The Joe Rogan Experience - #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Showing my day, Joe Rogan podcasted my night all day.

What's happening, man?

Good.

How are you?

I'm great.

I watched your documentary, The Alabama Solution last night, and it was wild.

It's very, very disturbing.

I'm kind of shocked I hadn't heard more about it.

You know, because it's such a terrible, terrible story.

It's a joke.

It's just an unbelievably awful situation.

And I think you covered it really well.

It's just very, very heartbreaking.

Yeah, thanks for watching it.

Yeah, it's sort of a question of why people don't know about things that are happening

with our tax dollars in our backyards.

You know, are there things that we don't want to know?

There'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.

And 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.

And if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody probably told me about it.

But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, you know, we treat them sort of like black sites.

There's no way for us to really look inside.

So the press doesn't get lit in, and the public doesn't understand what's happening.

And we know that, you know, when you get people total control over other people, bad things happen.

Bad things happen every single time.

And this is one of the worst things.

What's really terrifying is the sheer numbers of people that died there with no investigation.

That's what's really terrifying.

Yeah.

Because, you know, you even detailed that at the end, like since then, how many people have died?

And it's just like, could Lord, your thousands?

Yeah.

Well, there's a attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall, who's always run on, like, tough on crime, strategies, and saying, you know, we got a lot more people up,

and people who are in prison for violent crime shouldn't potentially never get out of prison, ever.

And he says in the film, as you remember, that I ask 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.

And 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 start making the film.

Right.

So this question of like, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

You know, what's the nature of cruelty?

What's the nature of punishment?

Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them?

Are 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?

So obviously, prisons have become pretty much a catch-all for the ills of society.

So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison.

And once 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.

And you're much more likely to get murdered, which is what we saw happening in Alabama.

Well, you even, it's the old expression, who's going to watch the watchers, right?

Because one of the things that you detail is very obviously non-violent 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.

So the one guy with glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name?

Robert Old Council. I mean, there's so many stories that you show in this documentary from smuggled cameras. So these guys all get contraband cameras from the guards.

From the guards. Yeah, the guards sell the cameras, sell the phones to the men inside, which is also crazy.

Yeah, I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama State Prison System, and I spoke to one of the people who was incarcerated there early on on a contraband cell phone.

And I said, you know, we're all the drugs coming from the amount of drugs here. This is an incredible, you know, human wasteland.

You'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.

And how are you getting all the cell phones? And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, stupid, and he said, you know, we don't leave, right?

And I thought, oh, I get it. The people that come and go are the guards. Those are the ones that go out, they get the packages, they bring them in.

And I've spoken to guards who said, you know, we make $36,000 a year without the drugs, without the cell phones.

So of course, we got to sell the cell phones and the drugs because that takes us up to $7,000 to $75,000.

Oh, God. Yeah.

So what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to? What are they getting them?

Well, 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.

But as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in, now they can actually put, there's a drug called Flaka, which is a very significant problem there, fentanyl, obviously.

Also, but these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper. So somebody could send you a letter and it could be in the letter they can actually put the drug into the paper.

Oh, sort of like acid when they put acid on paper.

Yeah. And 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?

Ultimately, the easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers to sell the drugs.

And so, you know, we say, and I think it's sadly true that the Alabama Department of Corrections, and it's not just an Alabama, but obviously we use that as the lens through which we saw incarceration more generally.

But 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.

You know, you're much more likely to dive and overdose inside the prison than you are out in the street in Alabama.

Really? Statistically?

Oh, my God. Oh, boy. You know, one of the things that is was very heart-wrenching is this callous approach.

You showed at the one time where all these prisons were on strike, so they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones. They all got from the guard.

So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state. It's not just one.

And these people on the radio were like, well, it's prison. It's supposed to suck.

You know, maybe if they had saw your film, they wouldn't have such a cavalier attitude about it.

Yeah.

It's that attitude. It's like, these are human beings, and some of them barely did anything.

Like one guy that wound up dying from, you think they did something, or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave this guy.

He, all he did was break into an abandoned building.

Yeah. He didn't steer anything.

Entering an unoccupied building.

Yeah. His name is Gene.

I mean, I don't even know if he broke in, right? It was unoccupied. It might have even been open.

Yeah. It's that entering.

So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter, and he got 15 years in a cage, and then on his way out,

the, 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.

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Yeah, this goes back to a story of a woman who we had met in her son when 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.

I made other films about the justice system.

And 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.

And 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.

So we end 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.

It had never been there.

She was growing up in New York and it was just not in her frame of reference.

So we went down there and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain in the state of Alabama, chaplain Browder.

And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons.

And he said, well, you should just come in with me.

And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker. They're not going to let me just walk into the prison in Alabama.

And he said, well, just don't come in as a filmmaker.

You just don't have to bring a camera.

Just come in and talk to some of the guys.

So I went into film.

Ultimately, we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.

And when we were in there to film this revival meeting, just because we were lucky enough to find a warden who felt like, you know, he wanted to show an example of how Christianity was.

Active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with.

But then while we're 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.

And 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.

You have to get into these other buildings. You'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.

And you've got to look in that dorm where people have been in solitary confinement for five years at a time.

You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you.

And 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. They're all very dangerous.

I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates that I did talking to any of the guards.

And when we left, it was really because we got kicked out, right?

We 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 and then they shut down the filming they throw us out.

And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now. How are we going to make a film about this? We 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. So 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.

So that was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside.

And one of the first things we learned was one of the guys inside Melvin Ray texted us to say, hey, you know, this, this, this guard. It was a guard that we had been tracking already who is a particularly violent guard.

He just beat somebody very badly and he's now that person, the victim is at UAB hospital. So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB hospital and just walked up.

I just put my iPhone in my pocket and we just walked up to the intensive care unit. And when we got there, we found that this young man, Steven Davis, had died from his injuries.

And 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.

But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away. She had sort of turned off the life support.

And we said, we want to make a film about this. We were trying to tell the story. And she immediately said, I'm in. I want to help you. I don't want this to happen to any other mothers.

You know, and this is a very nice white lady from Union Town, Alabama with an oxygen tank. I mean, she's, she's not somebody that you would see ordinarily as kind of a heroic person.

But when she loses her son, she really becomes so activated and she ends up telling us the story. And then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already.

You know, my son just died last night. And they're already calling me and telling me things about how he was the one that attacked guards. And none of this is true. This all seems like it's, it's fake.

So teach me how to record my phone calls. You know, so this, this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film.

And this gets back to your question about Steven Davis. So her son, who was a drug addict, right, didn't kill anybody.

But was in a car when a drug deal went bad. He went to try to buy drugs and his friend went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot.

And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder statute works. And so here you have 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.

And 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. And 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.

But then he kind of hints on the phone. Listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story.

So do they have access to these communications? Is there a way they could be hacking into it, known that Sales had said that to you?

Well, the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray. So he was supposed to be on a private attorney call.

But we do think that the Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that. I think they do listen to attorney calls.

Sales 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.

I mean, Sales, the one who entered an unoccupied building and was locked up for 15 years for that, was obviously a decent person. That's why he says, you know, when I get out, I'll speak to that. I'm not going to lie to that man's mother.

Right now, this is their world, bro. I'm not going to, I'm not going to say more. I'm not going to put myself just by saying that might have been his death sentence.

He also, as he started to get closer to getting out, you know, because he was, he was killed a month before he was getting it out.

And 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.

