Behind the Scenes with Andrew Jarecki

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2:35Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. As many of you will know, we did a seven-part series last fall called The Alabama Murders, the story of the death of a preacher's wife in the Shoals in northwestern Alabama 35 years ago, and the tragic reverberations of that case. I honestly think it's one of the best things we've ever done on Revisionist History. And almost the exact time that our series dropped, HBO aired a brilliant documentary called The Alabama Solution. The Revisionist History series was about the death penalty in Alabama.

3:08The Alabama Solution was about the prison system in Alabama. We have record numbers of people leaving out of here in body bags. They don't want the public to see what's really going on on the inside. How can a journalist go into a war zone but can't go into a prison in the United States of America? The state is selling one lawsuit after another. There's no consequences for their actions. There's an argument that there is some systemic problem within all of our facilities, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

3:41The two projects fit together almost perfectly. So I called up the director of the documentary, Andrew Jarecki, and said, Do you want to sit down for a conversation? And he said yes. And so we got together at Honor Fest in Brooklyn for a long talk about Alabama and filmmaking and all kinds of other things. If the name Andrew Jarecki seems familiar to you, it's because he's one of the preeminent documentarians of our time. He did Capturing the Freedmen's, The Jinx, A Brilliant, Brilliant Guy.

4:12Here's our conversation.

4:15Andrew, welcome to Brooklyn. Thank you. Thank you for doing this. The reason you and I are on stage is that back in the fall, we released a seven-part series on revisionist history called The Alabama Murders. And almost at exactly the same time, you released a documentary on HBO called The Alabama Solution. Our series was about a capital punishment case. Your series was about the Alabama prison system. And it was this marvelous instance of two works that overlapped but didn't overlap.

4:50And I texted you and said, We should have a conversation. And here we are. And I found your documentary extraordinary. And I was just telling you backstage, I'm not someone who listens, watches a lot of documentaries, but I have seen all of yours. Capturing the Freedmen's, Jinx. This is the best in my mind. Thank you. And I was curious, I would like you to start, tell us how you came to do a story about the Alabama prison system.

5:20Because I suspect it's not a straight line. You didn't sit down one day and say, I want to do a story about the Alabama prison system. Yeah, I think nothing's a straight line.

5:30Certainly for me. And I was noticing also your podcast around that same time. And I was kind of holding back because I thought, is this going to influence what we're working on? Just because it's hard when you're making one thing and then somebody else does something else. And especially if it's a smart person, you're like, what if they do this better? What do they have an idea? And then I'm drawn to that idea or something like that. But I did get to listen to it. And it's really superb and extremely familiar to me.

6:03So I, you know, when I was making Capturing the Freedmen's, I had reason to go into Dannemora Correctional Facility in upstate New York. And I found that the visit was so punishing just as a visitor. Everything about it was so difficult and brutal. And then when I saw the waiting room and I saw how people were being treated there, I just thought, I think I need to get deeper into this prison. And I wasn't able to do that.

6:33But then over the years, I just visited a lot of prisons. And I was really amazed at how poorly we do this. But I never really understood the Alabama system because it's so secretive. I mean, I would say all prisons in the U.S. are sort of treated like black sites. And, you know, you drive down the highway and you see a little metal sign that says XYZ Correctional Facility in upstate New York or someplace. And you think, well, I probably don't need to drive down there.

7:04If anything really bad's happening, you know, somebody will tell me about it. But that presupposes that you will be able to read it in a paper. You will be able to see a television show that explains it. And that's not the case because the press is really not allowed to visit prisons. There's a great line from one of your characters in your documentary, one of the prisoners, who says, isn't it crazy that if you're a journalist, you can go to a war zone, but you can't go to a prison in your own country?

7:34Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can visit a war zone and you can't go to a prison in the United States of America. And so I was always curious and then didn't think I would ever get a chance to do it. And then oddly, my daughter, who was like 14, she went to Dalton and at Dalton, they had a really good speaker program and they had brought in a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton, who had been wrongfully convicted in Alabama and had been in this prison system for like 30 years.

