¶ Revisionist History and The Alabama Solution
Pushkin. Hello, Hello revisionist history listeners. As many of you will know, we did a seven part series last fall called The Alabama Murders, the story of the death of a preacher's wife in the shoals in northwestern Alabama thirty five years ago and the tragic reverberations of that case. I honestly think it's one of the best things we've ever done on revisionist history. And almost the exact time that our series dropped, HBO aired a brilliant documentary called
The Alabama Solution. The Revisionist History series was about the death penalty in Alabama. The Alabama Solution was about the prison system in Alabama.
We had record numbers of people leaving out of here body bays. They don't want to put a biet what's really going on?
Only at that How can a journalists go into a war zone but can't go into a prison In the United States?
The state is settling one.
Lawsuit after another. There's no consequences for their actions.
There's an argument that there is some systemic problem within all of our facilities, and I, whileheartedly.
Disagree with that, the two projects fit together almost perfectly. So I called up the director of the documentary Andrew Jireki and said, do you want to sit down for a conversation and he said yes, and so we got together at on AirFest in Brooklyn for a long talk about Alabama and filmmaking and all kinds of other things.
¶ Andrew Jarecki's Motivation for Prison Documentary
If the name Andrew Jireki seems familiar to you, it's because he's one of the pre eminent documentarians of our time. He did Capturing the Freedman's The Jinks. A brilliant, brilliant guy. Here's a conversation, Andrew, Welcome to Brooklyn. Thank you, thank you for doing this. The reason you and I are on stage is that in the fall, we released a seven part series on Revision's History called The Alabama Murders, and almost at exactly the same time, you released a
documentary on HBO called The Alabama Solution. Our series was about a capital punishment case. Your series was about the Alabama prison system. And it was this marvelous instance of two works that overlapped but didn't overlap. And I texted you and said we should have a conversation, and here we are, and I found your documentary extraordinary, and I was just telling you backstage, I'm not someone who listens to watches love documentaries. But I have seen all of yours,
Captain of Freedman's JINX. This is the best in my mind.
Thank you.
And I was curious, I would like you to start tell us how you came to do a story about the Alabama prison system, because I suspect it's not a straight line. You didn't sit down one day and say I want to do a story about the Alabama the system.
Yeah. I think nothing's a straight line, certainly for me. And I was noticing also your podcast around that same time and then and I was sort of I was kind of holding back because I thought, is this going to influence what we're working on? You know, just because it's hard, like when you're making one thing and then somebody else does something else, and especially if it's a smart person, You're like, what if they do this better? Or what do they have an idea? And then I'm
drawn to that idea or something like that. But I did get to listen to it, and it's it's really superb and and and and extremely familiar to me. So I you know, when I was making Capturing the Freedman's I had reason to go into Dana Mora correctional facility in Upstate New York, and I found that the visit was so punishing, just as a visitor, everything about it
was so difficult and brutal. And then when I saw the waiting room and I saw how people were being treated there, I just thought, I think I need to get deeper into this prison. And I wasn't able to do that. But then over the years, I just visited a lot of prisons and I was really amazed at how poorly we do this. But I never really understood the Alabama system because it's so secretive. I mean, I would say all prisons in the US are sort of
treated like black sites. And you know, you drive down the highway and you see a little metal sign that says XYZ correctional facility in Upstate New York or someplace, and you think, well, I probably don't need to drive down there. If anything really bad's happening, you know, somebody will tell me about it. But that presupposes that you will be able to read it in a paper, you will be able to see a television show that explains it.
And that's not the case because the press is really not allowed to visit prisons.
There's a great line from one of your one of your character is in your documentary, one of the prisoners who says, isn't it crazy that if you're a journalist, you can go to a war zone, but you can't go to a prison in your own country?
Yeah? Yeah, yeah, you can visit a war zone and you can't go to a prison in the United States of America. And so I was always curious and then didn't think I would ever get a chance to do it.
¶ Road Trip to Montgomery and A Slave Ship
And then oddly, my daughter, who was like fourteen, she went to Dalton, and at Dalton they had a really good speaker program and they had brought in a guy named Anthony ray Hinton who had been wrongfully convicted in Alabama and had been in this prison system for like thirty years. And she said, you know, I think you should read this book with me because I think, you know, you're interested in this stuff. And then we read the book together and we just sort of spontaneously decided to
take a road trip to Montgomery. We went to Montgomery, we didn't know anybody. We almost accidentally met a man who is almost eighty years old who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, appointed by George Wallace. I think he was like George Wallace's one black friend, because he had to have one. And so I asked him to have dinner with us. So we sat and had dinner, and I started asking him questions and he was kind of reluctant to tell me too much.
But I could also tell he had a lot of pain because he goes into these prisons all the time, so he knows what's happening in the prisons. But he's afraid that if he tells me too much, then I'm going to get too nosy and then maybe he's going to get kicked out of the prisons because we start so but I could tell he didn't want to let me leave either, and so we had this little standoff for a while where I was asking questions and he said, well, why don't you just, you know, come back and you
can see for yourself. And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. They're not going to let me into the Alabama prison system. And he said, well, just come in without a camera, just come in and volunteer and we'll give about hygiene packages and food. And so I said, or maybe I'm going to do that. Well, if I do come back,
what will I see? And I could tell that he was sort of thinking about whether he wanted to say this thing that he was going to say to me, because he knew if he said the right thing, I would come back, and if he didn't, maybe I wouldn't. And he said, if you come back, I'll take you on the death row at Holman Prison and you'll see it's a slave ship. And that was a very important
kind of moment for me. That was seven years ago, and I think it's the reason that line was the reason I went back, because I just thought, well, whatever this is, I have to see. And then I went back.