And, you know, and then lo and behold, he gets found in a cell that, and you know, he's bleeding from orifices in his body. And 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 boy.

So when you first started, when you first showed up with cameras, did you know basically what was going on? Do you have an understanding of what was going on?

Like what were you attempting to do when you got there? We're just going to try to investigate and figure it out. Or did you already have reports?

We already, we knew a bunch of stuff, you know, we knew because we had had this, this, we had visited some prisons as volunteers.

And I had gone on the death row with my, my filmmaking partner, Charlotte Kaufman. We had, had gone into Easterling, we had gone originally into Holman prison where they have the death row.

And we went in there with the chaplain. And 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.

But, you know, chaplain, I know you want to show your friends around the death row. So, you know, just go for it.

So we ended up walking around the death row for like two or three hours, just talking to men. And those men were very helpful.

They weren't, you know, we weren't talking to irrational people. We weren't talking to, you know, they're people who were trying to get the story out.

And so we knew going in that there were a lot of bad things happening. We didn't know exactly what.

And 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.

Or, you know, I just saw there were five stabbings this week and none have been reported.

We started to realize that it was really a huge crisis, but it was just being kept secret.

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So 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.

So and it's like the guards are aware of the phones because they provided them to the inmates and they're contraband they're not supposed to have them but yet they all do.

And so they have to ignore it if they want to keep selling them phones.

Well, 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.

And they're kind of right. Right. And if you remember that that guard who kills Stephen Davis, Rod Gadson, you know, this guy might be the most violent prison guard in America.

He's still working in the Alabama State Prison System after he's has 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 haven't employed there.

They still haven't interacting with people and he got hired to a higher position.

Yeah, yeah, he got he's been promoted twice and now he's up for another promotion.

So I think to some extent the guards just say, well, you know, I can do whatever I want.

I can sell the cell phones. And by the way, not all the guards are bad. Right.

There 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 they weren't any jobs.

But in their town, they had the ability to work in a prison. So they kind of went in there and described to us that they wanted to help people with addiction.

They wanted to see if they could help rehabilitate people. But when they got in there, they realized very quickly that was not what was in the offing. That wasn't an opportunity for them.

So the guy, this Roger guy that beat Stephen to death, the story was that Stephen had some sort of an implemented weapon. Correct.

Yeah, that he had a plastic knife. Right. Was there any evidence of that?

He had some kind of like a some kind of plastic thing that he had made.

It 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. He wasn't gay as it turns out.

You have to fight your way out of that. So somebody called you gay. You have to fight them. Yeah. In other words, you can't put up with that because otherwise they're going to turn you into what they call a sissy.

They're going to turn you into somebody that gets raped. And 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 at the prison.

So rape is such a significant problem. And when Stephen Davis was in there and was accused of being gay, he had to make a show of of fighting the person that was calling him gay.

He never went after the guards or anything like that. And everybody that that the lawyer spoke to, you know, it doesn't witnesses who had seen what happened. All of them said he as soon as the guards came in, he immediately laid down on the floor and put his weapon about 15 feet away from him, put his this plastic knife 15 feet away.

And then the guards came in and just started beating him, even though there was no threat. And the guards would say, Gadson was saying to Stephen Davis, you know, quit resisting, quit resisting. And he wasn't resisting at all. And that's what all the witnesses said.

So they just have to say that so the yell it out. Yeah, it's almost, I think it was almost like it was almost just a warning to everybody else. Like, look, I can do anything that I want. I can say that he's resisting isn't it funny?

You know, and the way, you know, the way he kills him, he stomps on his head with his size 15 boot. This is a guy who's almost 300 pounds. I think he's about six foot five.

And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive force cases. And the attorney general in Alabama every single time is defending the guard.

How many other people died in those cases? There have been a lot of other injuries. The only, I think that there have been two people who've died out of the 24 or 25 cases that we know about.

But, but there are a lot of just maimings. There are a lot of situations where people are just damaged, often permanently. You saw what happened in kinetic justice when he, you know, Robert Earl Council, when he leads a nonviolent work strike.

That guards come and attack him. And, and he loses sight in one of his eyes. He's, you know, dragged out of the cell. There's huge amount of blood.

So, you know, the, especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to try to improve conditions, they're always met with violence.

Right. He was the guy that was at the head of this strike. Yeah. And 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.

Sure. Yeah. I 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. I think what we don't realize is that those people are least out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives.

That was crazy. Yeah. Yeah. People that were denied parole were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's mansion doing like groundwork.

Exactly. Landscaping. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and beyond that, they're used for labor in industry. Right. So those are, those guys are sent out in the mornings and vans.

They go work at McDonald's. They work at Burger King. They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They work at the Hyundai plant. They work at the Budweiser Distributorship.

And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys. They get to get out into the community.

But it's a forced labor situation because if they don't, if they don't accept those assignments, then they're going to be punished.

And they're going to be punished with long stays and solitary confinement. They're going to be given disciplinary so that their sentences can be extended.

They are often just beaten for that. So it's really an extension. I've heard you on the, on your show talk about, you know, talk about the Jim Crow laws, which led to convict leasing.

And what we're seeing in Alabama now, it's not like convict leasing. It is exactly convict leasing. They are just selling the labor of incarcerated people to industries.

For pennies on the dollar of what you would get if you had to pay people. Yeah. And they, I mean, they get paid well. They get paid well.

But not the, you're saying they meaning the prisons get paid well. Yes. But not the prisoners. Correct. The prisoners get any money.

They, they get a little money. For example, the, the guy you see who's driving a sanitation truck, Danny Dandridge describes how he's getting paid $2 a day.

And now is that standard across the board for all those of the jobs? I think for that, everything.

I think for that, for that job, they're, 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.

They're charged for the uniform that they have to wear. So it's sort of like they're, they're kind of fees and fines that knock everything down to almost nothing.

And in a lot of cases, the $2 a day is a lot. You know, they're, they're required to do lots of work unpaid in the prisons. They do all the construction.

You could see that even the drug dorm where the, the counselor decided to leave his job, there was a professional drug counselor in one of the prisons.

And nobody replaces him. And so Raul Poole, one of the guys in our film, just starts running the drug dorm.

And that's a drug dorm that's getting money from the federal government to pay for drug treatment program in prison.

And that money's just not going anywhere or money's just going into the coffers of whoever's running the prison system.

And is there any accountability for all the money? Is there any, do they do an audit of the money? Is there, is it just, there really is not any meaningful accountability.

You 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. You know, he said this, there's just no way for me to keep track of this money.

And, you know, for example, they, they got this incredibly horrible set of findings from the Justice Department, right? The DOJ went into the Alabama State Prison System and did an investigation because for reasons I can explain that are kind of incredible.

But anyway, they went in there and they investigated the whole prison system, which I think they'd never done before. You know, usually they investigate an individual prison or something like that.

And they went in and, and, and issued a report that said, this is a, you know, beyond the pale, there's there 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.

And Alabama's response was to say, well, you know, we think that's just anecdotal and you don't know what you're talking about.

And 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.

And, meantime, the DOJ did not say to build any new prisons. The DOJ said, your problem is with corruption and brutality and you have, you're operating really a criminal enterprise.

And therefore, you need to address the underlying problems. And Alabama's response was, well, the DOJ says the prisons are no good, so we got to build new ones.

Well, that, you know, so they get a massive contract. Yeah, exactly. So 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.

