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Hello, 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.
The Alabama Solution was about the prison system in Alabama.
We had 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.
The 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 On Air 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, The Jinx, a brilliant, brilliant guy.
Here's our conversation.
Andrew, 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.
And 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.
Captain of 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, because 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, certainly for me.
And I was noticing also your podcast around that same time and I was sort of I was kind of holding back because I thought is this going to influence what we're working on?
You know, just because it's hard, like 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?
Or 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 it's really superb and and and and and, extremely familiar to me.
So I, 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.
But 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 us 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, If anything really bad is 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?
Yeah, 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...
I 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.
Alabama and had been in this prison system for like 30 years.
And 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 and We went to Montgomery.
We didn't know anybody.
We almost accidentally met a uh, a man who was almost 80 years old, who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, appointed by George Wallace.
Um, I think he was like George Wallace's one black friend.
Um, cause he had to have one.
Um, And 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 –.
But I could tell he didn't want to let me leave either.
And so we had this little standoff for a while where 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.
And 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.
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 we sort of get access until we don't.
But 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 i 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.
And we just started to understand how bad it was.
And then last year 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 uh, had contraband cell phones and had access to a charger or 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, the 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.
Has this been done before?
I mean I don't know of it having been done before because it was such an unusual situation, not 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 like watching Titic at 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 who 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 Robben Island on a cell phone.
So I want to pause on this because I think it's a really important point.
And 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 is 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.
Almost always in documentaries, any video that you're capturing, unless you get some archival, you're talking to people as they reconstruct something that happened far away and long ago.
All of that artificiality is gone from Alabama Solution.
You're right there in the prison with these guys.
Yeah.
I mean, 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 do this if the public knows that you're doing it.
Even a jaded public in Alabama who 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 to um, 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 um, robert earl counsel, 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.
And you know, and 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 felt so much more comfortable talking to the men who were incarcerated than the guards.
Yeah.
Well, how long did it take for you to realize that the movie was going to be constructed out of these 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
Obviously 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.
Um, but 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.
Um, you know, we had this sex to her.
Ponte 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.
We had access to the people that were in Bob Durst's life and we had access to people that were present during crimes and helpful in crimes and so on.
And so it just was.
Every time we'd interview somebody, we'd say well, let me tell you how this works, or something.
It just wasn't very effective.
And in this case, it would have been absurd.
We wanted to talk to some of the system actors, so we ended up getting access to the attorney general, who's an incredible person.
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, I I particularly enjoyed and 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 the?
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.
But he was somebody that had to be there.
So to pause for a moment, the movie is about, it's in general an investigation of the extraordinary brutality inside America. 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 cover-up that ensues that you're able to uncover by virtue of these calls with the prisoners inside the same institution.
So it's simultaneously a kind of Upton Sinclair-like expose of an institution and also a murder mystery.
And I 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.
And I'm, how, how far into the film was the twist of, Well, we didn't know what we were making.
We never know what we're making, right?
And sometimes today, I think, in documentary world you know somebody, some streamer or something, will send you like 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 and this is what they're going to say.
And then, you know, here's what your plot line is going to be.
And 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.
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, 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 radically different from that, because you discover something along the way.
When we were making The Jinx, 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 and he would get arrested for murder the day before the last episode.
It was totally unpredictable um, and that's why you do it right, i mean, it's it so.
Um, in this case, we had just gotten a text message from one of the men inside, And 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 sort of jailhouse lawyers, but very, very sophisticated.
And we had been looking at all these lawsuits and 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 Gadsen Roderick Gadsen 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 the most optimistic and kind of absurdist thing, because 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 $5,000.
It's very hard to get a lawyer to cover that.
We have lawyers that would say to us along the way, like, find me a, you know, a murderer.
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 texts Charlotte, my co-director, and says Hey uh uh, 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 and 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.
Uh, And we went up there and by the time we got there we found that this young man, Steven 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 to go to a different facility and we'll help this other guy out.
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 record 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, you know, I have this spare room.
So Charlotte just like, 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 you know.
A call from somebody inside the prison who was a whistleblower, who doesn't even want to identify himself but says you know, this is not—this was not what they're describing.