¶ Contraband Cell Phones and Prisoner Footage
And you'll see in the film we sort of get access until we don't. But in the course of going into Easterling Prison, we start hearing from these men who are saying, look this visit you're making here, I'm not supposed to be talking to you, but this is a curated visit, rightwing. You just what they want you to see. But see that building over there, that's where they do
solitary confinement. There are men that men that have been in there for five years or seven years at a time, seeing nobody, and see that building over there is the wide dorm. That's the behavior modification dorm, and somebody was just killed there by guard and we just started to
understand how bad it was. And then last thing that happened is, you know, we get kicked out, and then we thought we didn't know how we're going to tell the story until we discovered that there was this network of people inside who had contraband cell phones and had access to a charger, were borrowing a charger from a friend and would have to put the cell phones up when the guards came. But it was our only window into this very secretive system.
Had anyone I want to pause on that for a moment because one of the many remarkable the most remarkable thing about the documentary from a technical standpoint, is that it is largely shot in FaceTime right or in video calls. I don't know what percentage of the movie ends up being. Thirty percent of the movie is just the is the prisoners facetiming with you and you had this? Has this been done before?
I mean I don't know of it having been done before, because it's such an unusual situation, not only because the men had access to cell phones, but because they had collected all this material over years that showed what was really happening in the system and showed episodes of you know, really shocking episodes. I mean, when I saw it, I thought, you know, this is like watching Titkeke at follies. You're looking at a whole segment of the population that's just
been abandoned, and not just abandoned, but also harmed. And then we discovered that there were these men inside who were leaders, who were really civil rights leaders, who had been managing like a non vibe protest movement for years, even before we got there, and so we had the benefit of you know, it was like talking to Mandela on Robin Island on a cell phone.
¶ Overcoming Documentary Challenges
So I would to pause on this because I think it's a really important point. And I was naive enough
about documentaries that it hadn't occurred to me before. But with the notion that you were the narrative engine of this documentary is the videos being recorded by the prisoners themselves in real time and being sent to you, And with that you overcome what has always been the biggest problem with documentaries, right which is you're telling a story after the fact, and any almost always in documentaries, any video that you're capturing, unless you get some archival talking
to people as they reconstruct something that happened far away and long ago. This all of that, our artificiality is gone from Alabama solution. You're right there to prison with these guys.
¶ The Darkness of the Prison System
Yeah, I mean, it was, it was. It was an enormously eye opening and I would say violent experience to be drawn into that and to understand that the only way that these people can get away with treating human beings this way is if it's in darkness. You know, you can't you can't do this if the public knows that you're doing it, even even a jaded public in Alabama who you know, as you know very well, Alabama is sort of inured to certain kinds of indignities, and
you know, they're very propagandized group. You know, it's sort of very tough on crime, and the politicians really like weaponize the crime victims to just have this constant narrative. It's like watching cops twenty four hours a day. It's just an advertisement for poor people are crazy and dangerous and so being able to to eliminate that layer. You know that propaganda layer. You know, there's a great line.
I mean, one of the leaders in the film, Robert Earl, counsel who goes by Kinetic Justice, says, you know, I'm in prison. I'm supposed to lie, I'm supposed to exaggerate. I'm supposed to make up excuses. So that narrative is so strong that unless we can tell the story directly to people, they're just going to assume that it's not true.
And you know, and I felt like going into the prisons there, I was far more you know, they would say, oh, well, don't talk to the men because they're very dangerous and they're going to tell you lies and so on. And I felt so much more comfortable talking to the men who are incarcerated than the guards.
¶ Constructing the Film's Narrative
Well, how long did it take for you to realize that the movie was going to be constructed out of these based on videos and prisoners we're sharing with you.
Well, you know, my biggest anxiety was that we were not going to be able to get enough material talking to the men. Obviously this archival material where you can see really telling things that happen, there was an embarrassment of traumatic events. I mean, it was just that was like terror bytes worth of that material, but being able to talk directly to the men. Once you do it, once you're talking to them for five minutes, you think this is the only thing I want to watch. I
don't want to hear anybody. I don't want to hear experts. You know, we had this sex do Or Pontier was my partner in making the jinks. Who's sitting here right there. He and I talked a lot about experts when we were making the jinks. You know, we had access to the people that were in Bob Durst's life, and we had access to people that were present during crimes and helpful in crimes and so on, and so it just was every time we'd interview somebody would say, well let
me tell you how this works or something. It just wasn't very effective, and in this case it was. It would have been absurd, you know, there was we wanted to talk to some of the system actors. So we ended up getting access to like the Attorney General, who's an incredible cinematic villain, and.
It is I want to talk to him in more detail. I want to come back to him. Just pause on that, because anyway, keep going.
And by the way, I particularly enjoyed and my mind was a little bit blown by hearing Steve Marshall, the Attorney General in your podcast, you know, speaking as the convincingly right as the authority who's explaining how you know, he's there for crime victims and they've waited thirty five years for justice and all that stuff. And this is a guy who's presiding over death camps in an American state. But he was something, he was somebody that had to be there.