And that's really good for all the governor supporters and all the other people who are, you know, in the construction industry and, you know, they've now started construction on these massive new prisons.

And Alabama is a tiny state. It's like, you know, smaller population, I think, than Norway. And they've got a tiny budget. And yet they figure out how to put together a multi billion dollar prison construction plan.

They can't fund it at first. The governor announces she's going to build these new prisons with the DOJ did not ask for and are not going to solve the problem.

They'll admit, by the way, that they're not going to affect overcrowding, which is a huge problem. The prisons are operating at like 200% capacity. And, 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?

Or is it just the same number of beds? And he goes, no, it's the same number of beds. We're, you know, it's not going to affect overcrowding.

So they're building these massive new facilities. The governor can't get them paid for her. She can't raise the money in a bond offering.

So they go after the COVID money that they've got from the government, which is not designed to build prisons, right? It's very hard to argue that building prisons is something that's going to relieve some other kind of health problem or whatever.

And then I think they get fined for that or they're, they're, you have to pay a fine if you use government money for a thing that's not supposed to be for.

And 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.

That's how clearly it was communicated that these prisons were going to happen. You know, in other words, we had a crew in Alabama that was watching this site of this one massive prison that they were planning on building.

And there were just bean fields. And it's quite beautiful, actually. And one day I get a call from somebody and they say, we got to start filming because there are 25 earth movers here.

And I said, well, that's impossible because the legislature hasn't even approved the new prison construction.

And 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.

So the fix was in on this new prison construction. And the governor announced that it was going to cost $900 million to build three new prisons.

So far, they've broken ground and are far along on the first prison and it's up to $1.3 billion.

So when you open that door, a whole lot of commerce comes in, a whole lot of companies come in, you know, and they ask them why it went so...

Why was it so expensive? How did it go from $300 million for one prison to $1.3 billion for one prison and counting?

And they said, well, you know, it's inflation and, you know, meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that the government's not going to say that we got 400% inflation at the moment.

So it's kind of institutionalized thievery.

It's organized crime.

Yeah. I mean, when you are in charge of deciding what's crime.

Yeah.

And you're running a state like Alabama.

Yeah. And I think, you know, money in the justice system is a very perverting factor.

You know, I made this film, this series called The Jinks.

Great fucking series, by the way.

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

Crazy.

Yeah.

Like, watch says going, what?

Yeah. Is this real?

Yeah, me too.

I mean, you know, he's an incredible, he's an incredible person of watch.

But one thing about him is, you know, that family's worth $9 billion.

This is not like a regular rich person in America.

This is an extra super duper rich person in America.

And he's killed three people over 30 years and just walking around, gotten away with it.

Meantime you have, you know, young women moms in Browse's county jail in Texas.

You know, our mutual friend, Jeff Ross did a documentary there.

And he interviews the girls that are in there and he says, what are you in here for?

And two of them say, I'm in here because I stole baby formula.

So, you know, that's a money, money means a lot in this equation.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The money stuff is all over the place.

You 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.

You know, they're private prison companies.

But there are lots of prison companies that provide services to public prisons to state prisons,

like Cisco and all these companies that sell food there.

But everybody makes more money if the prisons are full.

And so, you have the head of Core Civic just did a shareholder call not too long ago.

And he's an engineer, I think his name is.

And they said, you know, what do you think?

What's the outlook?

And he said, oh, with all the new immigration prisons and all the prisons and all the increased,

you know, emphasis on law enforcement and on incarceration, you know,

this is the most exciting time in my career.

So, you know, you're really building this prison industrial complex every day,

especially right now, I think.

And all these people are doing, they're all doing bad stuff.

You know, there's a company called Securus, which is run by Tom Gore's,

who is a big team owner, owns the Dertroit Pistons and some other teams.

And he's a private equity guy worth about $10 billion.

And his company Securus does communications for the prison systems.

And they made deals that have now been sort of exposed.

But they made deals with sheriff's departments where they had jails.

And 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.

So 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.

But the contract specifically said that they had to replace in-person visits.

So 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.

And he was not allowed to see his dad in person.

So that's an example of, and that's in the contract that's in the Securus contract that said

that they have to eliminate the in-person visits.

So when you allow that for profit motive to be driving things in these state institutions

where theoretically we should have some kind of moral approach that makes sense for society

or can help community or build our relationships or help people stay in touch with their loved ones

when they're incarcerated.

When you add that for profit motive there, the system is just designed to exploit.

It just is natural that all those people have to get.

There's a kind of a value to every visit.

Every time a kid comes and visits a parent, it's worth $12.99.

Well, why do it for free if you can get $12.99 for it?

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Is 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.

They just do it.

Especially under the framework of a corporation.

The 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.

It's this thing that you work for and I'm just doing my job.

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.

You just dismiss it.

I really believe...

I've heard you talk about diffusion of responsibility before.

I 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.

Am I the person that's exploiting somebody?

Am I the person that's overcharging a mom?

Am I the person that's charging somebody a crazy amount of money for their medication

or allowing somebody to die from medical neglect?

Because once you have a corporation and you look at that org chart,

you can see the org chart and say, oh, that's a nice orderly way of getting commerce to move forward.

But it's also 1,000 points of responsibility.

Every one of those persons just takes a tiny measure of responsibility.

Well, I'm just in the accounting department.

I don't make the rules.

I don't make the laws.

And you see that in the healthcare industry, people recording their calls

with their healthcare providers or their insurance companies saying,

oh, I'm sorry.

I really can't answer.

That's not my job.

Somebody else makes that decision.

And so when you have these massive organizations,

there's a way for very bad things to happen.

And it's like the death of 1,000 cuts.

And it's also everybody's trying to maximize profit.

And when you're trying to maximize profit, you just find some ways to justify things.

Your main job is not to help people.

These prisons aren't rehabilitation centers.

You actually profit off people becoming functional members of society once they get released.

That would be amazing.

Then you'd have an incentive to make people better people in prison.

Imagine if their profit was based on people being rehabilitated re-entering society

and becoming functional, proper members of society where they contribute.

Yeah.

I mean, the incentives are so twisted.

They're so twisted.

It's like saying money is the root of all evil.

It's not the root of all evil.

It's the root of most of it, though.

It's like a giant percentage of it.

Yeah.

Maybe it's 75% of evil.

The rest of it's like what?

Lust.

Yeah.

I mean, my anger on jealousy.

Yeah.

That's the root of a lot of evil.

You know, whatever.

Whatever the other percentage is.

But money.

60% maybe.

Let's be charitable.

It's the root of a lot of fucking evil, man.

And when you can do it inside of this framework of a corporation.

It's so twisted because it's ubiquitous.

It exists in almost all industries.

There's always whether it's the...

Like, this is the reason why people celebrated

when that healthcare executive was shot.

Right.

They were like, hey, man, fuck you guys.

Like, yeah, finally one of you guys got it.

I lost my dad.

I lost my mom.

I lost my sister.

You know, that kind of shit.

Is in every fucking industry.

Yeah.

Whether 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.

I'm sure you've seen the Netflix, the Peterburg,

Netflix, painkiller series.

Yeah.

Fucking incredible.

It's just incredible that that guy's just walking around.

You're responsible for the death of who knows how many people.

Because who knows how many people

that had relationships with the people that got addicted,

also lost their lives, also lost everything.

Because you're dealing with a brother or a mom

that's completely lost and addicted.

Your life is hijacked now by this situation.

You've lost your dad.

