incarceration. I’ve been privileged that way. It’s not something I have a lot of personal context for outside of that time my brother locked me in jail for robbing the stagecoach at Wild West World. And even that example, I’m making up.
That’s why I have been so intrigued by the podcast, Ear Hustle. It’s produced from inside California’s San Quentin State Prison. Importantly, it’s produced by the inmates. Ear Hustle focuses on stories of day-to-day prison life as told by the people that live it. There is outside help, of course, but the stories are the ones the inmates want to tell and how they want to tell them. This isn’t the sensationalized, hyper violent, scripted prison of film and television. It doesn’t gloss over the real violence and tragedy either. Ear Hustle is an attempt at a true depiction of life inside.
It’s worth noting that Ear Hustle only occasionally mentions crime. Crime is often the least interesting part of these stories. The crime that landed an individual in prison is also almost entirely irrelevant to their day-to-day life. Both entertainment and news media tend to define a person in prison by their crime. It becomes easy to forget that people in prison are still people. Ear Hustle isn’t about how you got to prison, but what life is like once there.
How can you press your clothes in prison? What happens when there’s a lockdown and shower access is restricted for anywhere from a few days to several months? How do you maintain contact with family that you’ve never met? How do you and your celly not fight constantly in a 5x10 box? How many different meals can you make out of a packet of noodles? During yard time, are you training for the marathon or playing dungeons and dragons?
Ear Hustle also looks at life on the other side of the gate with families of inmates. How do you maintain a romantic relationship if your spouse is in prison? What’s the dress code for visiting someone in prison? How important are stamps on both sides of the gate? How much connection can you develop in a 15-minute phone call?
Recently, Ear Hustle has also been able to focus on former inmates and their quest to reintegrate into a society that in most cases, is a completely new world. One of the hosts of Ear Hustle, Earlonne Woods, was serving 31 years to life when the podcast started. That sentence was commuted, in part because of Woods’s work on Ear Hustle and providing a voice to those incarcerated. This has provided a fascinating look at how complex a simple, everyday thing can be if you are formally incarcerated not only because it’s a different world, but also because of societal stigma.
It isn’t always a happy ending. Ear Hustle doesn’t shy away from the truth. For good or ill, these are human stories. And that’s the point.
If you have no context for the human stories of incarceration, give Ear Hustle a listen. Or, read their recently released book, “This Is Ear Hustle”. Let Earlonne, Nigel Poor, and a host of other voices give you a perspective you didn’t know you were missing.
