Hidden Mirrors with Alan Huffman

Alan Huffman
  • 5.0 (6)
  • DOCUMENTARY
  • WEEKLY 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

  2. EPISODE 2

    Hidden Mirrors with Alan Huffman — "Deciding What to Read"

    Ten new members join the book club at Wilkinson County Correctional Facility, and their arrival reshapes the room. As host Alan Huffman goes around the circle asking what each man likes to read — biographies, westerns, mysteries, Christian books, true crime — a portrait emerges of readers searching for something real, something that moves, something that might explain the choices that led them here. The selection process is rarely simple. In a club of 25, tastes range from vampire novels to Malcolm X, from Harry Potter to Lonesome Dove. But this session takes an unexpected turn when a new member named Dollar quietly shares that Natchez author Greg Iles — whose sprawling, history-soaked Mississippi thrillers the club has long admired — just died. The news lands hard. Dollar knew him personally, had coached football with him, had ridden in the ambulance after his accident years ago. From that moment of grief comes a rare convergence: another new member, who goes by 69, nominates Iles' The Bone Tree — a 900-page mystery novel woven through with KKK ties, organized crime, and threads that reach all the way to the Kennedy assassination. It's the second book in a trilogy they haven't started. None of that matters. The vote is nearly unanimous. This episode is about how a book gets chosen, and what that process reveals: about appetite, attention, and what these men are really looking for between the lines. Books mentioned in this episode: The Bone Tree by Greg Iles | Station 11 by Emily St. John Mandel | Where the Line Bleeds by Jesmyn Ward | A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah | The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas | War by Sebastian Junger | No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy | James by Percival Everett | Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury | Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut | The Autobiography of Malcolm X

    25 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

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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