8:06And she said, you know, I think you should read this book with me because I think, you know, you're interested in this stuff. And then we read the book together and we just sort of spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery. We went to Montgomery. We didn't know anybody. We almost accidentally met a man who was almost 80 years old, who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, appointed by George Wallace. I think he was like George Wallace's one black friend because he had to have one.

8:39And so I asked him to have dinner with us. So we sat and had dinner and I started asking him questions and he was kind of reluctant to tell me too much, but I could also tell he had a lot of pain because he goes into these prisons all the time. So he knows what's happening in the prisons, but he's afraid that if he tells me too much, then I'm going to get too nosy and then maybe he's going to get kicked out of the prisons because we start. So, but I could tell he didn't want to let me leave either. And so we had this little standoff for a while

9:11where I was asking questions and he said, well, why don't you just, you know, come back and you can see for yourself. And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. They're not going to let me into the Alabama prison system. And he said, well, just come in without a camera, just come in and volunteer and we'll give out hygiene packages and food and so I said, all right, maybe I'm going to do that. Well, if I do come back, what will I see? And I could tell that he was sort of thinking about whether he wanted to say this thing that he was going to say to me because he knew if he said the right thing, I would come back.

9:41And if he didn't, maybe I wouldn't. And he said, if you come back, I'll take you on the death row at Holman prison and you'll see it's a slave ship. And that was a very important kind of moment for me. That was seven years ago. And I think it's the reason that line was the reason I went back because I just thought, well, whatever this is, I have to see. And then I went back and you'll see in the film, we sort of get access until we don't.

10:13But in the course of going into Easterling prison, we start hearing from these men who are saying, look, this visit you're making here, I'm not supposed to be talking to you, but this is a curated visit, right? They're showing you just what they want you to see. But see that building over there? That's where they do solitary confinement. They're men that have been in there for five years or seven years at a time, seeing nobody. And see that building over there is the Y dorm. That's the behavior modification dorm. And somebody was just killed there by a guard.

10:44And we just started to understand how bad it was. And then last thing that happened is, you know, we get kicked out. And then we thought we didn't know how we're going to tell the story until we discovered that there was this network of people inside who had contraband cell phones and had access to a charger, were borrowing a charger from a friend and would have to put the cell phones up when the guards came. But it was our only window into this very secretive system. Had anyone, I want to pause on that for a moment, because one of the many remarkable,

11:17the most remarkable thing about the documentary from a technical standpoint is that it is largely shot in FaceTime, right? Or in video calls. Various things, yeah. I don't know what percentage of the movie ends up being. 30. 30% of the movie is just the prisoners FaceTiming with you. And you, had this, has this been done before? I don't, I mean, I don't know of it having been done before because it's such, it was such an unusual situation,

11:48not only because the men had access to cell phones, but because they had collected all this material over years that showed what was really happening in the system and showed episodes of, you know, really shocking episodes. I mean, when I saw it, I thought, you know, this is, it's like watching Titicot Follies. You're looking at a whole segment of the population that's just been abandoned and not just abandoned, but also harmed. And then we discovered that there were these men inside

12:19who were leaders, who were really civil rights leaders who had been managing like a nonviolent protest movement for years, even before we got there. And so we had the benefit of, you know, it was like talking to Mandela on Robin Island on a cell phone. So I want to pause on this because I think it's a really important point. And I'm, I was naive enough about documentaries that it hadn't occurred to me before, but with the notion that you were, the narrative engine of this documentary

12:51is the videos being recorded by the prisoners themselves in real time and being sent to you. And with that, you overcome what has always been the biggest problem with documentaries, right? Which is, you're telling a story after the fact in any, almost always in documentaries, any video that you're capturing, unless you get some archival, you're having, you're talking to people as they reconstruct something that happened far away and long ago. This, all of that artificiality is gone from Alabama Solution.

