This Q&A was first published by Nieman Lab and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
When Ear Hustle launched in 2017, it was a bit of a revelation. It was the first podcast to be produced out of a prison — San Quentin State Prison in California, where two of the podcast’s founders, Earlonne Woods and Antwan Williams, were incarcerated, and where cofounder Nigel Poor was a volunteer teacher who made regular visits to the prison — and it quickly became known for its deeply human, often beautiful stories about the everyday realities of prison life. In 2018 Jerry Brown, the governor of California at the time, commuted Woods’ sentence, citing the podcast in his commutation letter. Woods became a full-time producer and co-host for the podcast after his release, and he and Poor have gone on to host 13 seasons of the show together; in 2020, the show was a finalist for the first-ever Pulitzer Prize in audio reporting.
For the last seven years, the Ear Hustle team has broadly consisted of people in two distinct places: inside — the members of the team who are incarcerated at San Quentin — and outside, which includes Woods (since his release), Poor and a few other producers. This year, they’re expanding by building a new audio space at the California Institution for Women (CIW) in Chino.
Ear Hustle has produced the occasional story out of CIW, using tape put together through reporting trips and phone calls. But this new space, which is being supported by the Mellon Foundation, will give Ear Hustle a second inside team — a significant expansion for a show that’s been rooted in one prison for so long. I called up Woods and Bruce Wallace, the show’s executive producer, to talk about the space and their plans for a training program that they’re developing alongside Uncuffed, an initiative out of NPR member station KALW. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Neel Dhanesha: What’s the origin story of the CIW space?
Earlonne Woods: Oh, that’s a heavy one. It’s a lot of factors.
I think one of the main factors was, when you serve a lot of time in a men’s prison, you stay up on a lot of prison stuff. And you will hear about a lot of the men’s prisons, because there are three other [men-only state prisons in California]. But you rarely heard about the women’s prisons. It was more like their voices were a little stifled, or people weren’t interested in what the women had going on.
Two things really got my attention. One, I had a sister that was there in the women’s prison. And two, I remember reading a San Quentin newspaper where there was a lady in there, Leslie Van Houten, who was getting on the San Quentin newspaper for not doing their own investigation and using source material from a regular newspaper to in theirs. She really banged on him, like, “Y’all could have reached out to me instead of using something that the media put out there to put inside of San Quentin newspaper.”
So I was definitely intrigued by her response to that, as well as knowing her story and knowing how the parole board kept granting her parole, but the governors kept taking it away. So once I was out, we reached out to her and was able to talk to her, and we did a cool story, over 50 phone calls with her. I think from there, it really intensified our interest to get up in there and try to just tap in with the women.
Dhanesha: When did you start making reporting trips to CIW, and how did that turn into an idea for a dedicated space?
Bruce Wallace: I joined in 2019, right after Earlonne got out. Nigel and Earlonne had always been trying to incorporate more women’s voices into our stories, but it took a long time, partly for structural reasons: The large majority of incarcerated people in California are men. But sometime in 2019 we were put in touch with CIW. We were about to get down there when the pandemic started, so that put everything on pause for a couple of years. So the specific, focused work for this has been going for a couple of years, but the energy was there for way longer.
Woods: That just reminded me, Bruce, we was going through the process, but then when the prisons reopened, it was a whole new administration, so we had to do it all over again, you know?
Wallace:: Yeah, that’s happened a couple times. After the pandemic we were getting close again, and the PIO [public information officer] who was kind of our main point of contact changed. That sort of started things over again.
Dhanesha: Do you know why that changed?
Woods: I mean, it’s those type of positions. San Quentin has more of a permanent PIO, but all the rest of the prisons, their position is pretty much “you’re here today and somebody else is there three months later.” San Quentin has the PIO as a permanent position because they hold death row there.
Dhanesha: I know the production space at San Quentin existed before Ear Hustle. But it’s different at CIW, where you’re building it from scratch. How did you go about building a whole new audio production space in a prison?
Woods: One thing I can say about prison is that there’s limited space. So trying to put something somewhere in a space is a hard situation if you’re not building a brand-new building, because you already have, like, self-help groups and all kinds of stuff that’s vying for spaces to utilize during program time.
Then when we did find a space, it was commandeered by the education department. … So the administration finally actually sacrificed one of their conference rooms for us to use.
Wallace: Yeah, once the conversation got started again, after the COVID stop and the personnel change, we were connected with the person who is still the current PIO and has been a great supporter of our work. And in the summer of 2020 we made our first reporting trip down there, just for a couple days, and he’d lined up some people for us to talk to. And I think it was on that first trip that this idea started going in conversation with him and an associate warden who’s also been a real supporter of not only going there for one-off reporting trip but establishing something more comparable to what we have at San Quentin.