I wonder 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 their 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 and 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?
So 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.
I 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 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 his food up in a bag high off the ground on his prison cell.
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, laundry bag, hanging from the bars.
And they write me disciplinaries for hanging things from the bars.
But if I put it on the floor, they'll get it.
Rats.
It's 11 o'clock in one night.
And that was a point where I was like, Jesus Christ.
I 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 episode film so that they can see um, but it, it is um, it is.
It is extraordinary that that the and and i have to say just, i think one of the things that in your um podcast that was so telling to me and i really think it brings these stories together is your postulate of the um uh, moral failure cascade.
You know that you have a series of small or 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?
Are we going to look at that and say, like, maybe we're doing something wrong?
But here you have Steve Marshall, the 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 right before he was executed.
You'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.
Yeah.
And 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 on the film, which was seven years ago, 1500 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.
And somehow people are dying of, you know, 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, you know, actually in the trenches doing the business of killing people.
After the break, more from my conversation with Andrew Jarecki.
Hi, I'm pianist Manny X.
On my new podcast, Classical Music Happy Hour, my guests and I talk about life and music, and we also like to play games.
Is it a composer, or is it cheese?
Oh, I know this game.
Knowing Mozart, it's probably all of the above.
It's all of the above.
Is this a fake, or was this a flop?
Flop.
That's more mistakes than I made in my last recital.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Let's talk a little bit about Alabama, because I'm curious about what you, what was your level of understanding knowledge, familiarity with Alabama before you did this project?
It was probably the state I knew the least about in the union.
You know, it's just not something.
If you grew up in New York City and you study history, you're not spending a ton of time on Alabama.
I knew a little bit.
You know like they're.
I don't know like the state motto of.
You know a typical American state will be like the sunshine state or the show me state.
You know, Alabama's motto is we dare defend our rights.
Yeah.
You know, which is really like if you want to come and have an opinion, you can go fuck yourself.
Right. we're not interested in your opinion.
Yeah.
We're just going to do our thing.
And certainly we don't want you telling us how to deal with our Negroes or our population of prisoners, or our crime, or you know any of it.
It's just, there's a, there's a wall.
I'm not sure whether that's more or less egregious than New Jersey calling itself the garden state, but where are these gardens in New Jersey?
I haven't yet seen anything along the turnpike, but uh, It's a hard.
You know I've done I think that I have done more podcast episodes of Origins History that are situated in Alabama than in any other state.
I'm drawn to this place.
And for the same reason, I feel like It's not the United States.
It's something, it is within the United States, but not of the United States.
Or maybe I'm being too kind to the United States.
It is clearly in some ways a foreign country.
It's kind of amazing.
You're saying that, because the chaplain who I visited and met and encouraged me to come back, Chaplain Browder, after I was in it for six months or the first year or two, and I stayed in touch with him constantly.
He's quite a bit older now.
He's seven years older than when I first met him, but he's still a very thoughtful guy.
And he said, I'm telling you, Andrew, Alabama ain't in these United States.
But then you ask yourself whether that's even right.
The reality is that upstate New York, Robert Brooks just got killed in upstate New York by corrections officers who beat him to death.
And the only reason we don't think it was natural causes or a drug overdose is because they were –
I don't even want to say dumb enough.
They were entitled enough to just leave their body cameras on because they just assumed that nobody was ever really going to try to figure out what happened to poor Robert Brooks, who was handcuffed when they beat him to death.
So it's happening in New York.
If you had put your dog in upstate New York in a kennel because you were going on holiday and you saw this, you would say I'm calling the ASPCA.
This is a total disaster.
Nobody can put their dog in this.
So it's not a whole lot better in a lot of these places.
Two things can be true simultaneously.
One is that, in general, the prison conditions in the United States are appalling compared to our peers around the world.
But there is something particular and unusual about Alabama that elevates Alabama even above its miserable peers.
And I'm wondering whether we can sort of, since we've both been immersed in this we can put our finger on what it is.