You've lost your mom.

You lost a spouse.

Fuck.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I've heard you talk a lot about mental health.

Obviously, there are a lot of causes of mental health problems.

That includes social media.

It includes sort of alienation.

It includes a lot of things that are present in society.

But the prison industrial complex

and the experience of having somebody incarcerated

has a huge impact on mental health.

I think people don't realize,

when you have two 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.

The idea that those people are going to somehow be okay

when you want to let them out ten years later

and they're going to rejoin society.

You give them $50 in a bus ticket.

And you say, hey, I hope you can become a taxpayer.

Meantime, they don't have enough money to pay for one red roof in

for one night.

They can't do anything when they get out of prison.

And then we say, well, why is there such high recidivism?

I guess that means they're bad people.

So let's put them back in.

So the mental health implications for the people

that are incarcerated are huge.

And the people who are in their families, as you say.

Imagine the anxiety you don't have any family members.

And they're going to give you $50.

And now you're out.

And you have to figure out how to eat,

how to get a roof over your head,

and try to figure out how to earn money.

Yeah, the $50.

Yeah.

And there are ways to do it.

You 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.

So, for example...

I love what you say about community.

You know, about the importance of building community

and seeing the country as our community.

And, 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?

Right.

You know, what does it say about Christianity?

What does it say about, you know, about God?

What does it say about forgiveness?

And clearly, we see that there are so many instances

where people are trying, you know, trying to do something better.

There's a woman named Erica in Alabama

who was a mental health professional.

And she described to me what it was like to try to give mental health services

to people who were incarcerated.

And I was trying to figure out, you know,

looking at these images of the places that they keep people

and these cells, these solitary cells, with just a little trace lot.

And, you know, they're in there for in a five by eight room with no windows

and they could be in there literally for years.

And I said to her, well, can you tell me like when you do a session with somebody

and you're trying to, you know, talk to them about their suicidal ideation

or their various problems?

You know, what does that look like?

How does that work?

And she goes, well, you know, it's a little uncomfortable because I, you know,

I got to be on my knees and I said, wait, why are you, why are you on your knees?

She said, oh, well, I have to be able to talk through the trace lot.

And I said, so when you're giving a mental health counseling session

to somebody who's incarcerated, you're not allowed to open the door.

You're not allowed to see, assuming that person's not like having a violent fit

or something like that, you're not allowed to sit down across from them

and have that conversation.

And she said, no, no, no, but it's okay.

I just put my mouth up to the trace lot.

And 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.

You know, we're checking the box that says, yeah, once a month this guy has a psychiatric evaluation.

But 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 mental cell with, you know, blood stains on it,

talking to somebody inside.

To a food slot.

To a food slot.

And that's probably the only interaction this person has with human beings

other than the guards.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very cruel.

Yeah.

And you're alone in that cell, which is also terrible for mental health.

Like there's nothing worse for mental health than complete total isolation

with no access to anything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you ever had experiences with people, friends or family who've been incarcerated?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

What have you?

What's that been?

What's that been like?

Well, I had this one friend that I used to do martial arts with when I was a kid.

And when I was probably around 16 or 17, he wound up going to jail.

I didn't know him that well, but I knew him as this guy who competed in tournaments

and, you know, he would show up and train with us.

And it's just a pretty tough guy.

He went into jail and he came out, first of all, much bigger.

He was just like stacked with muscle.

All of his tattoos, he burned off.

So he had scars, like these big, key Lloyd scars over all of his tattoos now.

And he was a completely different person, like a violent animal.

Like a terrifying guy to spar with.

If you spar with him, you were, you were in a, it wasn't, there was nothing no holding back.

Sparring for the most part, when you like people,

you're hitting them only a certain percentage of your strength.

This guy was not doing any of that.

He was full blast with everything.

It was like a caged animal.

And as I got to be closer to him, I actually became closer to him after he got out of prison than he was before.

You 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,

he started telling me these stories about what it was like in jail.

And just fighting for his life.

He had to take on three guys and he picked up a broomstick and he was beating.

He's just telling me his crazy stories of guys trying to kill him and jail.

You know, and he was in there for three years for drug selling.

And then he went right back to selling drugs.

And he eventually got arrested.

And I've told the story before, it's kind of crazy.

They found a guy that had every bone in his body broken with hammers.

And they kept him awake by injecting him with cocaine.

They kept injecting him with cocaine.

And then they cut his arms off.

They cut his hands off and then they cut his head off.

And they found his body.

But it's like all of his bones have been shattered.

And this guy that I knew as a kid got arrested for that.

They never wanted to trying him for that.

They brought him in for questioning.

He definitely knew something about it.

He knew either the people that did it or knew something, but it was all drug related.

And he was selling cocaine.

And then I lost touch with him after that.

That's a crazy story.

Oh yeah.

I knew quite a few guys like that.

Because 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.

A lot of them that come from violent households.

They were beaten as children.

Or they were bullied as kids.

Depending on where.

I came from the most mild of those environments.

I didn't have anybody abusing me.

I lived in the suburbs.

A Boston.

I lived in Newton, which was a really nice neighborhood.

I just was interested in martial arts.

And then I was fascinated by this idea of bettering myself through competition.

Because it was so scary.

And then also, I'm around like.

Hitman.

I knew one guy who was a hitman for Whitey Bulger.

And I would train him.

I would teach this guy how to do martial arts.

And he was an assassin.

That's amazing.

It was very strange.

I knew a bunch of organized crime figures.

Mostly with the Irish mob.

A lot of those guys came and trained.

And 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.

And he lived in South Boston.

And he was very tight with a lot of these guys.

Some of these guys came to training with us.

It was a very weird exposure for me.

I'd never been around any of that.

I'd never had anyone in my family that went to jail.

No one was a criminal.

No one was a drug addict.

There's nothing really crazy.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden, I was around a lot of these people.

That either went to jail eventually or had been in jail.

Because 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're just soft on crime.

And obviously, you're some kind of snowflake.

But clearly, there's a role for prison.

There's a role for jail.

The question is whether we should be putting people into institutions

that just further damage them, further retraumatize them.

Right.

You're just making them hardened.

They're going to be worse criminals if they get out,

if and when they get out.

And there's no emphasis on rehabilitation.

So that's the thing.

It's like, if you're releasing them back into the street,

like, what are you doing to the rest of society?

If you're taking a person who's committed a violent crime,

making them way worse in jail, and then releasing them,

this is like a slow bomb.

You know, it's slow release bomb.

And then also they have no options,

because no one wants to hire an ex-convict,

especially someone who wants to jail for aggravating assault

or something like that.

So it's very, very difficult for these people,

and very, very difficult for society to make a decision.

You know, you want to make a quick fix of something,

you want to protect people, just keep them in jail,

keep everybody in jail.

But 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 a custom,

completely being accustomed to violent crime,

because it's all around you.

It's in your neighborhood.

You imitate your atmosphere.

And then what do we do with these people?

You know, there's no emphasis whatsoever on it.

It's just using them as human batteries to generate money.

And that's evil.

That's what's really crazy.

And this is where people have subverted this idea

of incarceration being some sort of a rehabilitation

or correction, right?

They call them correctional facilities.

You're not correcting anything.

You're just making money.

You'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 committed violent crimes

and is like, oh, well, fuck them.

Push them aside.

And look, there's some people that I agree.

Yeah, fuck them.

If there's people that have, you know,

killed a bunch of people and raped a bunch of people

and they're constantly robbing people

and breaking their houses or violent,

you have fuck those people.