At first they identified a space, but they had to fix the roof because it was leaking. So it took close to a year for them to get those repairs done, and right as the repairs were almost done, like Earlonne says, it was commandeered for another use. But what we have now is actually a pretty good space. It’s a small space, but really nice and newly built and has windows and in a lot of ways, it’s a lot more functional than the space we work out of at San Quentin.
Dhanesha: How big is the space?
Woods: I’m just going to guesstimate and say 15 feet by 7 feet. I might be being too generous, but it’s a place where we were able to put in six Apple computers, microphones, keyboards, all the stuff you need to do a podcast. You know, once you line all the desks up against the wall, and put the computers there, it looks kind of big, but it’s not.
Wallace: It turns out the space is 17 feet by 8 feet, 10 inches. We were surprised when it all got in there. We were assuming once we loaded all this stuff in it was going to feel super cramped. But somehow when we got everything in place and orderly, it sort of expanded.
It’s in a new kind of double-wide trailer with typical gray carpeting. The prison’s in Chino, in Southern California, which is in the desert so it’s really hot, so the windows are tinted.
Woods: And it has air conditioning.
Dhanesha: I imagine setting up a space like this would require a lot of paperwork and permissions.
Wallace: It was a slow process, but at times it was actually less complicated than what we experienced at San Quentin. Basically we, along with Uncuffed, which is a program that does similar work that we’re collaborating with on a lot of parts of this program, kind of built our dream list, decided specifically what we would order and sent CIW a spreadsheet with everything. They cleared it at the CIW level and then sent it to [California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation] headquarters in Sacramento, and they cleared it just based on this spreadsheet. That process, I would guess, took a couple months, and then once that list was cleared, we ordered the stuff and decided on a day to bring it in.
All the equipment is sort of donated to the state, so it becomes state property. And at San Quentin, the process initially was sort of, we’d hand stuff over to them, it would sit in a warehouse while security stuff happened, and eventually, months or sometimes years later, it would hopefully show up. But here we all arrived one day in the first week of July, with all the equipment in three cars, taking stuff into the studio.
Woods: We had some people, particularly the associate warden and the PIO, who really pushed the program for the women. The associate was really pushing because she wanted the women to have what the men had, you know what I’m saying? She really wanted that in her institution.
Dhanesha: What are your plans for the space now that it’s almost up and running?
Wallace: One of the things that made Ear Hustle out of San Quentin unique was that it was a collaboration between an outside team and an inside team. So you had that embeddedness and the knowledge and trust that comes with that. I think we really quickly realized that we had to have a similar sustained presence in the CIW facility, both for the sake of richer storytelling but also just to be solid members of the community in the way I think we are in San Quentin.
The population at CIW was actually super familiar with Ear Hustle. In fact, Ear Hustle is heard on tablets that almost every incarcerated person in California has, and CIW got the tablets before San Quentin. We would go in there a day or two after an episode was released, and they would be like, “Oh, I heard the episode,” whereas at San Quentin it took weeks or maybe months sometimes. So they were actually more up on what we were for a while than San Quentin was. But the space is just, I think, another aspect that helps us be more of a known quantity in there.
And then there’s a training piece. At San Quentin, Earlonne and the folks in there who came on after him were learning on the job. Over the last year or so, we’ve started thinking about being more intentional and have developed what we think is going to be a 12-module audio production training program that has some pieces that are general and some pieces that are specific to doing this kind of work in the carceral setting. We’re just rolling that out at San Quentin over the next month or two, and then starting early next year, we’ll do the first round of it at CIW. Eventually we’ll have both that training program running and a sort of sustained Ear Hustle team in the CIW, the way we do at San Quentin.
Woods: To have audio training, it can help you, especially when you get out. Whether it’s sound design stuff, or auto syncing, or just, you know, knowing how to do a podcast, it’s very useful in society. The beautiful part about learning anything in the media, is that in San Quentin most of the people that were in the media center have been released home, and there’s a 0% recidivism rate. Like nobody is going back, dudes are out here living their best life in some form of media, be it video, audio, whatever, out here doing their shit. So it’s a very valuable skill inside of prison, and it’s one of the skills that people may gravitate towards over auto mechanics or some type of other skill set. Because people get real involved.
Wallace: We are building the curriculum keeping in mind the specific skills that we use to make this kind of work but also acknowledging that there are not an infinite number of jobs in the audio production space. So we keep in mind, what are the skills that are applicable, even if you don’t go on to work in nonfiction narrative audio?
So there’s some larger skills about working together and thinking about how to tell your story — which, actually, is specifically important in a prison setting, because that’s what you have to do when you go up for parole. You get grilled on every moment of your life.
Dhanesha: What’s the audio coming out of CIW going to sound like? Do you think the episodes are going to sound different from the ones coming out of San Quentin?