And I'm wondering I'm thinking about Steve Marshall, which is, if you I don't know I'm making this up but if you sat down with the Attorney General of New York State they, they would have the good grace to be embarrassed about what was happening in the prisons.
Steve Marshall, and I want you to talk a little bit about your interview with Steve Marshall.
Steve Marshall, when confronted with these questions, wasn't even remotely embarrassed.
In fact he had the gall when he had to give that one quote from him about.
When you ask him about Christian grace, he says I believe in Christian grace, but that doesn't mean somebody should get out of prison.
I mean, look, I think anybody can have a change of heart.
I'll say that.
I think God can invade somebody, I believe, in the concept of grace.
But grace itself doesn't mean release from prison.
Grace means that you're relieved from the burden of your sin.
It's not even that he's defiant.
It's that he thinks he's on the side of God, right?
Now, that is different.
Can you What are your thoughts on the peculiarity of Alabama?
And can you talk about, let's talk about Steve Marshall because you spent time with him.
Yeah.
How long was that interview?
I think that interview was shorter than most.
Maybe it was two hours.
By the way, this is why I love documentarians.
Your idea of shorter than most is two hours.
Yeah.
My idea of shorter than most is 10 minutes.
We do some sevens and some nines.
You know jesus yeah yeah, they're kicking.
Usually the wife is like standing in the corner and being like looking at the watch.
But steve marshall gave you two hours yeah, i mean, you know, the great thing about somebody like this is that they say the quiet part out loud.
There's no shame in it.
And I don't really know how he manages it, you know, as a self-proclaimed Christian.
I don't know how he goes and kisses his kids and says like daddy's upholding the law and so on.
Um, because he knows what the statistics are right, let's say he just doesn't.
He forces himself or he prevents himself from from having access to the prisons.
You know, you can always put some kind of operatic in between you and the prisons and then you say i don't know, i saw the reports and it doesn't look like it's all that bad.
Um, so i don't know how he describes it to himself.
But And I think you know politicians are kind of will-o'-the-wisp and you know he used to be a Democrat and then now he's a Republican.
And then he was recently so Republican that he was one of the guys who – one of the local state officials who came to New York and put on the red tie and the Trump outfit and went down to – lower Manhattan and start talking about how Trump was being railroaded by the justice system and so on.
So he's always auditioning.
And by the way, right now, Steve Marshall's trying to run for Senate.
He's trying to run for Tommy Tuberville's seat in the Senate.
So the football coach, Tommy Tuberville, became a US Senator from Alabama.
He's the one that did not know that there were three branches of government, right?
He did not have a lot of training.
He just thought it was offense and defense.
Exactly.
What would you do with this third branch?
Special teams.
That's what's happening in the federal government, too.
They're getting rid of some of the branches, I hear.
We have too many branches.
We're going to doge those branches right out.
But I think he just imagines...
First of all, I think he's very politically expeditious.
You know, he wants to become a U.S. senator.
He wants to be the guy that's the tough on crime guy.
He, he.
He's sort of made book with this organization called Vocal in Alabama, which is victims of crime and leniency, which is literally like a group of women who are crime victims, who had a crime happen in their family and they go to every parole hearing and they don't know the people.
They get a little card before they go there.
We sort of embedded with them and maybe should make a film about them.
And they go to a parole hearing where you have a guy who's been locked up for 25 years.
He's an ordained minister.
He's taken every conceivable class.
He's mentored 500 young men that have been in there.
And this woman will get up and say, you know, I'm here to protest the parole of Kevin Johnson.
And, you know, he committed a crime in 1973.
They have no idea what it is.
They just know he committed a crime and he should not be paroled.
And then they stand in front of the parole board and they say to the three members of the parole board if you let this man out and he reoffends, It will be on your neck and everyone will know that you did that.
And, you know, that's one of the things that drove Alabama's parole rate to 8%.
Is that the lowest in the country?
Yeah, it was at that time.
It's improved a little bit.
And I think it's improved in part, you know, because of the work in and around the film.
Because, you know, among other things, it was a lawsuit that that was sparked by the film.
This class action lawsuit, in which kinetic justice Robert Earl Counsel is the lead plaintiff, that really calls out Alabama for having a system of convict leasing.
