‘Death always feels imminent’: a moving Netflix documentary on prison, music and forgiveness

In Songs from the Hole, a man convicted of murder when he was a teenager finds healing in music during his sentence

In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to “the hole” – solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a fellow teenager outside a nightclub in his home town of Long Beach, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief – for what he had done, for what had been done to him.

In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest. A talented singer and rapper, he began to compose songs on notebook paper, along with treatments for imagined music videos. His lyrics that grappled with healing and reckoning – how to maintain self-worth in the face of devastating interpersonal and systemic violence, how to reconcile the worst thing you’ve ever done with your dignity as a human being. The prison kept Jacobs in the hole for 2.5 months – far longer than the 15 days the United Nations recognizes as torture. “Being in here, death always feels imminent,” Jacobs says in a recorded prison phone call at the beginning of the remarkable new documentary Songs from the Hole. “I have to manufacture hope. And the way I manufacture hope is by writing music.”

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