Hidden Mirrors with Alan Huffman

Alan Huffman
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  • DOCUMENTARY
  • TWICE-A-MONTH SERIES

In a maximum security prison in Mississippi, books are reshaping the conversation. Developed in collaboration with journalist Alan Huffman, Hidden Mirrors is a documentary-style podcast that explores the prison book club at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. For men serving time, books become more than words on a page. They become a way to be seen. And in a place built to strip people of their voices, this club helps them be heard.

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  1. EPISODE 1

    A Rare Record: Sebastian Junger, War, and a Prison That Went Silent

    The book club gathers to watch Restrepo—and the room fills with the sound of sustained gunfire echoing through a maximum-security prison. In this episode, the men discuss the documentary Restrepo, co-directed by Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington, a visceral companion to Junger's nonfiction book War, which the club read earlier. Filmed during a year embedded with a U.S. Army platoon at a remote Afghan outpost, Restrepo won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and was later nominated for an Academy Award. But A Rare Record is about more than war on screen. As the club looks ahead to a second season of the podcast, the men talk excitedly about sound design, T-shirts, and how Hidden Mirrors might give incarcerated people a public voice—only for that optimism to collide with a sudden and unexplained ban on further recording by prison officials. What follows is an account of how a fully approved podcast—endorsed by prison leadership, recorded with official permission, and even cleared for a planned CBS Sunday Morning segment—became a story the Mississippi Department of Corrections no longer wanted told. As prison administrators retreat, the podcast presses on using previously recorded sessions, transforming Hidden Mirrors into something unexpected: a rare, preserved record of voices that were meant to be heard, and then silenced. Inside the cinderblock room, the conversations continue—about books, rehabilitation, public perception, and the power of being listened to. Outside it, the ground is already shifting beneath the project. This is the beginning of Season Two—and the last season recorded inside the Wilkinson County prison.

    35 min
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In a maximum security prison in Mississippi, books are reshaping the conversation. Developed in collaboration with journalist Alan Huffman, Hidden Mirrors is a documentary-style podcast that explores the prison book club at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility. For men serving time, books become more than words on a page. They become a way to be seen. And in a place built to strip people of their voices, this club helps them be heard.

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