Fuck those people.

But that's a small percentage of what's in jail.

A large percentage is nonviolent drug offenders.

And that's where it gets really weird.

It's like, so a person is deciding,

you can have the drugs that we sanction.

You can have the drugs that we tax.

You can have these drugs.

You can have these prescription drugs.

You can have this drug that you buy in the liquor store

that we call alcohol, which is clearly a drug.

You can buy your cigarettes.

You can buy your coffee.

You can get all these drugs that we like.

Adderall, you need Adderall.

And should I think you know it a little ADHD?

Maybe you should use some fucking speed.

And we'll sell you that speed

and we'll tax that speed.

Anything else?

We'll put you in a cage,

because you're not following our rules.

And 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?

That's kind of crazy.

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Yeah, it's really crazy.

Yeah, 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 all those people have been let out already.

That somehow, like prison activists people have said,

well, all the people that are in there for drug crimes

should be released.

But it's not really true.

You have an enormous criminalization of drug addiction.

So you're already making people sort of feel hopeless

then they're turning to drugs

and then you're putting them into cages.

So like Steve Marshall, for example,

the AG in Alabama says,

well, we've already released all of the nonviolent criminals.

So the only people that are locked in there

are the first of the worst.

But, you know, that's clearly not true

just because of sales from your documentary.

Yeah, of course.

So you have, you know,

and he was put into a maximum security facility

for entering an unoccupied building.

That's because there's sort of an inflation

of this concept of violence.

So they will, in Alabama,

I think there are 44 different crimes

that are considered violent crimes.

And they include crimes that you and I

would not consider violent.

You 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 violent crime.

If somebody enters a building,

whether they steal something or not,

that could be considered a violent crime.

And so it makes it easier just to,

as you say, like,

I like that image of the battery.

I 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.

That's how you can use them to sell them stuff.

That's how you can charge them for fees and fines.

You know, that you need that many people.

I think they did a terrible thing

when they allowed private prisons.

I think it's a terrible thing.

I 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 where how tyranny can emerge.

And so they tried to create a system,

again, 1776,

crazy to think that we're still following those same rules today.

You know, but they had a great understanding.

Don't worry, we're not following those rules.

But the checks and balances

and make sure that one person couldn't accumulate all of the power.

Whoever 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.

Did 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 carveouts, caveats.

Some reason why they can continue to accelerate.

And 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.

And they do that just so they can keep their prisons full

so they can keep making more money.

So 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 they can keep arresting people

so they can keep filling up their buildings

and making more and the fact that nobody saw that coming.

Nobody saw that coming.

They thought coming.

I don't even know if they did.

You know what I mean?

They probably short term which is saying,

oh, this is a good business.

We'll get into it.

Then the business like,

we got a progress business.

Just like everything else.

Like if you're selling tires, you know,

you got to make better tires.

Sell more tires.

We're trying to say,

we want to be number one in the tire business.

Well, they're trying to be number one

in the human battery business.

Yeah.

And that's what's fucking insane about allowing that

in this country.

And how do you put that genie back in the bottle?

I don't know.

But I think it's very sick.

Well, the genie's 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.

Are those private prisons?

And we always say, no,

those are state run institutions.

But they kind of function like private prisons in a way

because they're able to make deals with

security about their prison phone system.

And that makes millions and millions and millions of

dollars that's extracted from the poorest people in the country.

Right?

Who are being charged like high, you know, daily

and even per minute fees for being able to communicate

with their families, then you have companies

who are selling the food to the prisons.

You have companies that are doing health care contracts

with the prisons.

And 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.

Right.

So we've sort of just given over the care

of two million Americans to companies

that are accountable to their shareholders maybe,

but the shareholders don't know.

Well, they're certainly not accountable to

humane living conditions.

That one scene where kinetic justice

that gentleman, what's his real name?

Robert Earl Council.

When Robert Earl Council 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 do you say?

Like catches 11 caught in one night.

Yeah.

And why are they there?

Because, you know, he tries to put his food in a bag

that hangs on the door of the cell.

But then they write him a disciplinary for doing that.

But if he takes his food out of the bag

and he puts it on the counter,

then the rats are going to get it during the night.

They're just everywhere.

Yeah.

So they're rats, they're rats throughout the prison.

And so it's a sleep in this room.

Or these rats are crawling all over them at night.

Yeah.

You know, and people just to get into him for a second.

I mean, he is, he is, frankly, one of the most,

one of the bravest people I've ever met in my life.

You know, this is a guy who's incarcerated when he was 19

and he was selling drugs in his neighborhood.

Somebody 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.

So this is now 30 years ago.

In any other condition you would have thought

that's a self-defense case, right?

That's, that's, that's, that it was clear

that he was trying to prevent somebody

from running him over the car.

And yet here he is 30 years later with a life

without parole sentence in a Alabama prison.

And he's spending his time trying to organize non-peace,

non-violent labor strikes.

He's trying to do hunger strikes.

He's trying to use every, every method that he can use

to call attention to the problem

that 20,000 other people have.

And 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.

He's, he would be an unbelievable asset to society

if he were out in the world, right?

He's, he's advocating for non-violence.

He's obviously smart as a whip.

And he's incredibly motivating to other people.

You know, he's got that entire prison system

listening to him when they want to be violent,

because they're so angry at their, at the treatment.

And, and, and the prison system starts,

starts bird feeding them, starts to cut off their food rations

to force them back to work.

And kinetic, Robert Earl is the person who says,

you know, that's not going to solve anything.

We don't want to do that.

So, you know, you see this huge level of humanity,

talent, thoughtfulness in people that are locked away

and we just assume, well, if they're in prison,

that means that they're bad people.

I mean, time, there's so many other people on the outside

who don't get locked up for doing things that are much worse.

You know, so it's a, it's a very confusing message

to be sending.

Well, especially for someone like you,

who did the jinx, and then you do this?

Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point.

You know, I worked for a long time on the story of Robert Durst.

And when we discovered evidence that showed that he had killed

his wife and his best friend and his neighbor

and Galveston dismembered him,

we found the only evidence to prove that he did those things.

And suddenly, I was in a dialogue with the L.A. District Attorney,

the L.A. PD, talking about how to get him arrested.

And even if I don't believe in the way that we incarcerate people,

it's clear that there's a role for prison.

And there's clearly a guy like Bob Durst who keeps killing people

needs to be taken out of society.

What kind of prison is he in?

Well, he died now.

And he was locked up in a facility in Northern California.

He was sort of a facility for senior citizens

who had medical problems.

You know, a lot of really rich people, as you could tell from,

you know, there have been a bunch of cases on this,

really rich people hire consultants to help them navigate

what prison they're going to end up going to.

They can negotiate for better conditions.

And 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 up in a pretty nice facility

where, you know, he has access to lots of things.

And then you have poor people that are locked up in places

that have rats in their cells and vermin.

But yeah, it was, I was always sort of amazed

that Robert Durst was able to get away with what he got away

with for so long.

And why do you think that is?

Well, you know, how much did you know about it

before you started the documentary series?

Well, 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.

There was this kind of strange love story

between this kind of difficult man

and this very lovely girl, Kathleen McCormick.

And I made this film, Ryan 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.

And 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 to get his input,

make sure that we're trying to tell the story out.

What was the premise of the film?

It 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,

eventually he kills her.