¶ Uncovering a Murder Mystery
So to to pause for a moment, the movie is about. It's a in general, an investigation of the extraordinary brutality inside the Alabama prison system, and in particular about the murder of a young man at the hands of a guard, of a sadistic guard, and then the cover up that ensues that you're able to uncover by virtue of these calls with the with the prisoners inside the same institution.
So it's simultaneously a kind of Upton Sinclair like expose of a institution and also a murder mystery and im and the murder mystery which I don't know whether we should give away the one of the key kind of moments in the in the movie, but you get it. Takes a surprising and horrifying twist. As you're in the middle of it. You think you think you're investigating one murder and then you end up investigating too And I'm how how far into the film was the twist?
Well, we didn't know what we were making. We never know what we're making, right, And sometimes today I think in documentary world, you know, somebody, some streamer or something will send you a like a an email saying like, you know, you need to make this film, and I almost never open them, but when I do open them, there's always like a deck, and the deck literally will say to you, you know, here are the main characters, and we've already made agreements with them, and this is
what they're going to say, and then you know, here's what your plotline is going to be. And I just think, like that should be an AI film, like you already know what it is and you should just say I that thing and some people watch it. But the whole idea is the journey, right, The whole idea is that
we don't know what's going to happen. You know, when I was making Capturing the Freedman's I thought I was making a film about professional children's birthday party entertainers in New York City, and then you know, it turned out to be something that was radically different from that because you discover something along the way. When we were making the jinks, we knew that Bob Durst wanted to talk,
and that was interesting enough for me and Zach. What we found, the fact that he wanted to talk enough that it would lead us down enough pass that we would discover evidence and he would get arrested for murder the day before the last episode, was totally unpredictable. And that's why you do it, right. I mean, so in
¶ The Death of Stephen Davis
this case, we had just gotten a text message from one of the men inside and the I guess the only precursor of that was that we had been looking at all of the pro sae lawsuits filed by prisoners, you know, lawsuits that are filed without the benefit of a lawyer. But these guys are kind of incredible lawyers. Some of them are really extraordinary, sort of jailhouse lawyers,
but very very sophisticated. And we had been looking at all these lawsuits because we wanted to see who are the guards that are coming up repeatedly in these lawsuits and we had found this one guard named Rod Gadson, Rodrick Gadson, and he was named in I think twenty four different brutality suits. And you have to understand, like bringing one of these lawsuits in prison is it's the most optimistic and kind of absurdest thing because there's no
money in it. They never get an award. Their conversations that happened like, Okay, well this guy got his finger intentionally cut off in his cell door by a guard. But how much is a finger really worth? You know, maybe it's five thousand dollars. It's very hard to get a lawyer to cover that. We have lawyers said that would say to us along the way, like find me a murder that might be worth it, that might be worth my getting into it. So in this particular case,
rod Gadson's name had kept coming up. And then one day Mel texts Charlotte, my co director, and says, hey, we understand somebody got beaten very badly at Donaldson Prison and he's currently at UAB Hospital. So he was moved off the campus to the hospital. So Charlotte, I had just got in a car in Birmingham and we just
drove over to the hospital. We walked in and I like took my iPhone and I stuck in my pocket and moved it around a little bit, and they said, oh, you got to go up to the fourth floor, and we went up there, and by the time we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died. So he had been and we didn't know how that
had happened, other than that he had been beaten. And then we went to find his mother because often the prison doesn't tell the family members if somebody has been killed in prison, especially if it's done by a guard, if the guard is responsible, they immediately scramble all the witnesses and they will say, well, let's not tell his
mother for two weeks. We'll move the these guys around them, we'll give this guy an incentive to go to a different facility, and we'll help this other guy, because they just don't want the evidence. And in that case, we went to Sandy Ray's house. She had just been with her son hours before that and had taken Mo off life support, and she said, you guys are making a film and we said yeah. She said, well, I want
to help you do it. I don't want this to happen to any other mother, and so right now they're lying to me. I know, the prison's calling me right now, and they're lying to me about what happens. So show me how to record my phone calls. So we got on her phone and we showed her how to record a phone call. And then she said, by the way, there are no motels here because Uniontown only has four hundred people in it, so you know, I have this
spare room. So Charlotte just like got her duffel back and just moved in for a couple of weeks into Sandy's house, which is.
Why, yeah, waiting for the call to come.
Not just that call, but it's just watching how Sandy was discovering what had really happened to her son and eventually getting a call from somebody inside the prison who was a whistleblower who said doesn't even want to identify himself, but says, you know this is not this was not a I wonder described it well.
¶ The Prison's Cover-Up
Watching My first kind of like technical question was you had you're there in the room on camera with the mom when she gets the call from the state or the Department of Corrections. I was like, how on earth were they there in the room, like I didn't understand. Technically, now I know how it happened. They were victims of their own because it's they built a delay in order to build a cover up, and in so doing they destroyed their cover up weirdly.
