Unwritten

Ear Hustle

Ear Hustle & Radiotopia

Documentary, Society & Culture

4.9 • 21.8K Ratings

🗓️ 13 September 2017

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The color of your skin influences your life in prison, from sharing food to celebrating birthdays. Meet Andrew Sabatino (Drew Down) and Arthur Snowden (AR), two guys whose close friendship often challenges the unwritten rules of race relations on the inside.

Thanks to Drew Down and AR for sharing the story of their friendship. It’s a big deal to talk about race in prison, so thanks also to Lonnie Morris, Lemar, Phil Melendez, Wayne Boatwright, Charlie and George “Mesro” Coles-El for stepping up.

Ear Hustle is produced by Nigel Poor, Antwan Williams and Earlonne Woods with consulting editor Curtis Fox, outside production advisor Pat Mesiti-Miller and executive producer Julie Shapiro. Sound design in this episode is by Earlonne Woods, with contributing beats from Antwan Williams.

Find out more about the show at earhustlesq.com, including how to send us a question (by postcard) that might get answered in a future episode. Ear Hustle is a proud member of Radiotopia, from PRX.

Big thanks to Mail Chimp, Squarespace and Texture for supporting the show.

Find out how AR and Lonnie have been doing since this episode originally aired, in the Ear Hustle Plus episodes “Where’s AR Now?” and "Where's Lonnie Now?". To listen to all EH+ bonus content, sign up at earhustlesq.com/plus or directly in Apple Podcasts.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Erlan Woods. I'm incarcerated as San
0:25.4	Clinton.
0:32.4	In prison there's a lot of rules and I mean a lot of rules.
0:42.4	Yeah there's rules for you guys inside but there's also rules for people like me who come into spend time here.
0:47.4	There's a big one around food. I can't share any food with you that I bring in and I can't eat your food.
0:54.4	And there's other ones too like there's only certain colors I can wear. There's only certain parts of the prison I can go to.
1:00.4	And in some ways they're not unlike some of the rules that affect you guys.
1:04.4	Yeah because there's only certain colors we can wear.
1:06.4	That's right you guys always have to wear blue and that's when the reasons I can't because I can't blend in.
1:10.4	You can't wear green, you can't wear brown because those are employee colors.
1:15.4	So yeah you do have that.
1:17.4	And I mean it's a lot of stuff. I mean I can only go to certain parts of the prison. I have to be in my cell at a certain time to be counted.
1:25.4	I go to a child every day at a certain time.
1:28.4	You know what there is something I can do that you can't do.
1:30.4	Yeah you can leave.
1:31.4	Well that is true but I can flush the toilet as many times as I want to.
1:35.4	Yeah we only got two flushes within a five minute period so you have to. I mean have to time it out.
1:41.4	Yeah let's not go too deep into that one.
1:43.4	Okay okay so and it's a lot of stuff like we can only have six cubic feet of property.
1:48.4	Which reminds me how big are the cells actually. I think we made a mistake.
1:52.4	We made a mistake. I know I said it's four by nine. It's actually four and a half by 10.8 feet.
2:00.4	I guess it was important that we were accurate about that.
	...

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