Because a lot of people don't realize A that Alabama and many states like it benefit from.
Let's say, just in the case of Alabama, 450 million a year in unpaid labor.
And the men inside are forced to provide this labor.
And by forced.
Maybe there's not a man with a bullwhip that's standing over them, but it's in some ways every bit as bad, because if you refuse to work, then you can be, you can be given a disciplinary which can extend your sentence.
You can be placed in solitary, which happens a lot in Alabama.
So basically the UN says solitary confinement for more than 15 days is torture.
They're putting people in for years at a time.
Um, And you could be moved to an even more violent facility than the one that you're in.
So it is a coerced, forced labor.
You can't be sick one day.
You can't do any of that.
But I think what people don't understand is the prisoners in Alabama and some other states.
It's not that they're being forced to work in the prison.
Maybe reasonable people could say oh, maybe you should be sweeping the floor in the prison if you're working in the prison.
But they also get leased out to the governor's mansion where they clean the floors and they polish the tiles and they do the landscaping.
They also get leased out to road crews, construction crews.
The state makes money from all of that.
They issue invoices, which you can see in the film.
You know, this is for X dollars an hour.
And then they pay the men $2 a day to do sanitation work or something like that.
And then they send them out to work at McDonald's.
They lease them to McDonald's.
They lease them to Burger King.
They lease them to the Hyundai parts company.
They lease them to the Budweiser distributorship.
So you know you go to the state fair in Alabama.
You know we have this kind of amazing shot of a guy in a corrections uniform wearing who's standing with a little girl and he is reaching into the duck pond and he takes a little duck out, a little baby duckling, and he hands it and the mother's clapping and is taking photographs.
And the chilling statistic behind that that Alabama does not track this, but we tracked it is that if you're considered safe enough to go out into the community to work at McDonald's or to work at the state fair, you have a statistically lower chance of being paroled than if you're somebody at a higher custody level.
Why?
Because you're economically valuable to them?
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And they don't track that statistic.
And I think Steve Marshall might be surprised if I said that, or he would say oh, that doesn't sound right.
And then we would say well, you know, there's a reason why you don't track that statistic, but it kind of makes sense right, the people that are out there.
And people.
There are all these anecdotal stories of people saying well, I was sick and I woke up in the morning and that guy came in and said you need to go out there and make me some money.
Yeah.
How I want to talk a little bit about the difference in the way that.
So you and I both, or your team and my team both began with a similar kind of question, which was how can we shed light on the practices of this very strange state?
And I was working in the podcast genre.
You're working in the documentary genre.
And both of us made very, very different choices.
And I wanted to reflect on one of the biggest differences, which is in our Alabama murderous, We spend an enormous amount of time on the backstory of our characters, our protagonists.
We really want you to know, we're telling the story of these two guys on death row.
We really wanted you to know about those guys.
We talked to them and who they were and what happened, you know, et cetera.
In your movie, We get that kind of backstory in passing, right?
There's a moment, for example, where you're talking about James Sayles, one of the principal characters in the documentary, and we learn why was he in one of the highest security prisons in Alabama.
Because he got 15 years for breaking into an unoccupied building.
It happens in like 10 seconds.
We learn a piece of information and then you move on, right?
Now, it's incredibly powerful in that little form.
But I'm curious, why do you do things that way?
Why is it that the form that you've chosen encourages you or directs you away from kind of luxuriating in the backstory the way that we do in the podcast world?
I mean, you know, if you look at Capturing the Freedmen's, there's just an enormous amount of archival material of that family, including going back, you know, 75 years to the you know family members that kind of came to this country.
And then in The Jinx, we have... lots of photographs but we also have moving pictures of Robert Durst when he was a kid and you get to see the awkwardness you get to see the feeling that this is a person who didn't particularly fit in and you see him you know in modern day you see him twitching Robert Durst has a lot of twitches And then you see a little, you know, film of him getting up on the diving board as a kid or, you know, somebody doing a movie of him like his mother.
And you see the same kind of twitches.
You see the early phases of what his... So I think that stuff is extremely valuable.
