55: Earlonne Woods
Source: San Mateo County Libraries
About Earlonne
Earlonne Woods has led an improbable path through life. He was raised in South Central LA, the same hood, or group of hoods, that Dr Dre and Snoop brought to the mainstream in the early 90s. Like Dre, he was from a broken home. His father was a violent alcoholic who wasn't around much, and his mother was a postal worker who struggled to make ends meet. So Earlonne and his older brother spent time on the streets. When he was just nine years old, Earlonne lifted up a faulty railroad crossing gate to allow cars to pass. Unfortunately for him, that was a federal crime. Adding insult to injury, the arresting officers claimed he was charging each car a dollar to go by, despite the fact that he didn't have a penny on him when he was arrested.
And like Snoop, Earlonne was attracted to the gang life. When he was just a kid, E and his friends Julian and Juan created their own gang, the Crip Boys, taking the name from the local gang Shackboy Crip. It was mostly harmless, but the older kids eventually noticed E and he joined their gang, which by that time was the 76 East Coast Crips operating on the east side of LA. At 14, he started selling weed and then cocaine. It was 1985 and Earlonne was experiencing the crack epidemic in real time. He didn't just have a front row seat, he was on the stage. When he was 15, Earlonne committed his first robbery with his brother, who had gone from selling drugs to robbing drug dealers, and at 17, he was convicted as an adult for the kidnapping and robbery of a drug dealer and sentenced to 10 years. After serving six, he was released in 1995.
On December 28, 1997, after a botched robbery attempt, Earlonne and his best friend Furman “F-Dog” Little found themselves in a police chase and, after losing control of the car, they jumped out to run. The police opened fire. 41 shots later E and F-Dog were hit. E was lucky. The bullet just missed his heart. F-dog was not so lucky. Hit in the back five times, he died at the scene. At the hospital, Earlonne had to call Furman's wife, the mother of a one-year-old and pregnant with their child, and tell her that her husband was gone.
But it got even worse. Unbeknownst to E, his juvenile convictions counted as his first two strikes under California's infamous three strikes law. This conviction for attempted second-degree robbery would be his third. He was sentenced to 31 years to life and another 26 to life for assault with a deadly weapon.
Dealing with his friend's death, Earlonne experienced unfamiliar emotions—loneliness, abandonment, bitterness, disappointment, shame, regret, fear, anxiety, anger. This would be his inflection point. He decided that he was done destroying whatever remained of his life. After over a dozen years and multiple attempts, E was finally transferred to San Quentin, a low-custody level two prison with a media lab. It was still prison, but for E it was practically Disneyland.
The prison's media lab was where he created the Ear Hustle podcast with prison volunteer Nigel Poor, a visual artist and photography professor at California State University. The two met when Nigel came to the prison to talk about photography and they immediately hit it off. They would record the show in San Quentin's media lab and use it to share the daily realities of life inside prison by those living it. On Nigel's suggestion, they entered the podcast into the Radiotopia podcast competition and, of the 1,536 contestants from 53 countries, they won. This meant the show would get picked up by Radiotopia and PRX, effectively giving them national distribution and access to more creative talent. The rest is history.
Within months, Ear Hustle, which is prison slang for eavesdropping, was at the top of the iTunes podcast charts and millions of people, yours truly included, devoured each new episode, ready to be taken inside, as the tagline went. It was an incredibly honest and completely unprecedented perspective.
The podcast set Earlonne free creatively. What he didn't see coming is that it would also help set him free physically. In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown commuted Earlonne’s sentence, citing his leadership and his work on the podcast.
He left San Quentin at 10 am on November 30, 2018, having served a total of 27 years in prison. He's been a free man for five years now and he's been busy. He still co-hosts Ear Hustle, which is celebrating its 100th episode with a sold-out tour. He and Nigel co-wrote a book called This Is Ear Hustle, which chronicles their journeys, and he advocates on behalf of those who have had their lives unfairly shattered by the Three Strikes Law.
He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Audio Reporting and has won multiple awards, including Apple Podcasts Creators we Love and the Authors Inside Hope Award, which he says is “the best award ever from my community.”