00:00:42.000Yeah, it's sort of a question of a question of why people don't know about things that are happening with our tax dollars in our backyards.
00:00:53.000You know, are there things that we don't want to know?
00:00:55.000There's a reason why people sort of drive by prisons on the highway and they see the little metal sign and it says, you know, XYZ correctional.
00:01:02.000And they probably think, as I did for many years, well, I'm sure it's not great back there, but it doesn't need to be great.
00:01:09.000And if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody would probably tell me about it.
00:01:13.000But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, we treat them sort of like black sites.
00:01:19.000There's no way for us to really look inside.
00:01:21.000So the press doesn't get lit in and the public doesn't understand what's happening.
00:01:25.000And we know that, you know, when you give people total control over other people, bad things happen.
00:01:57.000Well, there's an attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall who's always run on like tough on crime strategies and saying, you know, we've got to lock more people up and people who are in prison for violent crimes should potentially never get out of prison, ever.
00:02:14.000And he says in the film, as you remember, that I asked him about the nature of crime, and he says, well, I think there are evil people in this world, people who have absolutely no regard for human life.
00:02:27.000And this is a guy who's presided over a system that's killed, that's led to the deaths of 1,500 people just since we started making the film.
00:02:35.000So this question of like, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?
00:02:38.000And, you know, what's the nature of cruelty?
00:02:43.000Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them?
00:02:46.000Are we putting them there because they're drug addicts and we're trying to get rid of them as opposed to rehabilitate them or as opposed to try to get them off of drugs?
00:02:56.000So obviously prisons have become pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society.
00:03:00.000So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison.
00:03:04.000Once you're in prison, if you're mentally ill or you have bad social skills, you're much more likely to get into a scrape with a guard who probably isn't trained to deal with somebody who's mentally ill.
00:03:13.000And you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what we saw happening in Alabama.
00:03:18.000Well, you even the it's the old expression, who's going to watch the watchers, right?
00:03:24.000Because one of the things that you detail is very obviously nonviolent people who spend all their time writing and reading, and they're getting retribution because they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison.
00:03:41.000So the one guy with the glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name?
00:04:20.000This is an incredible, you know, human wasteland.
00:04:25.000You're seeing just high, high percentage, maybe 80% of the people are addicted to drugs, many of whom were not addicted to drugs before they came in.
00:04:32.000And how are you getting all the cell phones?
00:04:34.000And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid.
00:04:38.000And he said, you know, we don't leave, right?
00:05:14.000Well, there's originally, right, it was sort of more traditional drugs and people were using heroin and using whatever they could get a hold of.
00:05:22.000But as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in, now they can actually put, there's a drug called Flacco, which is a very significant problem there, fentanyl, obviously, also.
00:05:35.000But these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper.
00:05:39.000So somebody could send you a letter and it could be in the letter.
00:05:43.000They can actually put the drug into the paper.
00:05:45.000Sort of like acid when they put acid on paper.
00:05:49.000And so, you know, there's this effort to kind of stop that, but then does it lead to people being unable to communicate with their loved ones?
00:05:58.000Ultimately, the easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers to sell the drugs.
00:06:03.000And so, you know, we say, and I think it's sadly true, that the Alabama Department of Corrections, and it's not just in Alabama, but obviously we use that as the lens through which we saw incarceration more generally.
00:06:15.000But the Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency in the state of Alabama, and it's also the biggest drug dealing operation.
00:06:26.000You know, you're much more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison than you are out on the street in Alabama.
00:06:38.000You know, one of the things that is very heart-wrenching is this callous approach.
00:06:47.000You showed at the one time where all these prisons went on strike, so they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones that they all got from the guards.
00:06:55.000So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state.
00:07:13.000It's like these are human beings, and some of them barely did anything.
00:07:18.000Like one guy that wound up dying from you think they did something to, or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave this guy.
00:07:28.000All he did was break into an abandoned building.
00:07:42.000So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter, and he got 15 years in a cage.
00:07:48.000And then on his way out, At least they're inferring that they killed him because he had too much information about what was going on inside and he was going to get out.
00:07:58.000Yeah, this goes back to the story of a woman who we had met and her son.
00:08:04.000When we were first communicating with the men using these contraband cell phones, and they were telling us what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons, we sort of, in the early days, we couldn't believe it because the way we got into the prisons to begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because I was always interested in incarceration and the problems of that system and the justice system.
00:08:29.000I had made other films about the justice system.
00:08:32.000And I was always curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the worst prison system in the country, but it mirrors a lot of others.
00:08:40.000And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy, and she said, you know, I'm reading this book by a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton, and it's a book about his wrongful imprisonment in Alabama, and maybe you should read this with me.
00:08:54.000So we ended up reading the book together, and then we both sort of just spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we just didn't know anything about it, had never been there.
00:09:04.000She was growing up in New York, and it was just not in her frame of reference.
00:09:08.000So we went down there and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, Chaplain Browder.
00:09:16.000And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons.
00:09:19.000And he said, well, you should just come in with me.
00:09:35.000Ultimately, we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.
00:09:40.000And when we were in there to film this revival meeting, just because we were lucky enough to find a warden who felt like he wanted to show an example of how Christianity was active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with.
00:09:57.000But then while we were in there filming with like five cameras, which was just unheard of, the men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras in there.
00:10:06.000And they started taking us aside and saying, listen, what they're showing you here is a very curated version of what's going on in this prison.
00:10:14.000You have to get into these other buildings.
00:10:15.000You've got to see what's going on in that dorm over there called the behavior modification dorm, where guys have been killed by guards.
00:10:23.000And you've got to look in that dorm where people have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time.
00:10:29.000You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you.
00:10:32.000And I felt much safer, you know, even though the warden had said to us, when you go in there, you know, don't talk to any of the men.
00:10:40.000I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates than I did talking to any of the guards.
00:10:44.000And when we left, it was really because we got kicked out, right?
00:10:49.000We start, you saw in the beginning of the film, we sort of start getting nosy and we start trying to look in some of these other areas.
00:10:55.000And then they shut down the filming, they throw us out.
00:10:58.000And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now.
00:11:01.000How are we going to make a film about this?
00:11:02.000We feel we have to because we're the only people that know what's going on in here, but they're not going to let us back.
00:11:09.000So it was then that we found out that there was this network of men inside who had access to these contraband cell phones who were documenting what was going on.
00:11:18.000So that was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside.
00:11:22.000And one of the first things we learned was one of the guys inside, Melvin Ray, texted us to say, hey, you know, this guard, it was a guard that we had been tracking already, who was a particularly violent guard.
00:11:40.000He just beat somebody very badly, and he's now, that person, the victim, is at UAB Hospital.
00:11:45.000So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB Hospital and just walked up.
00:11:49.000I just put my iPhone in my pocket and we just walked up to the intensive care unit.
00:11:55.000And when we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died from his injuries.
00:12:01.000And as we started to get deeper into it, we went and visited his mother because we didn't even know if she knew that she had lost her son.
00:12:10.000But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away.
00:12:12.000She had sort of turned off the life support.
00:12:15.000And we said, We want to make a film about this.
00:13:01.000So teach me how to record my phone calls.
00:13:03.000So this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film.
00:13:09.000And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis.
00:13:12.000So her son, who was a drug addict, right, didn't kill anybody, but was in a car when a drug deal went bad.
00:13:20.000He went to try to buy drugs and his friend went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot.
00:13:25.000And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder statute works.
00:13:31.000And so here you have a drug addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in the highest security prison there and is targeted by a particular guard who is especially violent and is just beaten to death in front of 70 witnesses.
00:13:48.000And then, of course, as we go through the film, we start tracking that in our investigation and we start looking into the cover-up and why they lied about how he had died and how they scrambled witnesses and how the Department of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from finding out what really happened to their kids or their loved ones and they avoid liability and so on.
00:14:12.000And there was one person that we ended up hearing from, this guy James Sales, who originally tells just the police side of the story, just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly the way that the guard said.
00:14:25.000But then he kind of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story.
00:14:30.000Now, do they have access to these communications?
00:14:34.000Is there a way they could be hacking into it and know that Sales had said that to you?
00:14:39.000Well, the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray.
00:14:44.000So he was supposed to be on a private attorney call.
00:14:49.000But we do think that the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that.
00:14:55.000I think they do listen to attorney calls.
00:14:57.000Sales didn't say exactly on the phone what he was going to say, but I think they knew that he was a problem because he was a good person.
00:15:04.000I mean, Sales, the one who entered an unoccupied building and was locked up for 15 years for that, was obviously a decent person.
00:15:13.000That's why he says, you know, when I get out, I'll speak to that.
00:15:18.000I'm not going to lie to that man's mother.
00:15:20.000But right now, this is their world, bro.
00:15:25.000I'm not going to put myself in the middle of the morning.
00:15:26.000But just by saying that might have been his death sentence.
00:15:31.000He also, as he started to get closer to getting out, because he was killed a month before he was going to get out.
00:15:40.000And so as he started getting closer to release, he just started to get more frustrated and more angry and started to say things to guards about like, you know, you know what I've seen in here.
00:15:52.000And then lo and behold, he gets found in a cell dead.
00:16:00.000And, you know, he's bleeding from orifices in his body.
00:16:03.000And it was pretty clear that he was given what they call a hot shot, which is they give you a cigarette that's got something bad on it and it can kill you.
00:16:49.000We had gone originally into Holman prison where they have the death row.
00:16:53.000And we went in there with the chaplain.
00:16:55.000And the lieutenant came down and said, you know, unfortunately, we're so understaffed right now, which is an understatement, that, you know, we don't have anybody to take you around.
00:17:07.000But, you know, chaplain, I know you want to show your friends around the death row, so, you know, just go for it.
00:17:13.000So we ended up walking around the death row for like two or three hours just talking to men.
00:17:33.000And then when we went into Easterling and the men started calling us aside and saying, you know, they beat me so bad, I defecated on myself.
00:17:42.000Or, you know, I just saw there were five stabbings this week and none have been reported.
00:17:48.000We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis, but it was just being kept secret.
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00:19:13.000So it's crazy that you're relying on these guards to get in the phones that they're using to expose the crimes of the guards.
00:19:24.000And it's like the guards are aware of the phones because they provided them to the inmates and they're contraband.