Well yeah, and by the way, in terms of being shot with your own gun, the contraband cell phones that are in the prison are all sold to the inmates in the prison by the guards. Right. As a matter of fact, when I started to discover how many, just how much drugs were coming into the prison or this enormous cash of cell phones that were coming to the prison, I was talking to one of the prisoners and I said to him, you know, where's all this coming from? And he looked at me like I was an idiot,
and he said, you know, we don't leave, right. So clearly the people that come and go every day are the ones that are going out and getting drugs and going out and buying cell phones and bring him in. So it's kind of incredibly ironic that the tool that the men are using to identify the crimes that are being committed by the ostensible law enforcement officers are sold to them by aforementioned law enforcement officers.
¶ Horrific Prison Conditions Visualized
I had a lot of difficulty, even after I had spent months and months and months doing my Alabama project, I was just aghast. I don't know why was I I was just something about seeing it because I only heard. My whole thing was just listening to people tell me stories. Right, I didn't see anything. Will be the point. I'm doing a podcast. I suddenly there's a scene in the doc when it's I don't know why the scene has stayed
with me, but I've forgotten. One of your characters gets sent to solitary and he's on the phone and he shows you these jars he has that are full of He's telling you why he hangs his food up in a bag high off the ground on his prison cell. And then and then he gets in trouble for it every day, but he says, well, the reason I do that is because of these guys. And he shows you
jars that have little live rats inside of it. And then he shows you his toilet and you see rats swimming in his toilet, and he says, I caught eleven of these last.
Night, Eleven caught in one night, eleven caught in one night.
They keep my food laundry bead hanging from the bars, and they write me different, theres be hanging things from the bars, but if I had put it on the floor, they'll hit it rats.
One back.
And that was the point, was like I was like Jesus, why that's not the worst but way not even close to being the worst thing that happens. But something about the visual of realizing that there are people who will happily tolerate conditions like that inside of prison, like the administration is fine with that. Somehow, that somehow got me.
Well, first of all, I can tell from your description that everyone's going to run out and immediately go to HBO and watch this film so that they can see But it is, it is, it is extraordinary that that the and I have to say just I think one of the things that in your podcast that was so
¶ Moral Failure Cascade and Intentional Cruelty
telling to me, and I really think it brings these stories together, is your postulate of the moral failure cascade. You know that you have a series of small or larger or growing problems and events that happen, and then one thing leads to another and it gets worse and worse and worse, and I think, you know, people get used to it. You know, they get to the point where they say, well, I mean, how many people are
really you know, I mean some people are going to die? Right? Well, I don't know what if we have the deadliest prison system in America at some point, are we going to look at that and say, like, maybe we're doing something wrong? But you hear you have Steve Marshall, the one person that we share in this the podcast and also in the film, who says, you know, I've been told that
there's some kind of systemic problem in all of our facilities. Right, We've just been watching an hour of the most punishing material. You can't imagine prison after prison after prison, Donaldson Prison, Kilby Prison, bib Prison, each one of these places home and where they have two hundred and forty people on the death row. And your guy was right before he's executed.
You've been watching that for an hour, and then here's Steve Marshall, the chief law enforcement officer of the State of Alabama, and he says, I've been told that there's some systemic problem in all of our facilities. And I wholeheartedly disagree with that. Yeah, and it's not just willful blindness. I mean, it's just it's just intentional cruelty. It's a willingness to preside over a system of death camps. They are death camps. We have to say that's what they are.
Since we started working in the film, which was seven years ago, fifteen hundred people have died in that little prison system. You know, they have twenty thousand people in
the prison system. They have another twenty five thousand in the jails in Alabama where people die regularly and somehow people are done of, you know, highest level of drug overdose of any prison system in the country, not that there are not lots of other horrific ones, highest numbers of suicide, highest level of sexual assault, and just the brutality of the situation. You can't you can't run that
without knowing it. You can't say, well, I wasn't aware of it, because there were enough layers between me and the people that were, you know, actually in the in the trenches doing the business of killing people.
¶ Alabama's Unique Political Climate
After the break, more from my conversation with Andrew Jireki, Let's talk a little bit about Alabama, because I'm curious about what you what was your level of understanding, knowledge, familiarity with Alabama before you did this project.
It was probably the state I knew the least about in the Union. You know, it's just not something if you grew up in New York City and you study history, you're not spending a ton of time on Alabama. I knew a little bit, you know, like there, I don't know, like the state motto of you know, a typical American state will be like the Sunshine State or the show Me State.
You know.
Alabama's motto is we dare defend our rights. Yeah, you know, which is really like if you want to come and have an opinion, you can go fuck yourself. We're not interested in your opinion. We're just going to do our thing. And certainly we don't want you telling us how to deal with our negroes or our population of prisoners, or our crime or you know, any of it. It's just there's a wall.
I'm not sure whether that's more or less egregious than New Jersey calling itself the garden state. But where are these gardens in New Jersey? I get to see anything along to it Turnpike. But uh, it's it's a heart. You know. I've done I was kind of I think that I have done more. Podcast episodes of Rusion's history that are situated in Alabama, within in any other state. I'm drawn to this place. And for the same reason,
I feel like it's not the United States. It's something an it's it is within the United States, but not of the United States, or maybe I'm being too kind to the United States. It is clearly in some ways a foreign country.