In this film I think that we had so many.
You know, there was 10 pounds of flour in a two-pound bag always.
It was always so hard to convey the tapestry of how we got here and try to incorporate everything from the slave labor to the parole, to why they weren't letting people out of the system, how they put people in the system, how people are when they're in the system, and then also try to have a narrative thread that was going to bring people along.
You know, because we used to have this expression just in the storytelling process.
Um, i always have a blackboard in my office and i and i, at the very beginning of this, when we started to see what we had, i wrote this like mnemonic device.
I said um, smitwit knows and.
And that stood for how do we not make the saddest movie in the world that no one ever sees?
And it was a real concern because you know you're dealing with this very dark material.
So we knew it had to have a very compelling narrative.
It needed to have, you know, we needed to have a story.
And that's like, you know, you got to keep telling yourself what is the story.
So you can only have enough room for this archival material to, Yeah, you do as much as you can.
And also some of those people, you know, it's kind of a deprived economy.
And a lot of these families of people who are incarcerated.
Just, you know, they don't have like extra room in their house where they have all the photo albums or they have a millimeter video or whatever.
Yeah, I was I was thinking and it's not a criticism at all.
I'm marveling about how you made a compelling story where I cared about the protagonists even though I knew so little about them.
That's the puzzle.
So I came away... So your main character is Stephen Davis.
White guy, seems like a very poor family.
And we briefly learn what his mom sells us in one sentence, why he's in prison.
That's all we get.
We don't know...
When his offense occurred, we don't know what his sentence was.
We don't know what his personality was.
We don't know anything about him.
We barely see him because he's dead 10 minutes in, right?
Whatever it is.
And yet, my concern over him and feelings for him sustain me through the entire movie.
In a million years I would never have thought I could tell a story like that, where My main character is someone the audience knows almost nothing about and who exits.
And yet I still care an hour later.
That's what I'm trying to get at.
How did you do that?
Well, I mean, you know, as a young storyteller, I think you're going to evolve.
You know, you're going to learn more about how to tell these stories.
And I'm looking forward to that.
But I think, you know, a little goes a long way.
We do see pictures of him as a child.
And I think that's extremely powerful.
You know, when you see somebody who you've been trained to believe is going to be a hardened, terrible criminal.
But we sort of know really what he was was a drug addict.
And now you see a picture of this young man with his hair shorn and his face pale and wearing a jumpsuit that's exactly what everybody else in the prison wears and he becomes totally homogenized and dehumanized.
And then you get to see a photograph of him as a child, you know, with a smile and just seeing pride on his face, or him starting to play Little League or something like that.
And then you're just reminded that I don't know.
I have somebody in my family who was playing Little League and then 10 years later was a drug addict.
You know, was playing Little League and 10 years later was an alcoholic and his life was falling apart.
So you make a connection to those people that goes beyond whatever their, you know, their crime was.
But you bring up an interesting point that I've not talked about regarding this film, which was that There were people who came to test screenings of the film and literally said the following
I'm uncomfortable if I don't know what crime they committed.
So could you have some kind of a device where, as soon as I see somebody on screen, there's some kind of a chyron or a little designator on the bottom that says murder one, or that says burglary, or that says
And I was so instructive to hear somebody say that, right?
And of course, you could have the debate with them or you could say so you're saying that it's okay for a prison guard to beat somebody to death.
You're going to make the evaluation of whether that's reasonable or not based on whether they had a burglary charge or an aggravated burglary charge.
Yeah.
And then they always say, well, no, no, no, of course, of course, of course, of course.
But they're revealing that they're propagandized.
They're revealing that, like, everybody wants safety.
Everybody wants their family to be safe.
Everybody doesn't, you know, people don't want people to rob their store or whatever.
But this idea that anything goes if somebody's a criminal, we're just going to suspend our humanity, we're going to suspend right.
And that's the basic idea of sort of the Constitution is you have this absolutely minimal level.
You're not supposed to be treated to cruel and unusual punishment, which is already kind of a you know, I know it when I see it kind of situation.
You know, but, well, if they committed a crime... then maybe they should just be locked up forever.