00:19:30.000They're not supposed to have them, but yet they all do.
00:19:33.000And so they have to ignore it if they want to keep selling them phones.
00:19:37.000Well, another way of looking at it is that there's so little accountability that they don't actually think they're going to get in trouble for anything.
00:19:47.000And if you remember that guard who kills Stephen Davis, Rod Gadson, this guy might be the most violent prison guard in America.
00:19:56.000He's still working in the Alabama state prison system after he has a starring role against his will, I'm sure, but after he has a starring role in our documentary, which has been seen by millions of people, they still have him employed there.
00:20:09.000They still have him interacting with people.
00:20:11.000And he got hired to a higher position.
00:20:24.000And by the way, not all the guards are bad, right?
00:20:26.000There are guards that we met there who were pretty heartbroken because they went into the system hoping to make change or trying to, maybe they wanted to work in the police department and there weren't any jobs.
00:20:38.000But in their town, they had the ability to work in a prison.
00:20:41.000So they kind of went in there and described to us that they wanted to help people with addiction.
00:20:45.000They wanted to see if they could help rehabilitate people.
00:20:48.000But when they got in there, they realized very quickly that was not what was in the offing.
00:21:09.000He had some kind of like a some kind of plastic thing that he had made.
00:21:15.000It did not appear to be anything very serious because the reason he had made it is because somebody had called him gay, and you have to fight your way out of that, right?
00:21:28.000You have to fight your way out of that.
00:21:29.000So if somebody called you gay, you have to fight them?
00:21:31.000Yeah, in other words, you can't put up with that because otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call a sissy.
00:21:37.000They're going to turn you into somebody that gets raped.
00:21:39.000And there's so much rape in the prison that the DOJ report that came out said that there's rape occurring at all hours of the day and night in all areas of the prison.
00:21:49.000So rape is such a significant problem.
00:21:53.000And when Stephen Davis was in there and was accused of being gay, he had to make a show of fighting the person that was calling him gay.
00:22:03.000He never went after the guards or anything like that.
00:22:06.000And everybody that the lawyer spoke to, you know, a dozen witnesses who had seen what happened, all of them said as soon as the guards came in, he immediately lay down on the floor and put his weapon about 15 feet away from him, put this plastic knife 15 feet away.
00:22:24.000And then the guards came in and just started beating him, even though there was no threat.
00:22:29.000And the guards would say, Gadson was saying to Stephen Davis, you know, quit resisting, quit resisting.
00:23:27.000There are a lot of situations where people are just damaged, often permanently.
00:23:31.000You saw what happened at Kinetic Justice when he, you know, Robert Earl Counsel, when he leads a nonviolent work strike, that guards come and attack him, and he loses sight in one of his eyes.
00:23:43.000He's, you know, dragged out of the cell.
00:24:00.000And then the strike really highlights something that I think a lot of people are unaware of is how many industries actually use the prison system essentially for slave labor.
00:24:11.000I mean, that was a shock to me, I think, is that, you know, I guess we all sort of assume, well, if you're in prison and they ask you to mop the floor, you need to help serve the meals or something, you know, that's a reasonable thing to do.
00:24:23.000I think what we don't realize is that those people are leased out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives.
00:26:19.000I think for that job, they get paid a little bit of money, and then on top of that, they're charged for the cost of the van that takes them to the workplace.
00:26:29.000They're charged for the uniform that they have to wear.
00:26:32.000So it's sort of like there are kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing.
00:26:38.000And in a lot of cases, the $2 a day is a lot.
00:26:42.000They're required to do lots of work unpaid in the prisons.
00:26:49.000You could see that even the drug dorm where the counselor decided to leave his job, there was a professional drug counselor in one of the prisons, and nobody replaces him.
00:27:02.000And so Raul Poole, one of the guys in our film, just starts running the drug dorm.
00:27:08.000And that's a drug dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay for drug treatment program in prison.
00:27:15.000And that money is just not going anywhere.
00:27:16.000Or money is just going into the coffers of whoever's running the prison system.
00:27:21.000And is there any accountability for all the money?
00:27:24.000Do they do an audit of the money or is it just – There really is not any meaningful accountability.
00:27:31.000You know, there's like the state auditor who we actually interviewed and spent a lot of time with just sort of threw up his hands.
00:27:38.000You know, he said, there's just no way for me to keep track of this money.
00:27:41.000And, you know, for example, they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the Justice Department.
00:27:51.000The DOJ went into the Alabama state prison system and did an investigation because for reasons I can explain that are kind of incredible.
00:27:59.000But anyway, they went in there and they investigated the whole prison system, which I think they'd never done before.
00:28:04.000You know, usually they investigate an individual prison or something like that.
00:28:09.000And they went in and issued a report that said, this is beyond the pale.
00:28:14.000There are horrific things that are happening in your prisons, people being murdered, and there's the highest rate of drug overdose and highest rate of rape.
00:28:23.000And Alabama's response was to say, well, we think that's just anecdotal and you don't know what you're talking about.
00:28:30.000And then they decided that their solution, the Alabama solution that we sort of ironically talk about in the title of the film, the one the governor talks about, is just to build new prisons.
00:28:41.000And meantime, the DOJ did not say to build any new prisons.
00:28:46.000The DOJ said, your problem is with corruption and brutality, and you're operating really a criminal enterprise, and therefore you need to address the underlying problems.
00:28:59.000And Alabama's response was, well, the DOJ says the prisons are no good, so we've got to build new ones.
00:29:05.000Well, that, you know, they get a massive contract.
00:29:08.000So we, you know, we always call it the Alabama Department of Construction because they don't really change anything unless they have the opportunity to build something.
00:29:16.000And that's really good for all the governor supporters and all the other people who are, you know, in the construction industry.
00:29:22.000And, you know, they've now started construction on these massive new prisons.
00:29:47.000The governor announces she's going to build these new prisons, which the DOJ did not ask for, and are not going to solve the problem.
00:29:53.000And they admit, by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding, which is a huge problem.
00:29:57.000The prisons are operating at like 200% capacity.
00:30:00.000And, you know, when they're asked about it, the head of the Department of Corrections, they ask him, you know, is this going to affect the overcrowding?
00:30:09.000Or is it just the same number of beds?
00:30:10.000And he goes, no, it's the same number of beds.
00:30:13.000It's not going to affect overcrowding.
00:30:14.000So they're building these massive new facilities.
00:30:19.000She can't raise the money in a bond offering.
00:30:22.000So they go after the COVID money that they got from the government, which is not designed to build prisons.
00:30:29.000It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something that's going to relieve some other kind of health problem or whatever.
00:30:37.000And then I think they get fined for that, or you have to pay a fine if you use government money for a thing that's not supposed to be for.
00:30:47.000And then when they start construction, they still can't raise the money, but they start building the new prisons even before they're authorized by the legislature.
00:30:56.000That's how clearly it was communicated that these prisons were going to happen.
00:31:03.000In other words, we had a crew in Alabama that was watching this site of this one massive prison that they were planning on building.
00:31:16.000And one day I get a call from somebody and they say, we've got to start filming because there are 25 earth movers here.
00:31:23.000And I said, well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even approved the new prison construction.
00:31:29.000And they said, well, the prison construction companies know what's happening and they're already spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to clear the site.
00:31:36.000So the fix was in on this new prison construction.
00:31:39.000And the governor announced that it was going to cost $900 million to build three new prisons.
00:31:45.000So far, they've broken ground and are far along on the first prison, and it's up to $1.3 billion.
00:31:54.000So when you open that door, a whole lot of commerce comes in.
00:31:59.000A whole lot of companies come in, you know, and they ask them why was it so expensive?
00:32:05.000How did it go from $300 million for one prison to $1.3 billion for one prison and counting?
00:33:49.000The money stuff is all over the place.
00:33:52.000You know, it's the perverting of the system with money you see because, you know, for example, these big prison companies like Geo Group and Core Civic make money by having full prisons.
00:34:07.000You know, they're private prison companies, but there are lots of prisoners.
00:34:11.000There are a lot of companies that provide services to public prisons, to state prisons like, you know, Cisco and all these companies that sell food there.
00:34:19.000But everybody makes more money if the prisons are full.
00:34:22.000And so you have the head of Core Civic just did a shareholder call not too long ago.
00:34:33.000And he's Heninger, I think his name is.
00:34:36.000And they said, you know, what do you think, what's the outlook?
00:34:38.000And he said, oh, with all the new immigration, prisons, and all the prisons and all the increased emphasis on law enforcement and on incarceration, this is the most exciting time in my career.
00:34:54.000So, you know, you're really building this prison industrial complex every day, especially right now, I think.
00:35:03.000And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff.
00:35:07.000You know, there's a company called Securus, which is run by Tom Gores, who is a big team owner, owns the Pistons, the Detroit Pistons, and some other teams.
00:35:21.000And is a private equity guy worth about $10 billion.
00:35:25.000And his company, Securis, does communications for the prison systems.
00:35:31.000And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed, but they made deals with sheriff's departments where they had jails.
00:35:40.000And they said, instead of letting kids visit their parents in jail and actually get to see them and hug them and maybe have some kind of normalcy, let's install video visit terminals.
00:35:53.000So the cover story was the video visits are going to be great because you don't have to drive across the state to see your loved one.
00:36:00.000But the contract specifically said that they had to replace in-person visits.
00:36:07.000So when a kid went to go visit his dad, even if he was 20 yards away from him in the prison waiting room, he had to use a video terminal, which costs $12.99 for 20 minutes.
00:36:19.000And he was not allowed to see his dad in person.
00:36:24.000So that's an example of, you know, and that's in the contract that's in the Securist contract that said that they have to eliminate the in-person visits.
00:36:32.000So when you allow that for-profit motive to be driving things in these state institutions where theoretically we should, you know, have some kind of like moral approach that makes sense for society or, you know, can help community or build our relationships or help people stay in touch with their loved ones when they're incarcerated.
00:36:55.000When you add that for-profit motive there, the system is just designed to exploit.
00:37:01.000It just is natural that all those people have to get, you know, they all have, there's a kind of a value to every visit.
00:37:09.000Every time a visit, you know, every time a kid comes and visits a parent, it's worth $12.99.
00:37:15.000Well, why do it for free if you can get $12.99 for it?