It's kind of amazing you're saying that because the chaplain who I visited and met and encouraged me to come back, Chaplain Browder, after I was in it for six months, so the first year or two, and I was stayed in touch with him constantly. He's quite he's quite a bit older now, he's seven years older than when I first met him. But he's still very thoughtful guy. And he said, I'm telling you, Andrew, Alabama and in these United States. Yeah. But you know, then you ask yourself
whether that's even right. You know. The reality is is that you know, upstate New York, Robert Brooks just got killed in upstate New York by corrections officers who beat him to death. And the only reason we don't think it was natural causes or a drug overdose is because they were I don't even want to say dumb enough.
They were entitled enough to just leave their body cameras on because they just assumed that nobody was ever really going to try to figure out what happened to poor Robert Brooks who was handcuffed when they beat him to death. So it's happening in New York. You know, if you were in it, if you would put your dog in upstate New York and at kennel because you were going on holiday and you saw this, you would say, I'm
calling the ASPCA. This is a total disaster. Nobody can put their dog in this, So it's not a whole lot better in a lot of these places.
¶ Steve Marshall and Christian Grace
Two things can be true simultane see. One is that in general, the prison conditions in the United States are appalling compared to our peers around the world. But there is something particular and unusual about Alabama that elevates Alabama even above its miserable peers. And I wonder whether the weekend sort of since we've both been immersed in this,
we can put our finger on what it is. And I'm wondering, I'm thinking about Steve Marshall, which is if you I don't know I'm making this up, but if you sat down with the Attorney General of New York State, they they would have the good grace to be embarrassed about what was happening in the prisons. Steve Marshall, And I want you to talk a little bit about your interview with Steve Marshall. Steve Marshall, when confronted with these questions,
wasn't even remotely embarrassed. In fact, he had the gall when he had to give that one quote from him about when you ask him about Christian grace, he says, I believe in Christian grace, but that doesn't mean somebody should got out of prison.
I mean, look, I think anybody can have a change of heart. Oh I'll say that, I think God can invade somebody believe in the concept of grace. But grace atself doesn't mean released from prison. Grace means that you're relieved from the burden of your sin.
It's not even that he's defiant, it's that he thinks he's on the side of God right now. That is different. Can you what are your thoughts on the peculiarity of Alabama and can you talk about let's talk about Steve Marshall because you spend time with him.
Yeah, how much?
How long was that interview?
I think that interview was shorter than most. Maybe it was two hours.
This is why I love documentarians. Your idea of shorter than most is two hours.
Yeah.
My idea of shorter than most is ten minutes.
We do some sevens and some nines, you know Jesus. Yeah, yeah, they're kick. Usually the wife is like standing and the corner and being like looking at the watch.
But Steve Marshall gave you two hours.
Yeah. I mean, you know, the great thing about somebody like this is that they say the quiet part out loud. There's no there's no shame in it. And I don't really know how he manages it, you know, as a self proclaimed Christian, I don't know how he goes and kisses his kids and says like daddy's upholding the law and so on, because he knows what the statistics are. Right, Let's say he just doesn't he forces himself or he
prevents himself from from having access to the prisons. You know, you can always put some kind of operachic in between you and the prisons. And then you say, I don't know I saw the reports, and it doesn't look like it's all that bad. So I don't know how he describes it to himself, but and I think, you know,
politicians are kind of will of the wisp. And you know, he used to be a Democrat, and then now he's a Republican, and then he was recently so Republican that he was one of the guys who one of the local state officials who came to New York and put on the red tie and the Trump outfit and went down to Lower Manhattan and start talking about how Trump was being railroaded by the justice system and so on. So he's always auditioning. And by the way, right now,
Steve Marshall's trying to run for Senate. He's trying to run for Tommy Tubberville's seat in the Senate. So the football coach, Tommy Tubberville became a US senator from Alabama. He's the one that did not know that there were three branches of government, right, He did not have a lot of training.
He just thought it was offense and defense.
¶ Political Expediency and Parole System
Exactly what would you do with this third branch? Especially, that's what's happening in the federal government too. They're getting rid of some of the branches out here. We have too many branches that we're going to We're going to doze those branches right out. But you know, I think he just imagines. First of all, I think he's very politically expeditious. You know, he wants to become a US senator. He wants to be the guy that's the tough on
crime guy. He's sort of made book with this organization called Vocal in Alabama, which is Victims of Crime and Leniency, which is literally like a group of women who are crime who you know, had a crime happen in their family, and they go to every parole hearing and they don't know the people. They get a little card before they go there. We sort of embedded with them and maybe should make a film about them. And they go to a parole hearing where you have a guy who's been
locked up for twenty five years. He's an ordained minister, he's taken every conceivable class, he's like mentored five hundred young men that have been in there. And this a woman will get up and say, you know, I'm here to protest the parole of Kevin Johnson, And you know he committed a crime in nineteen seventy three. They have no idea what it is. They just know he committed
a crime and he should not be parled. And then they stand in front of the parole board and they say to the three members the parle board, if you let this man out and he re offends, it will be on your neck and everyone will know that you did that. And you know, that's one of the things that drove Alabama's parole rate to eight percent.
Which is that the last lowest in the country.