You know, does it make sense?
For you know, there are plenty of countries where the maximum sentence for any crime is 10 years.
Cause you say somebody commits a crime when they're 19 years old.
It's a completely different human being.
11 years, 12 years later, you know maybe, maybe 10 years is enough to reset that person and try to bring them back into civilization.
And yet Alabama has these three strikes laws that are locking people up for life without parole.
But this is a really interesting point which I think is worth dwelling on a little bit, which is that, as storytellers, so the urge when the people in the screening said I want to know what crime they committed, that was my urge when I watched it.
It's a natural human urge to want to know as much as possible about the person whose world you're.
And what we don't think about is what are we using that information for?
And how will that kind of information at the margin affect the quality of our moral judgments?
And what you're saying is the value of that.
Incremental information about these characters reduces the quality of our moral judgment.
It actually contributes to precisely the phenomenon you're trying to confront, which is people, regardless of who they are, deserve a certain level of respect and decency in the way we treat them right.
In other words, there is an obligation here on the part of the titration, and the limitation of information given by the storyteller is a hugely consequential question.
It's not just a storytelling question.
It's a moral question.
It's what do you want people to take home from this story, right?
In a profound way.
And like, so you shouldn't.
Now, I agree with you.
I had that impulse.
And then I thought about it and I was like, no.
No.
I don't need to know.
It is not relevant what Stephen Davis was in for.
It's like, it shouldn't matter.
Or it shouldn't matter with Robert.
Robert Earl.
Robert Earl.
Who was the one who had the rat swimming in the toilet?
Robert Earl.
Robert Earl, yeah.
But Robert Earl's crime.
I mean Robert Earl's crime.
Yeah, there's a guy and it's sort of undisputed that there was a guy trying to run him over with a car.
That's right.
And he was 19 and he had a gun, which everybody in Alabama has a gun, and he shot the guy and he prevented him from running him over.
In today's world, you know, that's like... Stay on your ground.
Yeah, right?
So there's no question that would have been a self-defense case but for the fact that the police went to incredible lengths to try to tie him into an earlier altercation that night because nobody died in.
But they were sort of trying to say well, he was involved in a robbery which he actually wasn't involved in.
Um, because that enables you to give him a life sentence because you can say it's capital murder.
Yeah.
So.
So I guess our our um, you know kind of uh theory going in was maybe we don't need to talk about the crimes at all.
And then we realized that there are certain crimes, right?
And Steve Marshall of the world will want you to assume that everybody's in there for this, right?
They say, oh, we've already let out all the nonviolent criminals.
That sounds like totally reasonable.
Well, yeah, I guess people that are nonviolent should be let out, right?
But in Alabama, I think in the rest of the country maybe we have like, maybe in the federal system we have like four crimes that are considered violent.
And in Alabama it used to be, you know 10, and then it was 20, and then it was 30, and now it's 44 crimes.
And they include entering an unoccupied building.
That's considered a violent crime.
So by redefining what a violent crime is, you get more and more and more people, and then you get to stand in front of a crowd and say we've let out all the good ones.
But Robert Earle.
I guess we concluded that we had to tell something about some of the crimes, because we felt like if the audience was going to really have to fall in love with Robert Earl which is not hard to do because man's a genius and he's an unbelievable human being then we would have to let people know that he's not Jeffrey Dahmer, that he's not somebody who's like a serial killer or a child killer.
And the percentage of people that are in prison who are serial killers or child killers is minuscule.
But if you're going to give the audience the desire to fall in love with somebody, they're going to hold back their empathy unless you can just give them a little bit of a pass, a little bit of a feeling like.
This is not one of those people that's just going to be released and then immediately go and murder somebody or push somebody in front of a bus.
We'll be right back.
What's the stage in the process where you're happiest?
It's a really good question and I think it's a question you have to ask in a kind of longitudinal way, because you're having the most fun in the very beginning because it's all new, and then you're halfway through it and it's like the dark night of the soul and you think it's a disaster.
And then you look back and you think oh, my god, you know that was the time.
And then you get further along and you solve a problem, and then that's the time and then you get to the end of the whole thing.