And then later his best friend, Susan Berman,

who knows about what happened to his wife,

starts to become problematic, then he kills her

and then later he moves to Galveston, Texas

and disguises himself as a deaf mute woman,

if you remember this.

And he ends up becoming friends with his elderly neighbor

and this guy named Morris Black and they go out shooting on

in Pelican Island and so on.

And eventually they have a little altercation

because he figured out who Bob Durst was

and that he was sort of on the run

and he dismembers that man.

He kills him and dismembers him.

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This movie with Kristen Dunst, when was that released?

I guess we started working on that in around 2005

and it came out in 2010.

So in 2010, it's about to come out in theaters as film.

And there was a big article in 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.

And the real Robert Durst reads the article

and calls me out of the blue.

And I had tried to get in touch with him before

without any success.

And he actually calls the distributor of the film first,

Magnolia Pictures.

And he asked for the president, Aiman Bulls.

And Aiman and I would use Bob's voice,

like when we would talk to each other,

Bob had a very recognizable voice.

So when I would call him, we would hang up

and I would say, bye-bye.

And that was always sort of Bob's tone.

And then one day somebody calls Aiman's office

and says, this is Robert Durst.

And so a secretary walks in the office

and says, like, you know, an air quotes,

like, it's Robert Durst on the phone thinking that it's me.

And he picks up the phone.

He's like, hey, Bob, I'm not surprised you're calling.

I think we did a hell of a job on the film.

And there's a long pause.

The guy says, who am I talking to?

And Aiman says, oh, who's this?

And he says, this is Robert Durst.

And so he reaches out to me.

I knew that he was trying to get, trying to reach me

so I could record my very first phone call with him.

And I call him and I say, listen, I'm keen to talk to you.

I've been making this film about you for the last five years.

And he said, well, I would like to see the film.

So I range from to see the film.

And he calls me immediately after he sees the film.

And he says, I want you to know I like the movie very much.

The movie kind of shows him killing people, right?

And I said, well, why did you like it?

And he said, well, you know, you did a beautiful job

explaining what I was going through as a child

and the difficulty I had in losing my mother

and Kirsten Dunst was just like my wife Kathy.

And I cried three times.

And I would like to do something with you.

You know, I would like there to be something out there from me.

My ability to sort of tell my story.

And I said, all right, well, why don't we sit down?

I'll ask you a bunch of questions.

And he said, that's fine.

Okay, let's do that.

So I end up sitting with him for three days.

I've just finished a movie about him.

A dramatic film, which is now in theaters.

And I sit down with him and interview him for 21 hours.

And you think you do long interviews.

He's 21 hours with this one person.

And he is fascinating.

I mean, absolutely extraordinary.

He is incredibly honest about things that most people

would never be honest about.

Like, you know, he talks about how, you know,

he had violent arguments with his wife where he says,

you know, that he says crazy stuff.

I mean, he would explain to me that I said, you know,

I think you were kind of offensive when you went to visit her mother.

You know, she had this mother who was in her 80s.

And you went to visit her mother.

And, you know, I think you did some odd things.

He goes, well, yeah, you know, I visited those people.

And they were, you know, that woman, she reads Yankee magazine.

And, you know, and she asked me how I liked her daughter.

And I told her that Kathy had come out of the shower.

And my penis was hard.

Like, you said that to her aging mother?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, what am I going to assure?

That's what I thought, you know.

You know, or you say to him, well, what did you say?

You 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, oh, yes, I lied about that.

And so, why did you lie to the police?

Well, you know, I needed to be somewhere.

And I wanted them to stop asking me questions.

So, you know, I told them that I went to the neighbors.

I said, well, that was so easy to disprove.

They just talk to the neighbor.

Well, yeah, but, you know, I don't, people don't usually do that.

So, he's very candid.

He speaks very, very openly.

Almost like having a level of sort of assburgers.

Did you believe him at any moment?

While he's telling you this?

Because obviously he's proclaiming his innocence, right?

Yeah.

I mean, he is so good at telling the story his way.

And 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.

I did because I had already researched the story.

So, I knew when he was trying to tell me something

that was bullshit, that it was bullshit.

But, you know, I did have to put myself

in a position of giving him the benefit of the doubt

whenever I could, partly 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.

Right.

Because otherwise he's not going to tell you his version

and, you know, you want to hear his theory about all this stuff.

And in the course of that, he really indites himself.

I mean, you know, 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.

But during the course of it, he admits to so many bad things

that, you know, you just pretty quickly assume that he is guilty.

How old is he when you first started filming him?

I guess he was in his early 70s.

So he's probably already experiencing

some kind of cognitive decline.

And then you have the years and years of hiding all this,

which wears on you.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I do think there was a,

I think he had a compulsion to confess.

Yeah, you know.

I 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.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, and that ultimately what happened with him

as you may remember is he, we find this evidence.

The evidence I thought was determinative.

I thought it was going to be something

that police would ultimately use to convict him from murder.

But we, what was that evidence again?

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.

And the note said, 1527, Benedict Canyon, cadaver.

And it was sent to the Beverly Hills Police Department.

And that very seldom happens, but people speculated a lot.

Well, why would somebody who killed somebody

have sent a note to the police?

Well, 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.

And, you know, she has dogs.

She didn't want the dogs to mess with the body.

So he may have just killed her and then left this note.

But then later, when he was asked about it,

he said, I have no knowledge about that note.

So 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.

So 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...

Right, with the same misspelled words, right?

Exactly. And he writes 1527, Benedict Canyon,

Beverly Hills, California, and Miss Spells,

the word Beverly, puts in an extra E at the end.

And, of course, this letter that we find,

he also misspells the word Beverly.

So nobody had ever seen, or the police hadn't known about this letter.

So we find it, and then I immediately start planning away

for me to show it to him in a second interview.

And 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 answer any question you want.

But I start to call him about doing the second interview

and he gets very skittish.

And then this goes on for two years.

And so we have this evidence, but we need to show it to him.

And I had done a bunch of research.

I talked to Marsha Clark, for example, you know,

who was smart about how the LA District Attorney's Office works.

And she said, if you had 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.

And he's going to lawyer up.

But you guys, before you're even in contact with law enforcement,

you could show him the evidence, and he's going to have to react to it.

And I bet it's going to be interesting.

So we finally get him to sit for the second interview.

And I show him the evidence in the interview.

And he has this incredible meltdown.

You know, I 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...

That there's this letter that matches the cadaver note

that he admitted could only have been written by the killer.

So he's sort of in a...

He's trapped.

And I finish the interview with him.

And he gets up and goes to the bathroom.

And he leaves his microphone attached.

And while he's in the bathroom, he confesses to the murder.

He's, you know, he's a guy who talks to himself a lot.

And he always said that to me.

He 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.

I just talk to myself.

So when he goes in the bathroom, the first thing he says when he goes in is,

there it is.

You're caught.

He says that to himself.

And it's...

And then he goes on to say,

I killed them all.

I killed them all, of course.

And it's such an extraordinary thing to have...

Did you have your headphones on while he was doing that?

No.

And that's kind of fascinating.

So I didn't know that he said anything when he went to the bathroom.

And so we're working with the LAPD.

We're giving them the printed evidence,

the letter that matches the cadaver note.

And it's a pretty strong case already.

And we don't know that he's said a word in the bathroom.

And 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.

And she sees on the editing system that there's a little wave form,

there's a little squiggle that shows that there's some audio when he's in the bathroom.

So the problem was that I had a microphone.