Yeah, it was at that time. It was. It's improved a little bit, and I think it's improved in part, you know, because of the work in and around the film, because you know, among other things, it was a lawsuit that was sparked by the film, this class action lawsuit
¶ Forced Labor and Economic Value
in which Kinetic Justice Robert rol Council is the lead plaintiff, that really calls out Alabama for having a system of leasing. And you know, because a lot of people don't realize a that Alabama and many states like it benefit from let's say, just in the case of Alabama, four hundred and fifty million dollars a year in unpaid labor and
the men inside are forced to provide this labor. And by forced, you know, maybe there's not a man with a bull whip that's standing over them, but it's in some ways, you know, every bit is bad because if you refuse to work, then you can be you can be given a disciplinary which can extend your sentence. You can be placed in solitary, which happens a lot in Alabama. So basically, the you know, un says solitary confinement for
more than fifteen days as torture. They're putting people in for years at a time, and you could be moved to an even more violent facility than the one that you're in. So so it is a coerced forced labor. You can't be sick one day, you can't do anything. But I think what people don't understand is the prisoner's Alabama and some other states, it's not that they're being
forced to work in the prison. Maybe reasonable people could say, oh, maybe you should be sweeping the floor in the prison if you're working in the prison, But they also get leased out to the governor's mansion where they clean the floors and they polish the tiles, and they did the landscaping. They also get leased out to road crews, construction crews. The state makes money from all of that. They issue
invoices which you can see in the film. You know, this is for X dollars an hour, and then they pay them in two dollars a day to do sanitation work or something like that, and then they send them out to work at McDonald's. They lease them to McDonald's, they lease them to Burger King, they lease them to
the Hyundai Parts Company, they lease them to the Budweiser distributorship. So, you know, you go to the state Fair in Alabama, you know, we have this kind of amazing show of a guy in a corrections uniform who's standing with a little girl and he is reaching into the duck pond and he takes a little duck out, a little baby duckling, and he hands it and the mother's clapping and is
taking photographs. And the chilling statistic behind that Alabama DOS not tracked this, but we tracked it is that if you're considered safe enough to go out into the community to work at McDonald's or to work at the state fair, you have a statistically lower chance of being paroled than if you're somebody at a higher custody level.
Why because you're not economically valuable to them?
Absolutely, yeah, And they don't track that statistic. And I think Steve Marshall might be surprised if I said that, or he would say, oh, it doesn't sound right, and then we would say, well, you know, there's a reason
why you don't track that statistic. But it kind of makes sense, right the people that are out there, and people are all these anecdotal stories of people saying, well, I was sick and I woke up in the morning and that guy came in and said, you need to go out there and make me some money.
¶ Storytelling Choices: Backstory and Empathy
Yeah. How I want to talk a little bit about the difference in the way that you and I both or your team and my team both began with a similar kind of question, which was how can we shed
light on the practices of this very strange state. And I was working in the podcast genre, you're working in the documentary genre, and we both of us made very very different choices, And I wanted to reflect on one of the biggest differences, which is in our Alabama murders, we spend an enormous amount of time on the backstory of our characters, our protagonists. We really want you to know we're telling the story of these two guys on death Row. We really want you to know about those guys.
We talked to them and who they were and what happened, you know, et cetera. In your movie documentary, we only learn we get that kind of backstory in passing Right. There's a moment, for example, where you're talking about James Syles, one of the principal characters in the documentary, and we learned why was he in one of the highest security prisons in Alabama because he got fifteen years for breaking into a unoccupied building. It just happens in like ten seconds.
We learned peace of permission, and then you move on right now. It's incredibly powerful in that little form. But I'm curious, why do you do things that way? Why is it that the form that you've chosen encourages you or directs you away from kind of luxury r curiating in the backstory the way that we do in the podcast world.
I mean, you know, if you look at Capturing the Freedman's there's just an enormous amount of archival material of that family, including going back you know, seventy five years to the you know, family members that kind of came
to this country. And then in the jinks we have lots of photographs, but we also have moving pictures of Robert Durst when he was a kid, and you get to see the awkwardness, You get to see the feeling that this is a person who didn't particularly fit in and you see him, you know, in modern day, you see him twitching. Robert Durst has a lot of twitches.
And then you see a little you know, film of him getting up on the diving board as a kid, or you know, somebody doing a movie of him like his mother, and you see the same kind of twitches. You see the early phases of what his So I think that stuff is extremely valuable in this film. I think that we had so many you know, there was
ten pounds of flour in a two pound bag. Always it was always so hard to convey the tapestry of how we got here and try to incorporate everything from the slave labor to the parole to that why they weren't letting people out of the system, how they put people in the system, how people are when they're in the system, and then also try to have a narrative thread that was going to bring people along, you know, because we used to have this expression just in the
storytelling process. I always have a blackboard in my office and I at the very beginning of this, when we started to see what we had, I wrote this like mnemonic device. I said, smitwit knows, And that stood for how do we not make the saddest movie in the world that no one ever sees? And it was a real concern because you know, you're dealing with this very dark material. So we knew it had to have a very compelling narrative. It needed to have you know, we
need to have a story. And that's like, you know, you got to keep telling yourself, what is the story? So you only have enough room for this archival material, Yeah, you do as much as you can. And also some of those people, you know, it's kind of a deprived economy, and a lot of these families of people who are incarcerated just you know, they don't have like an extra room in their house where they have all the photo albums or they have a milimeter video or whatever.
Yeah, I was thinking, and it's not a critesis of it all. I'm marveling about how you made a compelling story where I cared about the protagonists even though I knew so little about them. That's the puzzle, So I came away. So your main character is Stephen Davis, white guy. Seems like a very poor family, and we briefly learned what his mom tells us in one sentence, why is in prison? That's all we get. We don't know when has offense occurred. We don't know what his sentence was.