13:23You're right there in the prison with these guys. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was, it was an enormously eye-opening and I would say violent experience to be drawn into that and to understand that the only way that these people can get away with treating human beings this way is if it's in darkness. You know, you can't, you can't do this if the public knows that you're doing it. There's even, even a jaded public in Alabama

13:55who, you know, as you know very well, Alabama is sort of inured to certain kinds of indignities. And, you know, they're very propagandized group, you know, it's sort of very tough on crime and the politicians really like weaponize the crime victims to just have this constant narrative. It's like watching cops 24 hours a day. It's just an advertisement for poor people are crazy and dangerous. And so being able to,

14:27to eliminate that layer, you know, that, that propaganda layer, you know, there's a great line. I mean, one of the leaders in the film, Robert Earl Council, who goes by Kinetic Justice, says, you know, I'm in prison. I'm supposed to lie. I'm supposed to exaggerate. I'm supposed to make up excuses. So that narrative is so strong that unless we can tell the story directly to people, they're just going to assume that it's not true.

14:58And, you know, and I, I, I felt like going into the prisons there, I was far more, you know, they would say, oh, well, don't talk to the men because they're very dangerous and they're going to tell you lies and so on. And I, I felt so much more comfortable talking to the men who were incarcerated than the guards. Well, how long did it take for you to realize that the movie was going to be constructed out of these, the FaceTime videos the prisoners were sharing with you? Well, you know, my biggest anxiety was that we were not going to be able to get enough material talking to the men.

15:30Obviously, this archival material where you can see really telling things that happen. There was an embarrassment of traumatic events. I mean, it was just a, that was like terabytes worth of that material.

15:48But being able to talk directly to the men was once you do it, once you're talking to them for five minutes, you think this is the only thing I want to watch. I, I, I don't want to hear anybody. I don't want to hear experts. You know, we had this sex, Stuart Pontier was my partner in making the jinx who's sitting here right there. Um, he and I talked a lot about experts when we were making the jinx. You know, we had access to the people that were in Bob Durst's life and we had access to people that were present during crimes

16:18and helpful in crimes and so on. And so it just was, every time we'd interview somebody who would say, well, let me tell you how this works or something, it just wasn't very effective. And in this case, it was, it would have been absurd. You know, there was, we wanted to talk to some of the system actors. So we ended up getting access to like the attorney general, who's an incredible cinematic villain. And it is, I want to, I want to talk to him in more detail. I want to come back to him. Just pause on that because the, anyway, keep going. And by the way,

16:49I particularly enjoyed, and my mind was a little bit blown by hearing Steve Marshall, the attorney general in your podcast, um, you know, speaking as the convincingly, right? As the authority who's explaining how, you know, he's there for crime victims and they've waited 35 years for justice and all that stuff. And this is a guy who's presiding over death camps in an American state. Um, but he was something, he was somebody that had to be there. So to, to pause for a moment,

17:21the movie is about, it's a, in general, an investigation of the extraordinary brutality inside the Alabama prison system. And in particular, about the murder of a young man at the hands of a guard, of a sadistic guard. And then the coverup that ensues that you're able to uncover by virtue of these calls with the, um, with the prisoners inside the same institution. So it's simultaneously a kind of Optin Sinclair like expose

17:52of a institution and also a murder mystery. Um, and I'm, and the murder mystery, which, I don't know whether we should give away the, one of the key kind of moments in the, in the movie, but you get, it takes a surprising and horrifying twist as you're in the middle of it. You think, you think you're investigating one murder and then you end up investigating two. Yeah. Um, and I'm, how, how far into the film

18:23was the twist? Well, we didn't know what we were making. We never know what we're making, right? Um, and sometimes today, I think in documentary world, you know, somebody, some streamer or something will send you a, like a, an email saying like, you know, you need to make this film and I almost never open them, but when I do open them, there's always like a deck and the deck literally will say to you, you know, here are the main characters and we've already made agreements with them