There was a microphone in the room, and he had a microphone on.

So there's a lot of noise.

We're finishing.

I just finished the interview.

I'm incredibly excited that I got him to give this crazy reaction.

And it's pretty obvious that that's going to be part of proving that he's guilty.

And so I'm out there kind of whispering to the crew.

There's noise in the room, and there's noise in the bathroom.

And so she mutes the other microphones.

And she hears him say, there it is, you're caught.

And she screams.

And she runs in the next room to where my other main editor was, Zach.

And she says, you have to hear this.

And he listens to it.

And he says, wait a minute.

I was there that day.

And we have audio that's a continuation of that.

That audio stops at, at, at, there it is, you're caught.

But there's, he was in the bathroom for seven minutes.

So they go and get the drive that has the other seven minutes of audio on it.

And it's this long rambling confession.

And I come over and I listen to it.

And I, I can't believe what we're hearing.

I mean, it was extraordinary.

And I had to call the LAPD and the LA District Attorney and say, hey, I know.

Literally two days ago, we gave you the documents.

We gave you the letter so that you could start this prosecution.

We found something else.

And so they come to New York and they listen to this confession.

And it's just, you know, absolutely mind blowing that that, that that happened.

And then when the film comes, when the series comes out, you know, we've been working with the, with the police then for a couple of years

while they were building the prosecution.

And when the film finally comes out, when the series comes out on HBO,

he is arrested the day before the final episode.

So 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.

Was he aware that you have the audio of the confession?

I don't think you remembered saying anything.

You know, I don't think he's even all that aware that he's 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?

Just like the ability to shut that part of your brain off and put that aside and lie about it.

Just the struggle of having that information in your head.

I think the way that he would have thought about it, you know, from inside the killer, right?

He doesn't think of himself as a murderer, right?

The Marshall and Alabama doesn't think of himself as, you know, this incredibly immoral person.

He thinks himself as law enforcement, right?

Bob Ders thinks of himself as just a guy trying to get along, you know, like we all are.

So 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.

I mean, he was not a, 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 power over her.

And so I think something happened between the two of them, where they were at their lake house,

and there was an altercation.

He admitted to me that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night.

And then he, and then, you know, he says he took her to the train and sent her into the city.

None of that makes any sense.

So I think what happened was he either accidentally or semi accidentally killed her.

I think they had a fight, they 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.

And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down.

I mean, my unfortunate that this had to happen, but I got to get rid of the body.

And so he found a way to make her disappear.

We 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.

So after that, he sort of widely believed to be a likely person to have killed his wife.

There's no other explanation for it.

And how long did it take before they realized the wife was missing and when did they determine that she was dead?

It was a few days later because he kept sort of, he held off on telling anyone.

And then later he said, oh, Kathy, you know, I just put her on the train to go in the city and then I haven't heard from her what's going on.

So 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.

But none of those really held water, but it took him a while to report her missing.

He 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.

So they were at their house.

They're Lake House in Westchester. She disappears and he goes into the city five days later and he says, oh, my wife was at our apartment.

So he complete, that's why I'm saying he's very smart. He 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.

Most of the time somebody comes in and says, my wife is missing and they say, oh, where did you last see her?

Let's help you try to find her.

So I think he was smart enough to flip that on his head and he says that my wife was in the city and so they do their whole investigation in the city.

They don't look at the Lake House. They don't figure out where she really truly might have been.

Did they ever do an examination of the Lake Forensic on the Lake House?

Yeah, they did and they and they 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 in the house.

And she may very well been killed somewhere else, but they never find the body ever.

And so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do.

Did he ever confess to that?

He didn't.

But 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. So he's being accused of three murders.

His wife, his best friend, and his neighbor in Galveston, who he then cuts up.

And his confession of bathroom is killed them all, of course.

So I think we, you know, we, I think we know what happened. We don't know how it happened.

Did they find his neighbor's body?

Or his best friend, brother?

Yeah, his best friend's body was in her house where somebody shot her and that's where they left that cadaver note.

And 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 they're all these body parts.

So he had actually taken off the legs and the arms and all that.

So I mean, I think, you know, I think it's fair to say that there are people like Bob Ders, who need to be out of society, you know, and are repeatedly causing problems for others.

But that's, as you say, you know, that's, that's the extraordinarily rare case, you know.

And 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 like nobody thinks that nobody really believes that people are saying, well, not what 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.

And 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.

You know, there's a, there's a, you just have to take a nuanced view.

You know, you can't just say, well, they're bad people and they're good people, especially because they've got so many bad people walking around and so many good people locked up and vice versa.

Yeah, the nuanced part is so important because the real question is like, what causes so many people to become bad people and how come no one's examining the root of this?

How 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?

You 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.

Like it's almost almost like you have to figure out a way to privatize peace and safety.

You know, it's almost like the one way, I mean, it's really what I was saying before, like 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.

Like you get incentivized. Like this is, he's never committed another crime. Now he started his own business. He's doing this. That has got a family.

Yeah, kids all get straight A's. Everybody's happy. This is a success and we got a bonus because of that success.

Yeah, I mean, you're right in a way that it's the root of 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.

And they take guys who are who have had severe drug addiction have ended up in prison and are released and have no starting place as you were describing.

And they give them a bed. They give them a bank account where they give them a certain amount of money each week for working.

And it's not a huge amount of money, but it's sort of is the first step toward even being able to sort of have a checkbook and be able to say, OK, so I've got $100 and I spent 50 and this is what I have left.

And 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.

And 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.

And sometimes they'll put them out in pairs so that they have, you know, they can work in tandem.

And these neighborhoods become incredibly clean.

The guys stay in this facility for as long as they need to until they sort of get back on their feet. They can't do drugs when they're in the facility.

So there's a little bit of tough love going on there too, but they end up bringing people back. They 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, you know, bothering people outside an ATM or whatever, because there's a level of desperation that you, you know, you have.

We all know like if we absolutely had absolutely nothing and we thought that our kids were going to starve, we would do a bunch of things that, you know, would probably get us in trouble.

And 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. But the real, real impact is going to be when you address the environment in which they came from.

Like again, if we're our community, we're this entire country as a community, why do we have these places that have been fucked for 50, 60, 70 years?

Like why haven't we put resources into community centers and education and providing some method for these people to get peace and safety? Why aren't we doing something about that if we really care?

Well, there is a lot that can be done, you know, one of the places, for example, this can be done inside and outside of prison, obviously.

And I think you're pointing out a really important thing, which is the earlier, the better.

So when you look at, you know, 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.

But 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.

And if you look at people who are even in prison, like in the main state prison system, which is a very humane prison system.

I've 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 and they give them a proper work bench and they give them some time to do this work and they give them training.

And then they sell that stuff in the prison store and they make a couple million dollars a year that goes back into rehabilitation programs.

So where are people in one of the best places for that?

I think Maine is the best prison system I've seen in the US.

And partly it's because it's run by this very brilliant guy, Randy Liberty is his name.

That's correct.

He first visited the main state prison when he was 14 because his dad was locked up there.

And later in life, he became a sheriff and I think his dad was in his jail at some point and it was like, Randy, get me a coffee, sorry dad.

That's crazy.

But 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?

What can we do to bring these people out?

Because 95% of people are coming out and are these people that we want to be our neighbors.

And this issue of community is so important because how are we going to get back to some kind of brotherhood in this country?

It's so important.

And 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 smell it.

And I'm going to go over and smash his tractor.