00:37:22.000Is it one of the darker aspects of human nature in regards to our relationship with money that so many people, if unchecked, if you give them the opportunity to make more money at the expense of other people, they do it.
00:37:37.000They do it, especially under the framework of a corporation.
00:37:41.000The framework of a corporation allows you to have a diffusion of responsibility because you don't think that you're the one doing this horrible thing.
00:37:50.000It's this thing that you work for, and I'm just doing my job.
00:37:55.000And also, if you're involved in a corrupt system and this is your job and you think of these people as all good people that are part of the corrupt system, it sort of minimizes the horrible feelings that you have about that corruption.
00:38:10.000Aaron Trevor Brandeis, I really believe, I've heard you talk about diffusion of responsibility before.
00:38:15.000I think it's such a huge part of what drives all this is that you have people who don't really have to ask themselves the hard question.
00:38:27.000Am I the person that's exploiting somebody?
00:38:29.000Am I the person that's overcharging a mom?
00:38:32.000Am I the person that's charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect?
00:38:42.000Because once you have a corporation and you look at that org chart, you know, you could see the org chart as, oh, that's a nice, orderly way of getting commerce to move forward.
00:38:52.000But it's also a thousand points of responsibility.
00:38:56.000Every one of those persons just takes a tiny measure of responsibility.
00:39:02.000Well, I'm just in the accounting department.
00:39:08.000And you see that in the healthcare industry, people recording their calls with their health care providers or their insurance companies saying, oh, I'm sorry, I really can't answer.
00:39:52.000Then you'd have an incentive to make people better people in prison.
00:39:55.000Like imagine if their profit was based on people being rehabilitated, re-entering society and becoming functional, proper members of society where they contribute.
00:41:10.000Whether it's military industrial complex, whether it's the health insurance complex, whether it's pharmaceutical drug industry, when you look at the Sackler family and what they did with opioids.
00:41:21.000I'm sure you've seen the Netflix, the Peterberg Netflix painkiller series.
00:42:11.000It includes a lot of things that are present in society.
00:42:16.000But the prison industrial complex and the experience of having somebody incarcerated has a huge impact on mental health.
00:42:28.000I think people don't realize when you have 2 million people locked up in these facilities and many of them are just being traumatized every day, whether they're seeing somebody get killed or they're constantly in fear for their life.
00:42:41.000The idea that those people are going to somehow be okay when you want to let them out 10 years later and they're going to rejoin society, you give them $50 and a bus ticket and you say, hey, I hope you can become a taxpayer.
00:42:51.000Meantime, they don't have enough money to pay for one red roof in for one night.
00:42:56.000They can't do anything when they get out of prison.
00:43:00.000And then we say, well, why is there such high recidivism?
00:43:03.000I guess that means they're bad people.
00:43:29.000You know, if you go into the I mean, all this sounds very dark and horrible, and it is, but there are a lot of positive developments that you can see when you give them a chance to grow in society.
00:43:48.000So, for example, like I love what you say about community, you know, about the importance of building community and seeing the country as our community.
00:43:59.000And, you know, if we're torturing people that are in our community, if we're being cruel to people that are in our community, what does it say about us?
00:44:19.000And clearly, we see that there are so many instances where people are trying, trying to do something better.
00:44:28.000There's a woman named Erica in Alabama who was a mental health professional.
00:44:34.000And she described to me what it was like to try to give mental health services to people who were incarcerated.
00:44:42.000And I was trying to figure out, you know, looking at these images of the places that they keep people in, these cells, these solitary cells with just a little tray slot.
00:44:51.000And, you know, they're in there in a five by eight room with no windows, and they could be in there literally for years.
00:45:01.000And I said to her, well, can you tell me like when you do a session with somebody and you're trying to talk to them about their suicidal ideation or their various problems, what does that look like?
00:45:44.000I just put my mouth up to the tray slot.
00:45:46.000And I just thought, you know, when you think about the idea that that's going to be somehow something that will give relief to somebody who's really struggling with a mental health crisis in prison, you know, we're doing the absolute minimum.
00:46:01.000You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah, once a month this guy has a psychiatric evaluation.
00:46:07.000But nobody's taking a picture of that and showing what it really looks like to have this nice, you know, young lady, this idealistic young mental health person kneeling outside of a metal cell with bloodstains on it talking to somebody inside.
00:46:57.000Well, I have this one friend that I used to do martial arts with when I was a kid.
00:47:04.000And when I was probably around 16, 16 or 17, he wound up going to jail.
00:47:13.000I didn't know him that well, but I knew him as this guy who competed in tournaments and he would show up and train with us and he's just a pretty tough guy.
00:47:25.000He went into jail and he came out, first of all, much bigger.
00:48:07.000And as I got to be closer to him, I actually became closer to him after he got out of prison than he was before.
00:48:15.000You know, because I just spent more time sparring him and hanging out and training with him and, you know, being in these group classes with him.
00:48:22.000He started telling me these stories about what it was like in jail and just fighting for his life.
00:48:28.000He had to take on three guys and he picked up a broomstick and he was beating these guys.
00:48:32.000He's just telling me these crazy stories of guys trying to kill him in jail.
00:48:37.000And he was in there for three years for drug selling.
00:48:39.000And then he went right back to selling drugs.
00:49:34.000Because the world of fighting, like people that are interested in entering in competitions with people, you get a lot of troubled people, a lot of very angry people.
00:49:46.000You know, a lot of them that come from violent households.
00:49:50.000They were beaten as children or they were bullied as kids, depending on where.
00:49:55.000I came from the most mild of those environments.
00:50:38.000And especially because they knew some other guys that we knew that were a couple of one of my friends who was a Bach, he was a professional boxer.
00:51:04.000And then all of a sudden I was around a lot of these people that either went to jail eventually or had been in jail.
00:51:13.000Because I think there's that question of, you know, people say, well, if you don't like the prison system the way it is, or if you don't think people should get locked up forever, then, you know, you're just soft on crime.
00:52:11.000And then also they have no options because no one wants to hire an ex-convict, especially someone who went to jail for like aggravated assault or something like that.
00:52:18.000So it's very, very difficult for these people and very, very difficult for society to make a decision.
00:52:24.000You know, you want to make a quick fix of something.
00:52:29.000But there's zero emphasis on how to take a person from a completely broken childhood, broken home, violence, drug addiction in the home, all the chaos, complete accustom, completely being accustomed to violent crime because it's all around you.
00:53:14.000You're just making money off of people and you're taking advantage of the fact that no one wants to pay attention to it because society generally looks at people that are criminals and have committed violent crimes as like, oh, well, fuck them.
00:53:30.000If there's people that have, you know, killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch of people and are constantly robbing people and breaking into houses that are violent, yeah, fuck those people.
00:54:08.000Andrew, I think you have a little ADHD.
00:54:10.000Maybe you some fucking speed and we'll sell you that speed and we'll tax that speed.
00:54:16.000Anything else, we'll put you in a cage because you're not following our rules.
00:54:22.000And it's like a grown adult telling another grown adult what they can or can't do with their life is responsible for what, 50% of the people that are in cages?
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00:55:44.000Yeah, I mean, there's this kind of illusion that everybody that is in prison for something that we don't think that the average person doesn't think they should be in prison for for many, many, many years, like a drug crime or being an addict, basically, that those people, that all those people have been let out already.
00:56:06.000You know, that somehow like prison activist people have said, well, you know, all the people that are in there for drug crimes should be released.
00:56:48.000So you have, you know, and he was put into a maximum security facility for entering an unoccupied building.
00:56:55.000That's because there's sort of an inflation of this concept of violence.
00:57:00.000So they will, in Alabama, I think there are 44 different crimes that are considered violent crimes.
00:57:06.000And they include crimes that you and I would not consider violent.
00:57:10.000You know, so if somebody threatens somebody verbally, like most people do in arguments with, you know, people that they're mad at or whatever, but doesn't assault somebody, that could be considered a violent crime.
00:57:22.000If somebody enters a building, whether they steal something or not, that could be considered a violent crime.
00:57:28.000And so it makes it easier just to, as you say, like, I like that image of the battery.
00:57:34.000I think about it as like sometimes like the matrix, that, you know, for Alabama to do what it's doing, it's got to have 20,000 people in suspended animation because that's how you can use them for labor.
00:57:47.000That's how you can use them to sell them stuff.
00:57:49.000That's how you can charge them for fees and fines, you know, that you need that many people.
00:57:55.000I think they did a terrible thing when they allowed private prisons.
00:58:00.000I think, like, if you think about the people that founded this country and the people that wrote the Constitution, they had a great understanding of how tyranny can emerge.
00:58:15.000And again, 1776, crazy to think that we're still following those same rules today, but they had a great understanding.
00:58:23.000Don't worry, we're not following those rules.
00:58:26.000But the checks and balances and make sure that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power.
00:58:33.000Whoever first initiated the policy of allowing and paying for private prisons to exist in this country did not think it through like that at all.
00:58:45.000Did not think of incentives, did not think of how people always, when given the chance to make more money, figure out a way to justify making that more money and come up with rules or regulations or carve-outs, caveats, some reason why they can continue to accelerate.
00:59:03.000And then you don't think about the fact that prison guard unions and these private prisons, these people that own them, actively work to keep some laws on the books that maybe the general public would not want to be illegal anymore, certain things.
00:59:19.000And they do that just so they can keep their prisons full, so they can keep making more money.
00:59:24.000So then they take the money that they get from these private prisons where they're using people as human batteries to make sure there's still laws in place that are ridiculous so that they can keep arresting people so they can keep filling up their buildings and making more.
00:59:38.000And the fact that nobody saw that coming.
01:00:14.000Well, the genies figured out a way to get into a whole new bottle because a lot of people say to us, well, this film that you made, the Alabama Solution, is obviously about Alabama State Prisons.
01:00:35.000But they kind of function like private prisons in a way because they're able to make deals with Securius about their prison phone system.
01:00:45.000And that makes millions and millions and millions of dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the country, right, who are being charged high, you know, daily and even per-minute fees for being able to communicate with their families.
01:01:00.000Then you have companies who are selling the food to the prisons.
01:01:04.000You have companies that are doing health care contracts with the prisons.
01:01:08.000And so there's so much money in that that they sort of, even though the state owns that piece of land, it still kind of functions the way that private prisons function.