18:53and this is what they're going to say and then, you know, here's what your plot line is going to be. Um, and I, I just think like, now that should be an AI film, like you already know what it is and you should just AI that thing and some people watch it. Um, but the whole idea is the journey, right? The whole idea is that we don't know what's going to happen. You know, when I was making Capturing the Freedmen's, I thought I was making a film about professional children's birthday party entertainers in New York City and then, you know, it turned out to be something that was

19:23radically different from that because you discover something along the way. Um, when we were making the jinx, we, we knew that Bob Durst wanted to talk and that was interesting enough for me and Zach. What we found, the fact that he wanted to talk enough that it would lead us down enough paths that we would discover evidence that he would get arrested for murder the day before the last episode was totally unpredictable. Um, and that's why you do it, right? I mean,

19:53so, um, in this case, we had just gotten a text message from one of the men inside and the, the, I guess the only precursor of that was that we had been looking at all of the pro se lawsuits filed by prisoners, you know, lawsuits that are filed without the benefit of a lawyer, but these guys are kind of incredible lawyers. Some of them are really extraordinary, um, sort of jailhouse lawyers, but very, very sophisticated. Um, and we had

20:25been looking at all these lawsuits because we wanted to see who are the guards that are coming up repeatedly in these lawsuits. And we had found this one guard named Rod Gadsden, Roderick Gadsden, and he was named in, I think, 24 different brutality suits. And you have to understand, like, bringing one of these lawsuits in prison is, it's, it's the most optimistic and, and, and, and kind of absurdist thing

20:55because there's no money in it. They never get an award. There are conversations that happen like, okay, well, this guy got his finger intentionally cut off in a cell door by a guard, but how much is a finger really worth? You know, maybe it's, it's $5,000. It's very hard to get a lawyer to cover that. We have lawyers said, that would say to us along the way, like, find me a, you know, a murder. That might be worth it. That might be worth my getting into it. So, in this particular case, Rod Gadson's name had kept coming up and then one day, Melvin Ray

21:25texts Charlotte, my co-director, and says, hey, we understand somebody got beaten very badly at Donaldson Prison and he's currently at UAB Hospital so he was moved off the campus to the hospital. So, Charlotte and I just got in a car in Birmingham and we just drove over to the hospital. We walked in and I like took my iPhone and I stuck it in my pocket and, you know, moved it around a little bit and they said, oh, you got to go up to the fourth floor and we went up there

21:56and by the time we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died. So, he had been, he had, and we didn't know how that had happened other than that he had been beaten and then we went to find his mother because often the prison doesn't tell the family members if somebody's been killed in prison especially if it's done by a guard. If the guard is responsible, they immediately scramble all the witnesses and they will say, well, let's not tell his mother for two weeks. We'll move these guys around and we'll give this guy an incentive

22:27to go to a different facility and we'll help this other guy because they just don't want the evidence and in that case we went to Sandy Ray's house. She had just been with her son hours before that and had taken him off life support and she said, you guys are making a film and we said, yeah. She said, well, I want to help you do it. I don't want this to happen to any other mother and so right now they're lying to me. I know the prison's calling me right now and they're lying to me about what happened so show me how to

22:57record my phone calls. So we got on her phone and we showed her how to record a phone call and then she said, by the way, there are no motels here because Uniontown only has 400 people in it. so I have this spare room so Charlotte just got her duffel bag and just moved in for a couple weeks into Sandy's house, which is why. Waiting for the call to come. Not just that call but just watching how Sandy was discovering what had really happened to her son and eventually getting a call from somebody inside the prison who was a whistleblower

23:28who doesn't even want to identify himself but says, you know, this is not, this was not what they're describing. While watching, my first kind of like technical question was, you had, you're there in the room on camera with the mom when she gets the call from the state or the Department of Corrections. I was like, how on earth were they there in the room? Like, I didn't understand technically, now I know how it happened. They were victims of their own because they built a delay in order to build a cover-up and in so doing they destroyed

23:59their cover-up. Weirdly. Well, yeah, and by the way, in terms of being shot with your own gun, the contraband cell phones that are in the prison are all sold to the inmates in the prison by the guards, right? As a matter of fact, when I started to discover how many, just how much drugs were coming into the prison or this enormous cache of cell phones that were coming to the prison, I was talking to one of the prisoners

24:30and I said to him, you know, where's all this coming from? And he looked at me like I was an idiot and he said, you know we don't leave, right?