We don't know what his personality was, we don't know anything about him. We barely see him because he's he's dead ten minutes in right, whatever it is, and yet my concern over him and feelings for him sustain me through the entire movie. This is what I'm in. A million years, I would never have thought I could tell a story like that where my main character is someone the audience knows almost nothing about and who exits, and yet I still care an hour later. That's what I'm
trying to get at. How did you do that? Well?
I mean, you know, as a young storyteller, I think you're going to evolve. You know, you're going to learn more about how to tell these stories, and I'm looking forward to that. But I think, you know, a little goes a long way. We do see pictures of him as child, and I think that's extremely powerful, you know, when you see somebody who you've been trained to believe is going to be a hardened, terrible criminal, but we sort of know really what he was was a drug addict.
And now you see a picture of this of this young man, you know, with his hair shorn and his face pale, and wearing a jumpsuit that's exactly what everybody else in the prison wears, and he becomes totally homogenized
and dehumanized. And then you get to see a photograph of him as a child, you know, with a smile and just seeing pride on his face, or him starting to play little League or something like that, and then you're just reminded that I have somebody in my family who is playing little league and then ten years later was a drug addict, you know, was playing little league, and ten years later was an alcoholic and his life
is falling apart. So you make a connection to those people that goes beyond whatever their you know, their crime was. But it's you bring up an interesting point that I've not talked about regarding this film, which was that there were people who came to test screenings of the film and literally said the following, I'm uncomfortable if I don't
know what crime they committed. So could you have some kind of a device where as soon as I see somebody on screen, there's some kind of a chiron or a little designator on the bottom that says murder one,
or that says burglary, or that says you know. And I was so instructive to hear somebody say that, right, And of course you could have the debate with them, or you could say, so you're saying that it's okay for prison guard to beat somebody to death, you're going to make the evaluation of whether that's reasonable or not based on whether they had a burglary charge or an aggravated burglary charge. And then they always said, well, no, no, of course, of course, of course, of course. But they're
revealing that they're begandized. They're revealing that like nobody, everybody wants safety. Everybody wants their family to be safe. Everybody doesn't, you know, people don't want people to rob their store or whatever. But this idea that anything goes if somebody is a criminal. We're just going to suspend our humanity. We're going to suspend right. And that's the basic idea of sort of the constitution is you have this absolutely
minimal level. You're not supposed to be treated to a cruel and unusual punishment, which is already kind of a you know, I know it when I see it kind of situation. You know, but well, if they committed a crime, then maybe they should just be locked up forever. You know, doesn't make sense for you know, there are plenty of countries where the maximum sentence for any crime is ten years, because you say, somebody commits a crime wh they're nineteen
years old, completely different human being. Eleven years, twelve years later, you know, maybe ten years is enough to reset that person and try to bring them back into civilization. And yet Alabama has these three strikes laws that are put locking people up for life without parole.
¶ The Moral Impact of Information
But this is a really interesting point which I think is worth dwelling on a little bit, which is that as storytellers, so the urge when the people in the screening said I want to know what crime they committed? That that was my urge when I watched it. It's a natural human urge to want to know as much as possible about the person whose world you're And what we don't think about is what are we using that information for? And how will that kind of information at
the margin affect the quality of our moral judgments? And what you're saying is the value of that incremental information about these characters reduces the quality of our moral judgment. It actually contributes to pros. I see the phenomenon you were trying to confront, which is, people, regardless of who they are, deserve a certain level of respect and decency
in the way we treat them. Right, there was there was an obligation here on the part of the The titration and the limitation of information given by the storyteller is a hugely consequential question. It's not just a storytelling question. It's a moral question. It's what do you want people to take home from this story? Right in a profound way, and like, so you shouldn't now, I agree with you. I had that impulse, and then I thought about it and I was like, no, I don't need to know.
It is not relevant what Stephen Davis was in for. It's like it shouldn't matter, or it shouldn't matter with.
Robert Robert Earl.
Robert Earl or who is the one who had the rat swimming in the toilet?
Robert Robert Earl. Yeah, like Robert Earl's crime, I mean Robert Earl's crime. Yeah, there's a guy and sort of speeder that there was a guy trying to run him over with a car and he was nineteen and he had a gun, which everybody in Alabama has a gun, and he shot the guy and he prevented him from running him over. In today's world, you know, that's like.
Stand your ground.
Yeah, right, So there's no question that would have been a self defense case, but for the fact that the police went to incredible lengths to try to tie him into an earlier altercation that night because nobody died in but they were sort of trying to say, well, he was involved in a robbery, which he actually wasn't involved in, because that enables you to give him a life sentence
because you can say it's capital murder. So I guess our you know, kind of theory going in was maybe we don't need to talk about the crimes at all, and then we realized that there are certain crimes, right and Steve Marshall of the world will want you to assume that everybody in there for this right. They say, oh, but we've already let out all the non violent criminals. That sounds like totally reasonable. Well, yeah, I guess people
that are non violent should be led out, right. But in Alabama, I think in the rest of the country, maybe we have like maybe in the federal system, we have like four crimes that are considered violent, and in Alabama it used to be you know, ten, and then it was twenty, and then it was thirty, and now it's forty four crimes and they include entering an unoccupied
building that's considered a violent crime. So by redefining what a violent crime is, you get more and more and more people, and then you get to stand in front of a crowd and say, we've let out all the good ones. But Robert Earl, I guess we concluded that we had to tell something about some of the crimes because we didn't want We've felt like if the audience was going to really have to fall in love with Robert Earl, which is not hard to do because man's
a genius and he's an unbelievable human being. Then we would have to let people know that he's not Jeffrey Dahmer. You know that he's not somebody who's like a serial killer or a child killer. And the percentage of people that are in prison who are a serial killers or
child kill is minuscule. But you if you're gonna give the audience the desire to fall in love with somebody, they're gonna hold back their empathy unless you can just give them a little bit of a pass, a little bit of a feeling like this is this is not one of those people that's just going to be released and then immediately go and murder somebody or put somebody in front of a bus.