01:01:19.000So we've sort of just given over the care of 2 million Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders, maybe, but the shareholders don't know.
01:01:32.000Well, they're certainly not accountable to humane living conditions.
01:01:35.000That one scene where Kinetic Justice, that gentleman, what's his real name?
01:01:41.000When Robert Earl Counsel was in solitary and you see the rats swimming in his toilet, rats are swimming in his toilet and he has rats in a water jar and what did he say?
01:02:20.000You know, and people, just to get into him for a second, I mean, he is, frankly, one of the most, one of the bravest people I've ever met in my life.
01:02:30.000You know, this is a guy who was incarcerated when he was 19, and he was selling drugs in his neighborhood.
01:02:38.000Somebody is trying to chase him down with a car and almost runs him over, and he shoots the person through the window, and the guy dies.
01:03:17.000He's trying to use every method that he can use to call attention to the problem that 20,000 other people have.
01:03:26.000And he's using a contraband cell phone to talk to us, knowing that he's probably going to get retaliated against by the authorities once the film comes out or once they know that he's organizing a labor strike.
01:03:39.000He would be an unbelievable asset to society if he were out in the world, right?
01:04:40.000Well, especially for someone like you who did the Jinx, and then you do this.
01:04:44.000Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point.
01:04:46.000I worked for a long time on the story of Robert Durst.
01:04:50.000And when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed his wife and his best friend and his neighbor in Galveston dismembered him, we found the only evidence that proved that he did those things.
01:05:04.000And suddenly I was in a dialogue with the L.A. District Attorney, the L.A.PD, talking about how to get him arrested.
01:05:13.000And even if I don't believe in the way that we incarcerate people, it's clear that there's a role for prison.
01:05:19.000And there's clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people needs to be taken out of society.
01:05:27.000Well, he died now, and he was locked up in a facility in Northern California.
01:05:34.000It was sort of a facility for senior citizens who had medical problems.
01:05:39.000So, you know, a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from, you know, there have been a bunch of cases on this.
01:05:46.000Really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate what prison they're going to end up going to.
01:05:53.000They can negotiate for better conditions.
01:05:57.000And so you end up, you know, with that sort of situation where a guy who maybe has stolen $100 million and not paid his taxes or taken money from his workers or committed some horrible act of fraud ends up in a prison farm, ends Ends up in a pretty nice facility where he has access to lots of things.
01:06:18.000And then you have poor people that are locked up in places that have rats in their cells and vermin.
01:06:25.000But yeah, I was always sort of amazed that Robert Durst was able to get away with what he got away with for so long.
01:06:37.000Well, you know, did you, how much did you know about it before you started the documentary series?
01:06:43.000Well, I knew a lot because I had made a film, a narrative film called All Good Things, about sort of Robert Durst's origin story, his relationship with his beautiful wife when they were both young, before all the bad stuff started happening and he became the guy that he became.
01:07:01.000There was this kind of strange love story between this kind of difficult man and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick.
01:07:14.000Ryan Gosling played the Bob Durst character and Kirsten Dunst played his wife and really investigated that story so that we could tell the tale of what had happened to them in an accurate way.
01:07:28.000And while I was doing that, we reached out to Robert Durst, to the real Robert Durst, and I said, you know, we're making this film about, I guess we spoke to his lawyer, so we're making this film about you, about your client, and we'd like to talk to him, get his input, make sure that we're trying to tell the story accurately.
01:07:47.000It was basically the story about him and his wife when they first met, this rich guy and this girl from sort of the other side of the tracks, and then how eventually that relationship got toxic.
01:08:41.000This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released?
01:08:45.000I guess we started working on that in around 2005 and it came out in 2010.
01:08:51.000So in 2010, it's about to come out in theaters, this film.
01:08:55.000And there was a big article in the New York Times about how accurate it was and how much we had done to make sure that the details were right and so on.
01:09:02.000And the real Robert Durst reads the article and calls me out of the blue.
01:09:09.000And I had tried to get in touch with him before without any success.
01:09:13.000And he actually calls the distributor of the film first, Magnolia Pictures, and he asks for the president, Eamon Bowles.
01:09:25.000And Eamon and I would use Bob's voice, like when we would talk to each other, because Bob had a very recognizable voice.
01:09:34.000So when I would call him, we would hang up and I would say, bye-bye.
01:09:38.000And that was always sort of Bob's tone.
01:09:41.000And then one day somebody calls Amon's office and says, this is Robert Durst.
01:09:45.000And so his secretary walks in the office and says, like, you know, in air quotes, like, it's Robert Durst on the phone, thinking that it's me.
01:10:10.000I knew that he was trying to reach me so I could record my very first phone call with him.
01:10:15.000And I call him and I say, listen, I'm keen to talk to you.
01:10:20.000I've been making this film about you for the last five years.
01:10:23.000And he said, well, I would like to see the film.
01:10:25.000So I arranged for him to see the film.
01:10:28.000And he calls me immediately after he sees the film.
01:10:32.000And he says, I want you to know I like the movie very much.
01:10:36.000The movie kind of shows him killing people, right?
01:10:40.000And I said, well, why did you like it?
01:10:41.000And he said, well, you know, you did a beautiful job explaining what I was going through as a child and the difficulty I had and losing my mother.
01:10:51.000And Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife, Kathy, and I cried three times.
01:10:57.000And I would like to do something with you.
01:10:59.000You know, I would like there to be something out there from me, my ability to sort of tell my story.
01:11:06.000And I said, all right, well, why don't we sit down?
01:12:29.000Sure, that's what I thought, you know.
01:12:31.000You know, or you say to him, well, what did you say?
01:12:36.000You know, why did you tell the police that after your wife, after you put your wife on the train, you went to the neighbors to have a drink when that clearly wasn't true?
01:13:18.000I mean, he is so good at telling the story his way.
01:13:27.000And he tells you so many facts that are true that when he occasionally lies about really critical things, I think a lot of people just didn't pay attention to that.
01:13:37.000I did because I had already researched the story.
01:13:40.000So I knew when he was trying to tell me something that was bullshit that it was bullshit.
01:13:48.000But, you know, I did have to put myself in a position of giving him the benefit of the doubt whenever I could.
01:13:54.000Partly because that was the only, you know, you got to just get into that mode where you're trying to hear his version without debating it the whole time.
01:14:04.000Because otherwise he's not going to tell you his version.
01:14:07.000And, you know, you want to hear His theory about all this stuff.
01:14:11.000And in the course of that, he really indicts himself.
01:14:16.000I mean, he sort of came into it with the attitude that he wanted to tell his version of the story so people would stop thinking he was a murderer.
01:14:23.000But during the course of it, he admits to so many bad things that you just pretty quickly assume that he is guilty.
01:14:33.000How old is he when you first started filming him?
01:14:56.000I think most people that aren't complete sociopaths, they get to a certain point in time where it's almost too much and they want to tell people.
01:15:16.000The evidence I thought was determinative.
01:15:18.000I thought it was going to be something that police would ultimately use to convict him for murder.
01:15:23.000But we … Trevor Burrus What was that evidence again?
01:15:26.000Trevor Burrus So there's a … So there was a famous note that the killer of Susan Berman, this friend of Bob Durst in California, had left behind when he shot Susan Berman.
01:15:39.000And the note said 1527 Benedict Canyon, cadaver.
01:15:45.000And it was sent to the Beverly Hills Police Department.
01:15:49.000And that very seldom happens, but people speculated a lot.
01:15:53.000Well, why would somebody who killed somebody have sent a note to the police?
01:15:57.000Well, maybe if he liked the person, if it was his best friend, this woman Susan Berman, and it was Bob Durst that did it, then maybe he wouldn't want her body to lie there.
01:16:07.000They didn't want the dogs to mess with the body.
01:16:09.000So he may have just killed her and then left this note.
01:16:13.000But then later, when he was asked about it, he said, I have no knowledge about that note.
01:16:17.000So when we're doing our investigation, we discover a letter that he had written to Susan Berman that has almost the exact same words on it because it's addressed to her at 1527 Benedict Canyon.
01:16:30.000So we can see the handwriting on that, not just a handwriting sample, but a handwriting sample that's saying exactly what it said on the letter that with the same misspelled words, right?
01:16:42.000And he writes, 1527 Benedict Canyon, Beverly Hills, California, misspells the word Beverly, puts in an extra E at the end.
01:16:51.000And of course, this letter that we find, he also misspells the word Beverly.
01:16:57.000So nobody had ever seen or the police hadn't known about this letter.
01:17:01.000So we find it, and then I immediately start planning a way for me to show it to him in a second interview.
01:17:09.000And he had always said to me, like, oh, if you ever need me to sit down again, I'm happy to come back and I'll ask, you know, I'll answer any question you want.
01:17:16.000But I start to call him about doing the second interview and he gets very skittish.
01:17:30.000I talked to Marsha Clark, for example, who was smart about how the L.A. District Attorney's Office works.
01:17:37.000And she said, if you have the opportunity to sit down with him and show him the evidence, do that before you go to the police, because it's going to be very, the police are not going to be able to do something like that.
01:18:05.000I don't know if you remember this, but he starts burping uncontrollably and he starts rubbing his face and breathing and he's obviously very, very surprised to see that there's this letter that matches the cadaver note that he admitted could only have been written by the killer.
01:18:43.000He said, oh, sometimes I talk to myself for long periods of time and I get in fights with people because they think that I'm hassling them, but it's just me.
01:19:27.000We're giving them the printed evidence, the letter that matches the cadaver note.
01:19:32.000And it's a pretty strong case already.
01:19:35.000And we don't know that he's said a word in the bathroom.
01:19:40.000And it's not until 26 months later that we have an editor, Shelby Siegel, who is just going through audio and kind of cleaning up old tracks because we're getting ready to deliver the film to HBO.
01:19:56.000And she sees on the editing system that there's a little waveform.
01:20:02.000There's a little squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in the bathroom.
01:20:07.000So the problem was that I had a microphone.
01:20:10.000There was a microphone in the room and he had a microphone on.
01:21:35.000And so they come to New York and they listen to this confession.
01:21:38.000And it's just, you know, absolutely mind-blowing that that happened.
01:21:43.000And then when the film comes, when the series comes out, you know, we've been working with the police then for a couple of years while they were building the prosecution.