24:39So clearly, the people that come and go every day are the ones that are going out and getting drugs and going out and buying cell phones and bring them in. So it's kind of incredibly ironic that the tool that the men are using to identify the crimes that are being committed by the ostensible law enforcement officers are sold to them by aforementioned law enforcement officers. I had a lot of difficulty even after I had spent months and months and months doing my Alabama project. I was just aghast. I don't know why was I,

25:11I was just, something about seeing it because I only heard, my whole thing was just listening to people tell me stories, right? I didn't see anything. What would be the point of doing a podcast? I suddenly, there's a scene in the doc when, I don't know why this scene has stayed with me but I've forgotten one of your characters gets sent to solitary and he's on the phone and he shows you these jars he has that are full, he's telling you why he hangs

25:43his food up on, in a bag high off the ground on his prison cell and then, and then he gets in trouble for it every day but he says, well the reason I do that is because of these guys and he shows you jars that have little live rats inside of it and then he shows you his toilet and you see rats swimming in his toilet and he says, I caught 11 of these last night. 11 caught in one night. 11 caught in one night. They keep my food in a laundry bag hanging from the bars and they write me this one there is for hanging things

26:13from the bars but if I put it on the floor they'll get it. Rats.

26:21See, 11 caught in one night. And it was, that was a point where I was like, Jesus.

26:30I don't know why that's not the worst, by the way, not even close to being the worst thing that happens but something about the visual of realizing there are people who will happily tolerate conditions like that inside a prison. Like the administration is fine with that somehow. That somehow got me. Well, first of all, I can tell from your description that everyone's going to run out and immediately go to HBO and watch this film so that they can see. But it is,

27:00it is, it is extraordinary that, that the, and I have to say just, I think one of the things that in your podcast that was so telling to me and I really think it brings these stories together is your postulate of the moral failure cascade, you know, that, that you have a series of small

27:30or larger or growing problems and events that happen and then one thing leads to another and it gets worse and worse and worse. And I think, you know, people get used to it. You know, they get to the point where they say, well, I don't know, I mean, how many people are really, you know, I mean, some people are going to die, right? Well, I don't know, what if we have the deadliest prison system in America at some point or we're going to look at that and say, like, maybe we're doing something wrong. But here you have Steve Marshall,

28:01the one person that we share in the podcast and also in the film, who says, you know, I've been told that there's some kind of systemic problem in all of our facilities, right? We've just been watching an hour of the most punishing material. You can't imagine prison after prison after prison, Donaldson prison, Kilby prison, Bibb prison, each one of these places, Holman, where they have 240 people on the death row, and your guy was,

28:32right, before he's executed.

28:37You've been watching that for an hour, and then here's Steve Marshall, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Alabama, and he says, I've been told that there's some systemic problem in all of our facilities, and I wholeheartedly disagree with that.

28:52And it's not just willful blindness. I mean, it's just intentional cruelty. It's a willingness to preside over a system of death camps. They are death camps. We have to say that's what they are. Since we started working in the film, which was seven years ago, 1,500 people have died in that little prison system. You know, they have 20,000 people in the prison system. They have another 25,000 in the jails in Alabama where people die regularly.

29:23And somehow people are dying of highest level of drug overdose of any prison system in the country. Not that there are not lots of other horrific ones. Highest numbers of suicide, highest level of sexual assault, and just the brutality of the situation. You can't run that without knowing it. You can't say, well, I wasn't aware of it because there were enough layers between me and the people that were actually in the

29:54trenches doing the business of killing people.

29:58After the break, more from my conversation with Andrew Jarecki.

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