Woods: As a man that spent close to three decades in prison and understanding everything there is to know about men in prisons, when I got to the women’s prison for the first time, man, it kind of deflated me. You know what I’m saying? Like, it let the air out of me, because, you know, I was used to seeing elderly men in prison. I was used to seeing all that. But when you see elderly women like your grandmama, like your great grandmama, in there, you’re like oh my God. And then you get to hearing the stories that come out of them. I’m not saying that, like, all women that are in prison were abused, but the majority of them have some cold stories. They got some deep-ass stories that the men just don’t have, you know? So yeah, the men are gonna have to step their game up a little bit.
Dhanesha: I imagine having a steady production space will also change things up a bit sonically because you’ll be able to be rooted in place, as opposed to having to make reporting trips.
Woods: Yeah, being rooted in the place is way different than just somebody showing up with a microphone, right? Before Ear Hustle, sometimes people used to come into [San Quentin] with a microphone, you’d say some things in it, then they’d go out and change the whole shit up.
Now, the narrative’s been changed. Our whole thing was to control the narrative. So, you know, allowing the women to control their own narrative is going to be very interesting, for sure.
And one thing sonically that’s different in this place than the men’s place is that this place has trees, you know. So you got birds, you got all kinds of stuff. Men’s prison don’t have trees, because they need a line of fire if something is happening. They don’t want the trees to impede them from quelling a disturbance. But this place has trees all over, trees on the yard, trees in the backyards, trees everywhere. So you get that sonically. It’s by the airport, so you get airplanes, too.
Wallace: The yard is such a center of life at San Quentin, so it’s sort of become that in Ear Hustle. And we went to CIW expecting to do the same thing, yard talk. The idea was that we’ll just go out and there’ll be hundreds of people on the yard and we’ll just do vox pops. But the yard at CIW is totally silent. There’s just like nobody there, and I think part of it is because of the climate; it’s just so often so hot, people don’t want to be out there. So we quickly had to drop the idea of doing the yard talk, and now we’ve done dorm talk — I don’t think we’re necessarily calling it that — but that’s where we found this sort of more vibrant life. There are a lot of examples of us just learning a new place sonically.
Dhanesha: The episodes will go in the Ear Hustle feed, right?
Wallace: Yeah, the episodes from CIW and San Quentin will be side by side in the Ear Hustle feed. We’ve had CIW stories in every season since August 2020, and sometimes they’re standalone, and sometimes we have voices from both places. I think it’ll continue to be more of a mix.
Dhanesha: Earlonne, will you and Nigel still host the show, or will you find a host from inside CIW for those episodes?
Woods: You’re gonna hear me and Nigel, because that’s the brand, right? So you’re definitely going to hear us, but we will be bringing the women into the fold. Because we have to introduce the women to the public.
What we learned from Ear Hustle was that all the attention was more on me. So to thwart that situation, we’re going to bring in a team of individuals where everybody can help put it together. So it’s not all eyes on one person, you know what I’m saying? It’s more collaborative. We’ll have the women produce episodes and get on the mic and do their thing in more of a team fashion.
Dhanesha: Do you have any concern about CIW interfering with your podcast?
Woods: I think a lot of times institutions are scared to say yes. I remember, back when I was still inside, the commissioner from Indiana [Department of Correction] came inside San Quentin. One thing he wanted to do was go see the Ear Hustle area. So he come over to the area, and he said, “Look, man, I’ve been in corrections 25 years. I was a correction officer. Now I’m the commissioner. And if the incarcerated individuals would have sent me a request to start a podcast, I would have balled that up and threw it in the trash. But listening to the episodes that come out of San Quentin gives me a view of the other side that we serve. We would never get that on a day-to-day basis.”
You know what I’m saying? So I think when you don’t understand something, or you don’t know what it’s about, you’d be more protective. But now when you see it, you see that only good things can happen out of these situations. I think once the institutions get comfortable with what we’re doing, it’s easier for them to get on. It’s like, “Okay, well, they got 108 episodes out already, so what bad can happen?”
Dhanesha: In many ways this idea reminds me of the Transom story workshop, back when Rob Rosenthal and Jay Allison ran that out of Woods Hole.
Wallace: Now that you mention it, part of this longer-term idea of the training program is to make sort of different-sized pieces of it, because now that people in a lot of different prisons are aware of us and hear us on these tablets or other ways, there’s a lot of incoming requests asking, “How do I start this?” And we want to have a better way. Now it’s just sort of that we get on the phone with people and talk through it, and for the most part, I don’t think anything comes of it. But hopefully down the road after we’ve run these workshops a few times, we’ll have learned how to have a version of it that’s more of like a two-week workshop that we could go and teach in a facility or turn into a book or multimedia package.
Dhanesha: Sounds like you’re almost building an Ear Hustle network.
Wallace: Yeah. Man, in 2017, could you have imagined it?
Woods: Nah, man. I always give Nigel the props, because all this audio stuff started with her. Just from that one professor coming over, wanting to do a project. You know, this shit was born from that. And it’s grown, you know, it’s grown immensely. And here we are.