By Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods.
EARLONNE: People know incarceration sucks. There are way more layers to the onion than what we show. We've never been about giving people a false reality.
NIGEL: We've never sugarcoated anything--we are telling real stories about how you make a life inside and what happens when you get out.
EARLONNE: A lot of people seem to think life stops when you're in prison. It doesn't.
I've been listening to Ear Hustle since it started, which is pretty weird for me since I'm normally not into prison stuff. I saw an interview with Nigel in the SN&R and it sounded like she lived around here (okay, turns out she works around here), and I checked it out and have listened ever since. The authors of this book created a podcast talking about stories and experiences within and without prison. (I note I asked for it for Christmas and my mom was all, "I saw one of the books on your list and said no way..." well, hahahahah, I just got it anyway, but I admit that was probably an odd interest for me to come up with.)
Nigel is a visual artist/professor turned podcaster who started volunteering at San Quentin, and Earlonne was her original "inside" cohost until his sentence finally got commuted in 2018. Now he works on Ear Hustle from the outside, covering re-entry into the world stories and the like. (Their new "inside" cohost, New York, is mentioned a bit at the end but doesn't get much play in this one--maybe in a later book.)
This book is pretty much like listening to the podcast and was everything I was hoping for. One might reasonably wonder how you cover five years of podcasting in one book, and the book doesn't try to tackle that experience. It has select interviews/transcripts from episodes for awhile, but also goes into background details about how they do their work and cover stories and how they've occasionally needed to work without each other on stories. I loved how they covered Earlonne's sentence commutation in great detail, and also about the difficulties they ran into when the pandemic limited their ability to even have contact with anyone at San Quentin for over a year. It even finishes with a tribute//short interview with Lt. Sam Robinson, who approves every episode (and retired recently, sadness!). He admits he didn't expect this to take off since Nigel was a visual rather than audio person and Earlonne IRL is quite the quiet introvert, which is something I never would have guessed since Earlonne always seems quite amiable and chatty on the podcast.
It talks about how both of them got into the podcast--how Nigel had some interesting signs happening to her that led her to San Quentin. I especially found it interesting how she started having wrongly delivered letters coming to her from San Quentin--heavily decorated ones that would certainly catch her interest! This led her to volunteering to teach history of photography in prison, and things went on from there.
It also covers how Earlonne got into drug dealing and robbing people and falling afoul of the Three Strikes law in California, giving him a longer potential sentence than actual murderers might get. I note I wasn't old enough to vote in 1994 when that law went into effect and I don't remember how this particular thing was marketed in the voting ads, but good god, it's ridiculous. (And I note as a jury forewoman, I got unpleasantly surprised on my last case when after we'd voted to convict a lady of a pretty dumb crime that was pretty obvious that she'd done, she ran off halfway through because unbeknownst to me, it was her third strike. They don't tell you this until after you've come back with the verdict.) Earlonne is sworn to fight back against this law and the book interviews several guys who have been incarcerated longer than they should have for doing three crimes, some of which were pretty dumbass/minor by comparison to what they should have been sentenced for. I continue to be baffled as to how penalties are set for crimes that seem extremely disproportionate to the crime and why that isn't more standardized, somehow. But I agree that this is wrong and needs to be changed...somehow. Yahya, one of the Ear Hustle staff, sums it up pretty well.
YAHYA: I do feel very put off by having to go to the board and be treated the same way as somebody who, say, took a baby and threw it out the window, then killed five or six people. Why should I be held to those same standards when I'm in there for a completely nonviolent felony?
Some stories, like Ear Hustle itself, are more lighthearted or just plain funnier than others. I did absolutely crack up at the discussion of a "fee-fee" (fake vagina) and making sex toys in jail, though. By the time that conversation continued to the time when Yahya mentions sitting down to a meal with three super dirty talking dudes and how it "ruined my grand slam breakfast and made it...not so slam," I was laughing so hard in public. There's also a story about how a guy managed to escape prison and only ended up getting caught again after 14 years of freedom because he fixed the cars of FBI agents, who recommended his services to other agents who recognized him. Awkward!
Then there's the sadder stories. The social aspects and racial divides in prison are ugly and hard to deal with and harsh, so you're impressed when anyone manages to make a lasting interracial friendship and how they managed to "follow the rules" to keep out of social trouble. There's a long interview with a former college professor who married a guy in prison, had kids with him, changed careers, and how just visiting him was hugely difficult, humiliating, and hard to take. Just the way she talked when talking about prison visits and all the rules and crap she had to do, especially with regards to interacting with other women in the same way, got kind of shocking to me after awhile. It was very reminiscent of reading about what the prisoners on the inside had to do, except she was outside. I did wonder if it was worth it to her in the end, since she talks about how as a woman she can never get sexually satisfied and literally everything she might have to talk to him about is forever trumped by "I'm in prison." She eventually reveals that she broke up with him romantically even though she feels bad about it, but will still be there whenever he gets out.
Nigel does agree with criticisms that the show early on focused more on men (for obvious reasons of SQ having that population), so they have worked to get interviews with female prisoners and former prisoners to get their perspectives. There's a mom who did white collar crime and was in for ten years and it still breaks her up what damage she did to her family by doing that. I do kind of admire how both these ladies had such a rough time BUT have continued to work in prison-related work and trying to improve things. There's also more talk of an interview Nigel did with the sister of a rape victim (now deceased) after interviewing the rapist on the inside. The rapist interview isn't covered in this book really, but the thoughts of the sister from what she saw are.
Anyway, four stars, this is an excellent book. Even if you, like me, are "not into prison stuff," I think it's worth a read and a listen. If you enjoy stories of people who have managed to improve themselves, Ear Hustle, both book and podcast, is a great place to find them, and that's very heartening.