01:21:51.000And when the film finally comes out, when the series comes out on HBO, he is arrested the day before the final episode.
01:22:01.000So it's in the final episode that he makes that confession and they arrest him right before because they knew that he was going to go on the run.
01:22:08.000Was he aware that you had the audio of the confession?
01:22:11.000I don't think he remembered saying anything.
01:22:14.000You know, I don't think he's even all that aware that he sometimes just burbles out with these do you think he started, I mean, this is pure speculation, but do you think he started going crazy after he started killing people?
01:22:26.000Just like the ability to shut that part of your brain off and put that aside and lie about it.
01:22:35.000Just the struggle of having that information in your head.
01:22:41.000I think the way that he would have thought about it, you know, from inside the killer, right?
01:22:48.000He doesn't think of himself as a murderer, right?
01:22:51.000Steve Marshall in Alabama doesn't think of himself as, you know, this incredibly amoral person.
01:22:57.000He thinks of himself as law enforcement, right?
01:22:59.000Bob Duris thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along, you know, like we all are.
01:23:05.000So I think what happened was in 1982, he and his wife, who were having problems, in part, in large part, because he had big personality problems.
01:23:15.000I mean, he was not an easy person to deal with at all, and was also very spoiled and was also, you know, had all these resources and had a lot of, yeah, and had a lot of power over her.
01:23:27.000And so I think something happened between the two of them where they were at their lake house and there was an altercation.
01:23:34.000He admitted to me that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night.
01:23:57.000They ended up getting into some altercation and she landed on the, you know, maybe on the stone of the fireplace or something like that, and she was dead.
01:24:07.000And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down.
01:24:12.000I mean, unfortunate that this had to happen, but I got to get rid of the body.
01:24:17.000And so he found a way to make her disappear.
01:24:21.000We don't know exactly what happened to her, but we know that, you know, he alleged that he had put her on the train to go in the city and they never found the body.
01:24:29.000So after that, he's sort of widely believed to be a likely person to have killed his wife.
01:24:57.000So he had a bunch of explanations about why, you know, somehow she had run off with a drug dealer or she had run off with some boyfriend or something like that.
01:25:11.000But it took him a while to report her missing.
01:25:13.000He waits five days to report her missing and does a brilliant thing, which is he reports her missing in New York City, even though the last time she's ever seen is in Westchester.
01:25:25.000So they were at their house, their lake house in Westchester.
01:25:29.000And he goes into the city five days later and he says, oh, my wife was at our apartment.
01:25:34.000So he completely, this is why I'm saying he's very smart.
01:25:37.000He completely redirects the police so that they make, because, you know, the police aren't organized for a guy to come in and give a phony story about what happened to his wife.
01:25:49.000Most of the time, somebody comes in and says, my wife is missing.
01:25:51.000And they say, oh, where did you last see her?
01:26:13.000And it was sort of because it was so late in the game, because it had taken so long for him to report her missing, they didn't find anything that showed that she had been killed in the house.
01:26:27.000And she may very well have been killed somewhere else, but they never find the body ever.
01:26:32.000And so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do.
01:26:41.000But during the course of his interview with me, I mean, he never did it publicly, but in the bathroom, he says, killed them all, of course.
01:26:51.000So he's being accused of three murders, his wife, his best friend, and his neighbor in Galveston, who he then cuts up.
01:26:59.000And his confession in the bathroom is killed them all, of course.
01:27:02.000So I think we, you know, I think we know what happened.
01:27:09.000Or his best friend, rather, his first friend?
01:27:11.000Yeah, his best friend's body was in her house where somebody shot her, and that's where they left that cadaver note, the note saying 1527 Benedict Canyon.
01:27:19.000And then in Galveston, when his elderly neighbor disappears, the reason they find this out is because a bunch of black trash bags wash up in Galveston Bay, and a little kid is fishing with his dad, and they see something bobbing around in the water, and they see these bags, and the police come and they look in the bags, and there are all these body parts.
01:27:43.000So he had actually taken off the legs and the arms and all that.
01:27:47.000So, I mean, I think, you know, I think it's fair to say that there are people like Bob Durst who need to be out of society, you know, and are repeatedly causing problems for others.
01:28:00.000But that's, as you say, that's the extraordinarily rare case.
01:28:06.000And I think a lot of the sort of tough on crime politicians will say, so you guys just want to let Jeffrey Dahmer out on the street.
01:28:17.000What we're saying is that people who are in prison for having entered an unoccupied building probably never should have been in prison at all.
01:28:25.000And the people who are in prison with good reason because they robbed somebody or something, we don't necessarily have to believe that those people can never, ever have a chance to come out of prison and be productive citizens.
01:28:37.000You know, you just have to take a nuanced view.
01:28:42.000You can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're good people, especially because we've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up and vice versa.
01:28:49.000Yeah, the nuance part is so important because the real question is, like, what causes so many people to become bad people?
01:28:58.000And how come no one's examining the root of this?
01:29:00.000How come no one's looking at these deeply impoverished, crime-ridden communities that have remained that way for decades and decades and decades and offered up some sort of a solution?
01:29:11.000You know, it's almost like you have to financially incentivize a company to radically improve the economic and the justice situation in any random community that's experiencing a lot of crime.
01:29:26.000Like, it's almost almost like you have to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety.
01:29:32.000You know, it's almost like the one way.
01:29:37.000I mean, it's really what I was saying before.
01:29:39.000Like, imagine if these prison companies got paid based on the amount of productive citizens emerge from their prisons and then wind up doing really well.
01:30:04.000I mean you're right in a way that it's – in some way we are – we sort of are privatizing it because like in my neighborhood in New York, there's a group called the Doe Fund, which has been around for a couple of decades I think.
01:30:18.000And they take guys who have had severe drug addiction, have ended up in prison, and are released and have no starting place, as you were describing.
01:30:36.000They give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working.
01:30:42.000And it's not a huge amount of money, but it sort of is the first step toward even being able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say, oh, okay, so I've got $100 and I've spent $50 and this is what I have left.
01:30:53.000And they give them a job, which is they make deals with neighborhoods around New York for them to come and do like street cleaning and clean up the neighborhood.
01:31:01.000And they give them a uniform, which is clean, and they put them out on the street with a big blue trash bucket and some functional broom and things like that.
01:31:13.000And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they can work in tandem.
01:31:20.000And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean.
01:31:24.000The guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet.
01:31:30.000They can't do drugs when they're in the facility.
01:31:33.000So there's a little bit of tough love going on there, too.
01:31:40.000They end up bringing people back who were otherwise abandoned and who otherwise would have been additional homeless people lying on the street in San Francisco or additional people who are bothering people outside an ATM or whatever, because there's a level of desperation that you know you have.
01:31:56.000We all know if we absolutely had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were going to starve, we would do a bunch of things that would probably get us in trouble.
01:32:07.000And taking care of people that are in that situation and providing them some sort of a vehicle for improving their life is going to be a good thing, and it's going to have some impact.
01:32:21.000But the real impact is going to be when you address the environment in which they came from.
01:32:28.000Like, again, if we're our community, this entire country is a community, why do we have these places that have been fucked for 50, 60, 70 years?
01:32:37.000Like, why haven't we put resources into community centers and education and providing some method for these people to get peace and safety?
01:32:48.000Why aren't we doing something about that if we really care?
01:32:51.000Well, there is a lot that can be done.
01:32:54.000You know, one of the places, for example, this can be done inside and outside of prison, obviously.
01:33:00.000And I think you're pointing out a really important thing, which is the earlier the better.
01:33:05.000So when you look at Head Start programs, which are one of the first things that people go to cut because you can't put your finger on exactly what they do.
01:33:13.000But if you track people that got early education, you see that it dramatically reduces the likelihood that those people are going to go to prison later in life.
01:33:25.000And if you look at people who are even in prison, like in the Maine state prison system, which is a very humane prison system, I have pictures on my phone of guys who are sitting at a bench working on models of tall ships, these beautiful, stunning pieces of art that they've been trained by other prisoners to build.
01:33:50.000And they give them a proper workbench and they give them some time to do this work and they give them training.
01:33:57.000And then they sell that stuff in the prison store and they make a couple million dollars a year that goes back into rehabilitation programs.
01:34:35.000But over time, he just said, well, why are we throwing people away when we put them into prison for having made a mistake of some kind or even a series of mistakes?
01:34:44.000What can we do to bring these people out?
01:34:46.000Because 95% of the people are coming out.
01:34:49.000And are these people that we want to be our neighbors?
01:34:53.000And this issue of community is so important because how are we going to get back to some kind of brotherhood in this country?
01:35:04.000And if we can demonize people so quickly and just say, well, look, my neighbor, he put his tractor on my lawn and therefore he's a horrible person and I'm going to go over and smash his tractor.
01:35:14.000And as opposed to the guy saying, oh, I couldn't put my tractor in my garage because it had a flood.
01:35:20.000You know, that it's, it's, that there's a level of, you know, rage right now that we're tapping into.
01:35:26.000It seems like a higher percentage of the people are like the martial arts people that are going into it because of damage that they suffered.
01:35:34.000It's like more Americans are becoming like that.
01:36:06.000So it's consuming an enormous percentage of your available resources in terms of your attention span.
01:36:14.000The people that I know that are addicted to Twitter, X, whatever, are genuinely mentally ill.
01:36:20.000Like whether they realize it or not, because they're still functional, they still do their jobs, but they are fully addicted to a thing that is just people bitching back and forth with each other.
01:36:33.000And they check responses all the time.
01:36:35.000They can't wait to type in another response.
01:36:37.000And they're sitting there looking at someone else's response and getting angry.
01:37:31.000And then you have a conglomeration of ideas that are attached to each perspective that you might not agree with at all, but you have to because you're a right-wing this or a left-wing that.
01:37:42.000So you have to say whatever the fucking party wants you to say.
01:37:46.000And if you don't, you're a Nazi or if you don't, you're whatever you are, a communist, whatever it is.
01:37:52.000And I loved your, when, in your comedy special, which was so fucking funny.
01:37:57.000And, you know, I'm like a big fan of comedy.
01:37:59.000But in your last special, you sort of talk about how people like sign up for, oh, yeah, well, you know, I agree with that.