You look back and that's a different.
So i guess it's the question.
You know, if you ask the question over time, did you have a dark night of the soul moment with this documentary?
It lasted like seven years.
So you yeah, by definition.
But it wasn't so much.
I mean, there were plenty of times we thought I don't know whether this is going to work.
And you go to the best advisors you have and you show material and you just watch and see how people react.
And then you do, we do these other things like we'll do like a session with a whiteboard and the whole team of people that are working on the film will say okay, what are the five things that that i feel like if i, if these aren't in the movie, we've made a terrible mistake.
And then you end up with 35 things on the board and then you think, all right well, what is this telling me?
You just try to look at it a million different ways.
You know you kind of keep.
You know, next time you're in deep, dark depression on something, you just call me, because if you just I didn't have to show me.
If you just called me and said Malcolm, I have cell phone video footage from inside Alabama, the Alabama prison system.
I have a lot of it, but I don't think it's going to work.
I would have said, it's going to work.
It's like, there's no way for it not to work.
I think the correct answer.
It really is a, I mean, I realize I have been gushing, but...
It is an extraordinary piece of work.
And I'm both complimenting you but also complimenting the prisoners who found a way to get their story out in the world.
Right?
They're your collaborators on this.
And the result is something that is quite unlike any other.
Like I said, it solves the documentary problem for me.
You solved it.
Like...
There's no, you're not reconstructing anything.
There's this great moment in Ibsen, you know, in Master Builder.
And there's this character named Hilda who works with this architect.
And the architect is this very grand fellow that is building big buildings and all that stuff.
And then you see her saying at the end of it her last line is she says the master builder, my master builder.
And a lot of people have commented about that over the years and written about it that it's really that Hilda at that time in history, like a young, brilliant woman, needed another person who thought that they were a great builder but really it was her ideas that were coming through.
And I do feel that way here, that there are that the men knew what they needed.
It's not, I don't want to act like it's working.
I mean, Alabama is still, this is a still an urgent problem.
Alabama is still killing people in its custody all the time.
I think people right now are dying at the rate of around one a day.
And that's just in one system.
We have 2 million people incarcerated around the country.
But I do get the feeling that, you know, while we're walking around thinking we're making a film, the men inside are driven by their own brilliance, their own survival instinct, are saying we need to get this material in front of the public.
We're not a position to do it, let's let's see if this collaboration can work.
And that, i think, is the thing i feel the most grateful for is that we were able to deliver that and the men in the film have seen the film because we showed it to them on cell phones.
And when we were done, I think they were very emotional seeing it.
I think we spent so much time and showed it to them, talked to them about what we were making, because it's such a responsibility to say hey, you guys, you've been running a nonviolent, organized protest movement that includes work stoppages and hunger strikes.
And somehow we're going to characterize that and we're going to put that on television or we're going to put that in movie theaters um, but it's really their story.
So you have to be in constant dialogue with them about what that is including.
Now you know, telling them what we're doing and what we're thinking and trying to.
You know we we created this sort of whistleblower defense committee of really smart lawyers because we knew that these men have been retaliated against time after time after time.
And so they jump in and they'll go and do wellness checks on the men.
You're in a relationship with them forever.
You know, it was a little different, right?
Cause in your.
I mean maybe you'll choose to go and have coffee with Steve Marshall once a week if you really enjoy his company.
But you know most of the people that are in your film are kind of already.
You know you're not going back to Alabama much and you're not going to go talk to the, to the people that are in the story.
But these guys are like, they're in my life happily.
I feel very lucky that they're in my life and Charlotte's life.
Yeah, yeah.
Andrew, we are out of time.
I want to thank you very much, both for coming to On Air Fest and singing with me, and also for the movie which has, you know, as the best art does, has left America a little better off than it was before.
Thank you so much.
Really appreciate it.
Revisionist History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Benda Naff-Haffrey, and Nina Bird-Lawrence.
Our editor is Karen Shikurji.
Our executive producer is Jacob Smith.
Engineering by Nina Bird-Lawrence.
Original music by Luis Guerra.
Mixing and mastering by Jake Korsky.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