We'll be right back. What's the stage in the process
¶ Filmmaking Process and Collaboration
where you're happiest.
It's a really good question, and I think it it's a question you have to ask in a kind of longitudinal way because you're having the most fun in the very beginning because it's all new, and then you're halfway through it and it's like the dark Knight of the soul and you think it's a disaster, and then you look back and you think, oh my god, you know that was the time. And then you get further along and you solve a problem, and then that's the time. And then you get to the end of the whole
thing you look back and that's a difference. So I guess it's the question, you know, if you ask the question over time, did you.
Have a dark Knight of the soul moment with this documentary? It lasted like seven years, so you get by definition, But it wasn't so much.
I mean, there were plenty of timeshe we thought, I don't know whether this is going to work, and you go to the best advisors you have and you show material and you just watch and see how people react, and then you do we do these other things, like we'll do like a session with a whiteboard, and the whole team of people that are working on the film will say, Okay, what are the five things that that I feel like if I if these aren't in the movie,
we've made a terrible mistake. And then you end up with thirty five things on the board and then you think, all right, well, what is this telling me? You just try to look at it a million different ways. You know, you kind of like, you know, moving around.
You're deep dark depression on something. You just call me because if you just you. I'd never show me if you just called me and said, Malcolm, I have cell phone video footage from inside Alabama, the Alabama prison system. I have a lot of it. But I don't think it's going to work. I would have said it's going to work.
Good.
It's like there's no way for it not to work. I think the correct answer. It really is a I mean, I really I realized I had been gushing, but it's it is. It is an extraordinary piece of work. And I'm both complimenting you but also complimenting the prisoners who who found a way to get their story out in the world. Right there. You're collaborators on this and the result is something that is quite unlike any other. Like
I said, it solves the documentary problem for me. You solved it like there's no you're not reconstructing anything.
It's there's this great moment in Ibsen, you know, in a Master Builder, and there's this character named Hilda who works with this architect, and the architect is this very grand fellow that is building big buildings and all that stuff, and the and then you see her saying at the end of it, her last line as she says the master builder, my master builder, and a lot of people have have have comment about that over the years and written about it that it's really that Hilda at that
time in history, like a young brilliant woman, needed another
¶ Prisoners' Ingenuity and Lasting Relationships
person who thought that they were a great builder. But really it was her ideas that were coming through. And I do feel that way here that they're that the men knew what they needed. It's not I don't want to act like it's working. I mean, Alabama is still this is still an urgent problem. Alabama is still killing people in its custody all the time. I think people right now are dying at the rate of around one a day, and that's just in one system. We have
two million people incarcerated around the country. But I do get the feeling that, you know, while we're walking around thinking we're making a film, the men inside are driven by their own brilliance, their own survival instinct, are saying, we need to get this material in front of the public. We're not a position to do it. Let's let's see
if this collaboration can work. And that I think is the thing I feel the most grateful for is that we were able to deliver that and the men in the film have seen the film, you know, because we showed it to them on cell phones, and when we were done, I think they were very emotional seeing it. I think we you know, we spent so much time and showed it to them talk to them about what
we were making. Because it's such a responsibility to say, you know, hey, you guys, you've been running a non violent, organized protest movement that includes work stoppages and hunger strikes, and somehow we're going to characterize that, and we're going to put that on television or we're going to put
that in movie theaters. But it's really their story. So you have to be in constant dialogue with them about what that is, including now, you know, telling them what we're doing and what we're thinking and trying to you know, we created this sort of whistleblower defense committee of really smart lawyers because we knew that these men have been retaliated against time after time after time, and so they jump in and they'll go and do wellness checks on
the men. You're in a relationship with them forever. You know. It's a little different, right because you're I mean, maybe you'll choose to go and have coffee with Steve Marshall once a week if you really enjoy his company. But you know, most of the people that are in your film are kind of already you know, you're not going back to Alabama much and you're not going to go talk to the to the people that are in the story.
But these guys are like they're in my life. Happily, I feel very lucky that they're in my life, in Charlotte's life.
Yeah, yeah, Andrew, we are we are out of time. I want to thank you very much both for coming to on AirFest and singing with me, and also for the movie which has you know, as the best art does, has left America at a little better off than it was before.
Thank you so much, really, appre Shadow.
Revision's History is produced by Lucy Sullivan, Bend, daph Haffrey, and Nina Bird Lawrence. Our editor is Karen Chakerji. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Kira, Mixing and mastering by Jake Krsky. I'm Malcolm Glabla.