01:38:07.000Oh, and by the way, if you're going to agree with that, you know, you're also going to have to agree that, you know, that men can get pregnant.
01:40:13.000It's going to get worse, I think, when you have glasses and you could be walking down the street or you could meet somebody and be like, hi, Joe.
01:40:20.000So when you went to college at, and then you learned, you know, it's like this idea that the information is more available and therefore it's better.
01:40:29.000My kids are like constantly deleting Instagram or deleting TikTok.
01:40:35.000Yeah, a lot of kids are doing that now.
01:40:52.000Fortunately, for a lot of kids, Twitter, which I think is maybe the most toxic in terms of what it can do, most beneficial in terms of like whistleblowers getting news.
01:41:03.000If anything is happening in the world, I almost immediately go to Twitter.
01:41:07.000It used to be a little better for that because now part of the problem is with AI generated content.
01:41:15.000There's a lot of weird stuff when it comes to like, especially war stuff.
01:41:20.000There's a lot of videos that are just completely fake and it's hard to tell.
01:41:23.000Or they take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and they add AI to it.
01:41:43.000Because a lot of people are doing that just for clicks because there is an actual economy based on engagement.
01:41:50.000So you can make money if you're, you know, if you're putting up these posts and these posts are getting millions and millions of interactions, you're going to get more money.
01:41:57.000And so there's a lot of people doing that.
01:41:58.000So it used to be better because it used to be just pure information.
01:42:02.000And if it was a video, it was just a video that someone took with their cell phone generally.
01:42:07.000Now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff, a lot of weird fake stuff.
01:42:12.000Also, there was a piece in the paper today that talked about how Trump gets a few minute video every day that's a compilation of all the attacks and all the explosions that have happened in Iran, but is not getting a more nuanced picture of it.
01:42:29.000So to some extent, is kind of drinking his own Kool-Aid.
01:43:43.000It's a TikTok president or a TikTok briefing for the president.
01:43:48.000You know, but video, I mean, what we saw in Alabama, and I know you have some clips of this, and I think if you feel like running one, there's the level of depravity that's going on in our prison system is so much higher than the average person thinks it is.
01:44:07.000And one of the reasons why we've seen so much outrage from people, finally, millions of people have seen the Alabama solution because people have HBO or they have watched it in theater.
01:44:15.000And it's the first time they've been able to see inside.
01:44:18.000It's the first time they've been able to really see it as opposed to reading a statistic or a lot of people die in prison or whatever.
01:44:25.000And I think it does tap into our sense of humanity and it taps into our sense of community and the feeling that, like, I don't want to be a part of that.
01:44:34.000I don't want to be part of doing that to other people.
01:44:39.000You know, we've shown the film to a lot of conservative viewers, including one of the founders of CPAC and various people who are pretty right-wing people and have said, look, I might be tough on crime.
01:45:15.000It's like laid out there in full color.
01:45:18.000You could see the blood on the ground.
01:45:21.000You could see, I mean, it's horrific when kinetic justice, when that guy's beaten in his cell and you see how they dragged him out, he's face down, bleeding all they thought he was dead and he he managed to live and he's being dragged out and you're following the blood trail from his cell with the contraband cameras from the cell phones.
01:45:45.000And had those cell phone cameras not existed, you'd have zero idea.
01:45:50.000Like if those guards only decided to sell money bringing drugs in and not phones with cameras, who knows what you would know.
01:46:02.000And it does, I mean, you know, I would like to believe that the average American does not want to harm the average other American, you know, and even if you get hyped up on Twitter or you get to see, you know, too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever, that ultimately people have that experience of saying, you know, I went to that like coffee at the church and I sat there with that guy who I really can't stand.
01:46:28.000And, you know, we ended up having a conversation.
01:46:31.000You know, people are, they're kind of amazed at how much commonality they can feel with people where if they just see the person.
01:46:40.000We all know, like if you text somebody, your kids or your wife or whatever, there's just some places where texts are not good.
01:46:51.000It's going to make somebody's feelings hurt, you know.
01:46:55.000But when you get to sit down across from somebody, you realize that it's another person you can kind of relate to.
01:47:02.000So it's really disturbing that whether it's social media or just the demonization of people, the way that we just turn people into these one-dimensional figures, and then we could just rage at them and just hate them.
01:47:16.000And distract yourself from your own problems.
01:47:59.000And all you care about is the government, you know, and what they're doing to fuck the people over.
01:48:05.000Like, I don't think that's really the problem.
01:48:07.000I think you're getting in your own way, son.
01:48:10.000You know, and that's a lot of people out there in this world.
01:48:13.000And anything that you do to distract yourself, whether it's start drinking, gamble, get on pills, whatever it is.
01:48:20.000People find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with their life.
01:48:26.000And that's part of what social media is providing you.
01:48:28.000It's providing this alternative avenue for your attention to divert you from all the things that really are making your life a fucking disaster.
01:48:37.000Yeah, there's also that, I think, sort of nuance falls into that also, because people are made calm by the idea that they can just identify problems and that they're simple, right?
01:48:50.000So if you say to somebody, hey, like locking people up for 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense, that's complicated.
01:48:58.000Wait, now I got to make a determination of what's the right thing to do with another person.
01:49:03.000And, you know, so you end up with a lot of politicians who say, well, I know this is these are the bad people.
01:49:10.000We've got to promote the good people and get rid of the bad people.
01:49:13.000Not recognizing that like everybody is a little of both and that some people certainly do a lot more bad stuff in the world than good stuff and vice versa.
01:49:21.000But you have to see yourself, you know, as you're describing, like you have to recognize what's happening in your backyard in order for the community to work.
01:49:50.000But I don't want to say that somebody else that did it is automatically just a horrible person.
01:49:56.000And that's why, you know, if you see this Attorney General in Alabama, you know, this idea that he says there are these horrible people in the world, people who have no respect for human life, and yet he's presiding over 1,500 of them dying.
01:50:11.000But he hasn't imagined that he's part of the problem.
01:50:15.000Respect for human life while human life is dying in these places where people are taken if they show no respect for human life and they're being killed by the people who are watching over them.
01:50:30.000We know that if you, sometimes we say about this film that it's about what we do to each other when no one's watching.
01:50:38.000Like, you know, all human beings have a little bit of a propensity to want to put a firecracker in a frog's mouth and just see what happens.
01:50:47.000You know, there's a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically.
01:50:56.000And that's to some extent why when it's exposed, right, when there's transparency, when the press is allowed to report on what's happening inside prisons, people kind of get a conscience because they start realizing, eh, I wouldn't want to do that in front of my kid, or I wouldn't want to do that if it ends up in the paper.
01:51:51.000Our job going into the Alabama state prison system was to shine a light on that.
01:51:56.000It shouldn't be that these guys who are incarcerated have to take life and death risks using contraband cell phones to show what's happening in institutions that I'm paying for and you're paying for it.
01:52:07.000We're spending $116 billion a year in the United States on prisons, jails, parole.
01:52:34.000Yeah, transparency is always good, especially in something like that.
01:52:37.000I mean, to me, the idea of preventing journalists from almost as akin to these ag gag laws that they've slapped in states that have factory farming to prevent people from filming the horrific treatment of some of these animals because it would be bad for business, which is fucking crazy.
01:52:57.000Like it should be bad for business, and people shouldn't tolerate it.
01:53:00.000They should take their business elsewhere, which is what transparency is all about.
01:53:03.000You don't want to buy chickens from a place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever it is.
01:53:09.000And I mean, and a lot of people say, oh, well, you know, it's going to upset, we don't need to upset the public.
01:53:15.000Well, what are you doing something for inside a slaughterhouse that would upset the public?
01:53:22.000Like, there are ways to, if you want to euthanize an animal or something like that, there are ways to do it where you're not using like a bolt and smashing their skull with it.
01:53:30.000Well, the bolt is actually the most humane way because it instantaneously kills them.
01:53:34.000The other way is when they hang them by their ankles and slip their neck.
01:53:41.000There's a lot of weird ways that they kill animals, but it's really the beating and it's the horrific torture that the cruel people that work there sometimes do.
01:53:51.000Because there's been some videos that have been released of people like beating animals with crowbars and stuff for no fucking reason.
01:53:58.000Just sadistic, sick people that just happen to work in these places and become very accustomed to treating these animals badly, just like security guards become very accustomed to treating prisoners badly.
01:54:14.000And just imagine what would happen if Tyson Foods or any of these companies just, the policy was just if the press wants to come in and photograph and the press wants to come in and write about it, they're allowed to come in once a week or whatever and just do whatever they want.
01:55:25.000But it's a very just being accustomed to horrors.
01:55:31.000You know, I knew a guy who worked at a slaughterhouse, and he told me, like, you never get the smell of blood off of you.
01:55:39.000And he goes, and you never get just like the image of animals dying.
01:55:44.000He goes, you got to understand, like, if you're working in a slaughterhouse, you're seeing who knows how many thousands of cows die a week.
01:55:51.000Just thousands, just thousands of deaths, constant death.
01:56:32.000I went sort of on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway and a few other places.
01:56:38.000And I was there with this sort of elderly woman that was like a deputy commissioner, I think, in North Carolina and the prison system, Virginia, Ginny.
01:56:51.000And the first thing they do is they bring you to a concentration camp.
01:56:55.000So they bring you to Soxenhausen before they take you to the prisons to see how the prisons are run.
01:57:01.000And we're standing there in this concentration camp with the guide, and the woman says, well, this is where they would bring in the people on the trains, and then they would take them out.
01:57:12.000And then this is where they would, you know, shave their heads, and then they would strip them down, and they would spray them with fire hoses and water, and then they would put powder, disinfectant powder on them.
01:57:23.000They would take away all of their, you know, any kind of distinguishing marks.
01:57:28.000They'd put them all in the same outfit.
01:57:30.000And they would give them a number instead of their name.
01:57:34.000And everybody started looking at it like very disturbed.
01:57:37.000And Ginny leans over to me and she says, you know, Andrew, we do every one of those things in our prisons today.
01:57:45.000And you realize that this dehumanization, this homogenization, this like making everybody look the same is part of just desensitizing us to what we're going to do to those people because they just look like they look like bad people because that's what happens when you shave your head and you're pale and you have the same outfit and you look like a convict.
01:58:09.000Yeah, you've turned them into another.
