Ear Hustle: Looking Out

July 12, 2017 2:46 PM

The need to nurture and show love for another living being (or, in San Quentin parlance, "looking out") is an essential human impulse. Away from your family and friends in prison this can be difficult, if not impossible. Sure, guys create strong bonds among themselves that help to alleviate the pain of missing family. But like on the outside, some people inside just relate better to animals than people.
posted by bq (1 comment total)

All I can say is this is a good little podcast. I feel lucky, in this highly stratified country, that I work with a lot of people who have been in prison, so I already "get" that like, yeah, people in prison are people, which I think is a lot of what this episode in particular is talking about. But it's still touching and tragic to hear these guys finding ways to nurture and love.

Listening to Ear Hustle, I keep being reminded that San Quentin has the great majority of all programs in California prisons. San Quentin prisoners can write for their newspaper, play on their sports teams, learn to code, get a degree, grow organic vegetables, take yoga classes, and now, produce a podcast. Almost no other prisons in California offer these kinds of programs. I love that San Quentin has this connection to the rest of the Bay Area, but the other prisons are in remote, rural, and largely conservative parts of the state.
posted by latkes at 9:51 PM on August 2, 2017