01:58:10.000And because of the tribal nature of ancient human civilization, we have almost like a deep-seated DNA that allows us to other people because those people were coming and they were going to kill your tribal members and steal your resources and do whatever they could to the survivors.
01:58:31.000And so we have this thing that we're able to do that allows us to attack or to go after people and just to not think of them as your brothers and sisters and neighbors and fellow human beings sharing this wonderful spinning ball.
01:59:00.000And that's how you feel about prisoners.
01:59:02.000And then there's the other side where you go too far the other way and you have these crazy no-cash bail policies where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly.
01:59:15.000You've got people that have been arrested 40 times, pushing old people in front of the train in New York City.
01:59:23.000You've got people that are just like mentally ill, violent criminals, punching women on the street in Seattle, and they just keep getting out of jail.
01:59:37.000But I think to the extent to which we could get everybody, which only is going to happen in little bits and little areas where we can make an impact, but we're trying, to say, well, look, it shouldn't be, you know, it shouldn't be that everybody who says that we shouldn't be running our prison industrial complex the way we are is soft on crime.
02:00:06.000It's okay to recognize that some people need to be separated out from society.
02:00:13.000But if it becomes so polarized, then you get that progressive DA who, you know, there are some very smart ones, and then you get some who are just saying, well, you know, we just should abolish prisons and therefore, you know, we don't need any of this.
02:00:27.000And that scares everybody and probably doesn't lead to any level because we all want public safety.
02:00:32.000Like everybody wants to be serious about public safety.
02:00:36.000That's different than being tough on crime.
02:00:39.000Well, it's also like, if you're not addressing the root of crime, if you're not addressing the, again, the same neighborhoods where it happens over and over and over, you know, you don't have like this rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills, right?
02:00:52.000It's all happening in these impoverished, gang-infested neighborhoods.
02:00:56.000Like, why has there been no resources put into that?
02:01:00.000Imagine the amount of return that you would get.
02:01:03.000Like, I always say, if you want to make America great again, here's the best way.
02:01:19.000No one will say everybody's at the same line and how you get by in this life is depending upon how much work you put in once you're at the line.
02:01:39.000Put some like some actual thought in trying to devise some sort of a method to increase the odds of having more productive people come out of these places and give them help.
02:02:35.000I mean, if you try to make the, if the, you know, the ultimate adjudicator of everything is whether it is turning a profit, you know, you sort of race to the bottom, right?
02:02:48.000Everybody's sort of, nobody really wants to do anything smart.
02:02:52.000They just want to do things that enable them to get the most money the quickest.
02:02:56.000But ultimately, right now, spending $116 billion a year on our prison system, you know, we've got 5% of the world's population.
02:03:06.000We've got 20, 25% of the world's prisoners.
02:03:17.000Like, if that's not evidence of a broken society, look, not like it's better in some of these other places that don't have a high percentage of people because they just kill them.
02:03:27.000Like, there's a lot of places where you do something bad, they just kill you.
02:03:33.000But I mean, in terms of like modern civilized society, you know, we don't do this well.
02:03:38.000No, we don't rehabilitate well, that's for damn sure.
02:03:41.000And we don't, as you're saying, we don't invest in kids.
02:03:45.000We don't, you know, like, how are we, how are we in a situation where we are paying teachers so little money that they have to use their own money to buy books and school supplies?
02:04:50.000You would probably ultimately wind up with less homeless.
02:04:54.000If you put $24 billion into education and community centers, God, imagine the work that you could do in California with $24 billion just in education.
02:05:04.000California would have the greatest education system in the country.
02:05:08.000If you just paid teachers an exorbitant amount a month, had an amount a year, had fantastic oversight, these incredibly well-structured education systems, great counseling, social workers that can help work with kids, people that could give them productive ways to expel some of this excess energy that they have, figure out how to focus, figure out what kind of jobs they maybe excel at based on their personality type, educate them towards that.
02:06:09.000I mean, there's, and I think that when you say it's a conspiracy, I really believe that, you know, conspiracies do not have to include people in dark back rooms, right?
02:06:21.000It's very often just everybody's sitting around the table.
02:06:24.000Everybody knows what the motivation is.
02:06:26.000And they just go, okay, yeah, I'll do the thing.
02:06:29.000There's not, nobody has to be rubbing their hands together and having secret meetings.
02:06:34.000They all know what's in their financial interest.
02:06:37.000Well, clearly, if you beat prisoners to death and then lie about it and you all agree that you're going to lie about it, you're conspiring, right?
02:06:50.000But I think there's an insidious element to the fact that people are agreeing that $24 billion should be spent on X, Y, or Z. Nobody really needs to get like a secret memo saying how they're going to steal that money.
02:07:05.000Like they just go, oh, okay, in Alabama, what now?
02:07:07.000We're allowed to spend $1.3 billion on one prison.
02:07:12.000Well, I'm not personally taking the $1.3 billion.
02:07:14.000I'm not personally taking the billion-dollar overage myself, but it's going into the system the way that, you know, the first time that the red flag is they start construction before the deal is even signed.
02:07:39.000That fucking thing was supposed to take like, I don't know how long it was supposed to take, but it went on long after I moved out and then came back to Boston like 10 years later.
02:08:11.000Well, the press is extremely important, which is why government, this government or prior government, they don't like the press, right?
02:08:20.000Nobody likes getting in trouble because the press does when it operates at its best and when you have the people that are able to make a living being journalists and you're not firing everybody who's a good investigative reporter, then that should be, it's one of the reasons why the country was founded in that way, why freedom of the press is so important, is because it's the only disinfectant.
02:08:46.000And it doesn't mean people don't use the press in malevolent ways or people don't bullshit in the press, but people bullshit everything.
02:08:52.000Yeah, but like the public kind of has a sense, or at least used to have a sense, and hopefully will again, that when somebody does an investigative story and they are able to produce the facts and figure out who's really responsible for a certain kind of corruption, that it reduces the corruption, just is the case, you know.
02:09:11.000And it's like you can't really regulate it, or you can regulate it, but if you regulate it and nobody's paying attention to it, then the press has to identify that people are breaking the rules.
02:09:21.000The DOJ right now is supposed to be the monitor of making sure that government institutions and others don't defy the Constitution, right?
02:09:35.000So in Alabama, clearly, every time you see one of these events that happens in our film, those are all crimes.
02:09:42.000Those are being committed by a state actor, by a prison guard, right?
02:09:47.000Those are crimes being committed against our fellow citizens.
02:09:50.000The fact that some of these people are incarcerated doesn't mean they're also supposed to be killed or maimed, right?
02:09:56.000And so who really monitors that is the U.S. Department of Justice, because at the end of the day, their job is to maintain a constitutional level of care.
02:10:06.000And it's not, by the way, that's not that great, right?
02:10:08.000It's like you have to make sure that there's no cruel and unusual punishment.
02:10:26.000What was the DOJ doing a few years back is they were doing a kind of a sort of an okay job pursuing just the worst actors, the worst of the worst.
02:10:36.000So they would find a police station that was just regularly harming people in its jails, arresting people for no reason.
02:10:46.000They were finding prison systems where people were getting murdered, like in Alabama, and that was going okay.
02:10:57.000Well, that whole civil rights division of the DOJ is now basically gone, right?
02:12:14.000So that happened under that happened under Jeff Sessions.
02:12:19.000And that was now, you know, two administrations ago.
02:12:24.000The Trump administration brought this action, but it's just being dragged on and dragged on.
02:12:31.000And now the DOJ doesn't really care about this kind of litigation.
02:12:34.000So the people that were running it are gone, all those people on the page.
02:12:37.000Well, I have to also imagine that there are so many cases.
02:12:41.000And if the press was allowed to weekly, if there was weekly access the press had to these correction facilities all over the country, the amount of cases would be fucking extraordinary.
02:12:54.000But because they've been allowed to hide, because they've been allowed to do this stuff in complete secrecy with total control over whether or not things get released or don't get released, like it's just it's become just a part of the system.
02:13:07.000It's like standard operational procedure.
02:13:10.000And it's, I mean, but the cases would go down, right?
02:13:17.000If you're beating people in your care, if you're a prison guard like Roderick Gadson, and you've had 24 cases of excessive force, it's sport for them.
02:13:27.000You know, you would say at one point, well, this is not working so great for me, so I want to at least behave somewhat better.
02:13:35.000Well, I think your film was probably the first time most people ever got a chance to see.
02:13:42.000And I would hope that your film and then also this conversation and the other ones that you've been having will move this conversation in a different direction where people start talking about it openly where they're forced to do something.
02:13:56.000Because it seems like you have to force them to act.
02:13:59.000And they're probably dealing with so many other cases as well.
02:14:19.000As a person who's had multiple podcasts with people that were wrongfully convicted, I've done a ton of them with my friend Josh Dubin, who was originally with the Innocence Project, and he's now with the Ike Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.
02:14:35.000Like his passion project is, besides being a successful attorney outside of that, his passion project is finding these very obvious cases of people that were wrongfully convicted that have spent a giant chunk of their life in jail.
02:14:49.000And through these podcasts, we've gotten a bunch of these people out, and you've got a chance to have conversations with them.
02:14:55.000I've had a few on here, and you have these conversations with these people, and you realize, like, these are brilliant people who lost a giant chunk of their potential to nonsense.
02:15:09.000And I think that's, if it's, first of all, I think Josh is really smart, and I know you've done a lot with him, and I think that's so important.
02:15:17.000There's, you know, there's always a tendency to sort of think of only wrongful convictions because, you know, everybody can agree that we shouldn't be locked up for something that we didn't do.
02:15:31.000We've had people on that weren't wrongfully convicted that did an extraordinary amount of time for a minor crime.
02:16:04.000Well, I think he, you know, he probably acted out of passion and then was trying to figure out how to rectify this problem that he created.
02:16:13.000But one thing I want to talk, I haven't met Josh, but I want to talk to him.
02:16:16.000And one thing I want to talk to him about is the fact that there is like a level of conviction on the part of a lot of prosecutors that they're on the, as you're saying, they're like, they're on that team and therefore they have to subscribe to everybody's guilty.
02:16:36.000Everybody should be locked up for as long as possible because there are all these other people, there are defense lawyers and people like that, who are on the other team.
02:16:42.000But then you end up with people like Steve Marshall, who, by the way, is running for Senate right now.
02:16:47.000And we're pushing to get him to step down from his Senate run because he's sort of been exposed for what he's.
02:16:53.000And by the way, he said that he had never been in the film.
02:17:39.000And yet, and by the way, the DA, who that office is the office that should prosecute that crime, they've asked for a new trial.
02:17:48.000They've said that they're not confident that he's guilty.
02:17:51.000And yet, the Attorney General's office is continuing to try to execute him.
02:17:55.000They're trying to kill him for something which he clearly did not do.
02:17:59.000There's another case, a guy named Chris Barber, where there's DNA evidence that showed that somebody else committed the crime, and the DA is trying to execute Christopher Barber.
02:18:10.000And so, you know, there's this teaming, you know, where you become part of law enforcement, and then somehow you lose your sense of judgment or nuance or your ability to decide who's guilty and who's not guilty.
02:18:47.000Which is very, I mean, it's disturbing that we haven't come up with ways to identify fairness, right?
02:18:58.000That fairness should be the method by which you judge how a district attorney performs.
02:19:03.000It's like, well, we decided to prosecute a certain number of cases.
02:19:06.000Some of those cases weren't worth prosecuting.
02:19:08.000Some of those cases were going to turn into wrongful convictions.
02:19:11.000We're not just going to prosecute everything, which is why this whole thing about like Brady material, where you're supposed to give the other side anything that comes out in the investigation that might be used to prove their innocence.
02:19:23.000You know, if there's something that goes against the criminal case, you have to provide it to the lawyer on the other side.
02:19:28.000But regularly, prosecutors just bury this information.
02:19:31.000You know, you have some witness that said, I was with that person at the time, and that witness's testimony disappears, or you have something that shows that the gun that they thought was used to commit the crime wasn't the one that was used to commit the crime.
02:19:42.000So there's just a that's the thing, the teaming, the decision that you have to be part of one side or another.
02:19:49.000You know, I really think that that part of your special where you're sort of like putting me in the position of somebody who's having to make a decision about what team I'm on and where I lose the thread, you know, that's like that's a very significant thing that you did there, you know, because it was like a way of bringing to the average citizen that feeling that they're all having right now.
02:20:55.000And then something happens or my shrink says to me, Yeah, I know you always say you're not going to make another movie, but I think you're better when you're making a movie.
02:21:04.000I think you're better when you're engaged in something like this.
02:21:07.000And I'm curious for, you know, you've built this incredible platform and you have access to just a remarkable number of people in the universe.
02:21:18.000And what do you feel like your mission is?
02:21:21.000What do you feel like is the, you know, when you get to the end of a week and you look back and you think, like, I did what I was, I did what I set out to do this week.
02:21:31.000All I ever do is try to talk to people I'm interested in talking to, and that's it.
02:21:38.000And I feel like that's what I started with, and that's what I stuck with.
02:21:43.000And if I deviate from that path, if I say, oh, I'll get this guy on because he's famous and then I'll get more views, or I'll get her on because she's controversial and I'll get more views.
02:22:04.000I get a list of people on my phone that are interested in coming on the show and I spend a couple hours, a few times a week, just going over this list and then I'll go, hmm, that's interesting.
02:22:42.000And I've done it that way from the very beginning.
02:22:45.000I either talk to my friends or I talk to people who I've seen a documentary that they did or I've read one of their books or I've watched a YouTube video with them in it.
02:23:27.000And if I try to make it anything more than that, if I try to change it or distort it or move it in a general direction or make it have a message or make it make more money or whatever it is, I'll fuck it up.
02:23:51.000And I think your approach is really smart.
02:23:53.000I also think, you know, I think you talked about that you really like playing pool and that if you weren't doing this, you might just play pool all the time.
02:24:27.000Like, why did they make these choices?
02:24:28.000Like, what is it about the way they think that makes them unique?
02:24:32.000And I don't think I'm ever going to lose that.
02:24:35.000I think that's a very important part of my understanding of us as a species, us as a civilization.
02:24:42.000And I'm very fascinated with the history of the human race and how we got to this point and where we are and how we define what is normal and what is not normal and what our standards are and how they get manipulated.
02:24:57.000I don't think I'm ever going to stop being curious about those things.
02:26:13.000Especially if you're talking to someone that has something really important to say.
02:26:16.000I mean, if I'm looking at my phone for a brief second, it's because it's something relevant to what we are talking about.
02:26:21.000I want to send it to Jamie so he can pull it up on the screen.
02:26:24.000But I think it's one of the great benefits of having these long conversations with people on a podcast is that that's time where you're not staring at a fucking device.
02:26:35.000So I've gotten this completely unexpected education in life and human beings and how they think and what drives them and just what makes them interesting.
02:26:45.000And, you know, how does it impact like your girls, right?
02:28:03.000But so it impacts not just my relationship with them, but really my relationship with everybody in my life.
02:28:10.000And what's really hard is talking to people that aren't interested in anything and don't engage with all these different things.
02:28:20.000And then when you talk to them, it's like they're operating on this frequency that's like time and work and life has sort of ground down all their sensitivity and callused all of their senses to the world, their thoughts of the world, their perspectives of the world.
02:28:41.000And they've developed these sort of placeholder opinions for things.
02:28:48.000And, you know, and over time, like, you know, Tony Robbins talked about this once, that if you make small changes in your life, like if you're both going in parallel lines, right?
02:28:58.000And then you make a small deviation, a few degrees to the right, over time, you'll be way over here where they're kind of on the same path.
02:29:07.000And that's what I find in life that's weird.
02:29:10.000And then I think about how many people don't have the opportunity to do that because they have a job that's like mundane and it's consuming and they're involved in it all day long.
02:29:19.000When they get done, they're exhausted and they never really satisfy their curiosity or encourage and engage with their curiosity.
02:29:31.000And it's what, to me, makes people fascinating.
02:29:35.000When I talk to someone who's curious about things and it's really like, and it went down all, I was curious, so then I started researching.
02:29:47.000Yeah, it's really, I mean, I think it's also, you know, you're probably because it got big without a plan to get big, and because I think you're the essence of it is wanting to express curiosity, wanting to take in information.
02:30:05.000How do you deal with the people who say like, oh, you know, you had so-and-so on.
02:30:10.000You should have asked them this or you should have done this.
02:30:12.000I don't know that they're saying that.
02:31:09.000Which is why like this idea of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is so fucking crazy.
02:31:14.000When you're asking some kid whose, you know, dad's been in jail since he was three and lives in a crime-infested neighborhood and has 11 kids living in a one-bedroom apartment.
02:31:25.000And you're saying, well, how come you went to jail?
02:32:32.000Like, when they're done, like, that was like, I should have stopped them from talking about that because I should have said, like, wait, that doesn't make sense.
02:32:39.000Like, you let people ramble a little bit too much, and then they change subjects, you want to go back to it, and then something else comes up, and you lose, like, ah, I should have really challenged that a little bit more.
02:32:49.000Or I should have done this, or I should have done that.
02:34:12.000The last hour you could really get them.
02:34:15.000Because it's hard for, especially if someone has an agenda.
02:34:19.000You know, you could, after a while, you're talking to them.
02:34:22.000The tendencies, the way they view the world comes out.
02:34:25.000If I really want to know how someone feels about love or life, I want to ask them, you know, how they got to where they are in life, how they became who they are.
02:35:09.000There's some people that come in, they're just open books.
02:35:11.000They're just like just a mind, a curious person, just a person who followed a path, an artist, a singer, a comedian, a this or that, an athlete, like whatever it is.
02:35:24.000That's why I love comedy so much because, you know, just listening, there's a joke in Pumping Mics, this little series that we did with Jeff, you know, Jeff Ross and David Tell.
02:35:35.000And I got to watch, you know, six versions of Dave, who's just incredible, telling, they're both great, but Dave telling the same joke like six different times.
02:36:47.000But also just like the freedom, right?
02:36:49.000Which maybe some of that for some people come with being stoned.
02:36:53.000Some people, but I see like the feeling, like in your comedy special, the feeling that it's coming in the moment, even though I know a lot of those things are things that you've been thinking about, talking about and honing over a lot of years.
02:37:06.000It's the moment when it feels like it's coming naturally.
02:37:11.000That's where like the biggest laughs are.
02:37:14.000It's also like where the biggest connection, the biggest human being.
02:37:47.000Well, hey, man, thank you for everything you've done.
02:37:50.000Thank you for the Jinx, and thank you for the Alabama solution because it's really awesome.
02:37:55.000And I really hope that through that film, a lot of people get outraged and the right people.
02:38:03.000And enough attention gets put on it where you force people to do something about it.
02:38:09.000And I don't think people have any idea how bad these fucking prisons are until they see that.
02:38:14.000And I think those contraband phones and what those inmates have done and the inmates themselves, through the way they conduct themselves, and when you could see how intelligent these people are, and that you realize this is not right.
02:38:32.000I mean, on the positive side, I would say, just so we don't end on a really negative note, the film has had an impact in Alabama.
02:38:43.000It's having an impact in Alabama already.
02:38:45.000And there are incredible demonstrations that have been happening.
02:38:49.000There's actually, I don't know if you have it, there's a still of this if you want to look at it, but there's hundreds of people showed up on the steps of the Capitol, people really showing up with the intention of showing their loved ones being there and saying, listen, is really happening, and giving the rest of the public permission to understand that this is, you know, 45% of Americans have had an incarcerated relative or been incarcerated.
02:39:17.000This is happening in many, many, many places.
02:39:19.000So for us, the film has been unlocking that, giving people a feeling that they're not alone, that they don't have to be ashamed of having somebody.
02:39:29.000So, you know, these are people who've seen the film who've decided that they want to express themselves.
02:39:37.000And we just saw there was a bipartisan bill that was just introduced by Senator Larry Stutz, who's a Republican senator, who said he saw the film.
02:40:01.000It's a real bill about how you take the investigations because you saw in the film the investigations are run by the same department that commits the crimes.
02:40:10.000So I think we're seeing a lot of positive action as a result of the film.
02:40:15.000And I think that's what transparency is all about, is if the public can see it, and I appreciate your talking about this and having this be in the public conversation because it's really important.
02:40:28.000If people see it, they're not happy about it.
02:40:31.000They understand that something more humane needs to be done.