And as opposed to the guy saying, oh, I couldn't put my tractor in my garage because it had a flood.

Oh, you had a flood. Let me help you.

You know that there's a level of rage right now that we're tapping into.

It 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.

It's like more Americans are becoming like that.

You know, more Americans are sort of well, we're getting radicalized by the internet for sure.

Yeah.

100% on both sides of the aisle.

People are being radicalized by hate and anger and frustration online.

And a lot of it isn't even real people that are writing these things or it's state actors and organizations that push certain narratives.

And you're being fed a lot of hate porn.

And people are sucking it up and it's highly addictive.

So it's consuming an enormous percentage of your available resources in terms of your attention span.

The people that I know that are addicted to Twitter, X, whatever are like genuinely mentally ill.

Like 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.

And they check responses all the time and they can't wait to type in another response and they're sitting there looking at someone else's response and getting angry.

It's illness. It's an illness.

It's like this is not in your life.

Like if you put that down and look around, what do you see?

You see the people that you know.

You see the neighborhood that you live in.

The stores that you visit.

And none of that exists.

It exists in this weird fucking cloud world that you choose to enter to get upset for no fucking reason.

And if you put it down, you will feel better.

But yet you think you're missing out on something.

So you have to go check it.

And when you're on the toilet, well, I'm on the toilet.

What am I going to do?

Let me check to see what people are pissed off at.

And I don't fucking agree with that at all.

Oh, yes, guys.

Idiot.

And then you're mentally ill.

And then it becomes because we have this bizarre political system in our country where we have two sides, only two.

We only have two perspectives, you know.

And 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 winged this or a left winged that.

So you have to say whatever the fucking party wants you to say.

And if you don't, you're a Nazi or if you don't, you're whatever you are.

A communist, whatever it is.

And I loved your when in your comedy special, which was so fucking funny.

And you know, I'm like a big fan of comedy.

But in your last special, you sort of talk about how people like sign up for, oh, yeah, well, you know, I agree with that.

That makes perfect sense.

Oh, yeah, I agree with that.

Oh, 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 I can get pregnant.

Yeah.

Because the men can get pregnant.

You're like, what?

Wait, so that those are my choices.

Yeah.

I have to go along with like, you know, it trans people should be allowed to be in every sport and it doesn't matter.

Like, I have to go along with that one too.

If I want to be part of my tribe.

Yo, yeah, that's part of the tribal initiation ritual.

You're going to have to sign up for that.

I think it's a really great way of delivering it also because it makes people laugh at themselves.

Yeah, and everybody wants to be on a team.

Yeah.

And you're like, you know, oh, we believe that everybody should, you know, be free to do whatever you want.

And as long as you're not hurting anybody, I agree, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You start going along with it.

This sounds great.

Yeah.

Hey, I'm with you guys.

And they're like, oh, fuck.

That's right.

Is this a package deal?

You know, I have to, yeah.

And that's what people are agreeing to.

And then you get group think.

And then you get also ostracization.

You get ostracized from the community if you don't do it.

So you, you know, you get kicked out of the kingdom.

And so you don't want that.

Yeah.

Because being excommunicated from whatever group that you identify with is terrifying.

Because then what are you going to do?

You're going to join the fucking Nazis.

I'm going to join those people on the right.

Because the left kicked me out.

Because I don't think that men can get pregnant.

Or maybe I should just apologize.

Maybe, and then you just wind up apologizing for something you don't even believe in.

And you're like, oh, I can't believe I have to say this.

Yeah.

You know, and it's just, it's a bad way of communicating.

It's an online communication.

It's a terrible way of communicating.

And it's the primary source that young people experience.

You know, young people, like my kids, they don't even fucking text each other.

They snapchat.

You know, they're all snapchatting with pictures and shit.

I'm like, this is like the minimal amount of communication you can do.

And when they have to talk to people, just put their phone down and talk to people that lost.

They're always like reaching for their phone.

Oh, yeah.

They always want to grab their phone in the middle of your talk.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They have to check, like it's like you're perpetually distracted.

Yeah, yeah.

It'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.

So when you went to college at, and then you learned, you know, it's like they're, they're,

this idea that the information is more available and therefore it's better.

And my kids are like constantly deleting Instagram or deleting TikTok.

Yeah, well, my kids are doing that now.

Yeah, but you know, and then it comes back for some reason or they'll say,

well, I felt like I needed to do this or whatever, but FOMO.

But it's very encouraging to see them recognize that like you have to go cold turkey on the social media.

Well, that narrative's out there.

Fortunately, 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 like everything is happening in the world.

I almost immediately go to Twitter.

It used to be a little better for that because now part of the problem is

with AI generated content.

There's a lot of weird stuff when it comes to like, especially war stuff.

There's a lot of videos that are just completely fake and it's hard to tell.

Or they take a video that is real and highly exaggerated and they add AI to it.

It's, it's very strange.

And if you got, you got to wonder like, who's doing that and why are they doing this?

Is this our government doing it?

Is it the Iranian government?

Who's, we're fucking, who's releasing these fake videos?

And are we doing it to ourselves, by the way?

100%.

But a lot of people are doing that just for clicks because there is an actual economy based on engagement.

So 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.

And so there's a lot of people doing that.

So it used to be better because it was, it used to be just pure information.

And if it was a video, it was just a video that someone took with their cell phone generally.

Now it's like a lot of weirdo stuff, a lot of weird fake stuff.

So it's hard.

Also, there was a, there was a piece in the paper today that talked about how like Trump gets a,

like a few minute video every day.

That's a compilation of all the attacks and all the explosions that have happened in Iran.

You know, but it's not getting a more nuanced picture of it.

So to some extent is kind of, you know, drinking his own Kool-Aid.

How do they know what he gets?

I think that there was enough of a leak to say that he was given a, that each day he's given a chunk of video to watch.

And that I think historically has been something that happens with him is he'd rather watch it than read it, right?

And that, that by putting together just, it's not even that they're saying they're fake videos.

I mean, actually there are a lot of fake videos.

But he's only getting the positive videos.

He's just getting explosions.

Right.

He's just getting a lot of pictures of explosions.

So he's saying, you know, we're destroying their, there you go.

And here it is.

Inside Trump's daily video montage briefing on the Iran War.

This is NBC News.

The montage typically runs for about two minutes.

That's enough time.

Let's give you a nuanced perspective on a fucking international war.

Has raised concerns amongst those of the president's allies that he may not be receiving the complete picture of the war.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course he's done.

Yeah.

And of course the people that tricked him into doing this in the first place don't want him to get a full nuanced perspective of the war.

I mean, nobody thinks it's a good idea.

Yeah.

The people in the video is a series of clips of stuff blowing out hilarious.

That's the world we're living in.

It's a TikTok president, or a TikTok briefing for the president.

You know, but video, I mean, what we saw in Alabama, and I know you have some, 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.

And 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 at theater.

And it's the first time they've been able to see inside.

It's the first time they've been able to really see it as opposed to reading a statistic.

Because a lot of people die in prison or whatever.

And 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.

I don't want to be a part of doing that to other people.

You know, I could be tough on crime.

You know, we've shown the film to a lot of conservative viewers, including one of the founders of CPAC and various people who are, you know, pretty, pretty right wing people.

And have said, look, I might be tough on crime.

That's not what I'm talking about.

Right.

That's a human rights crisis.

Right.

And where's the DOJ and where's the government doing anything to protect?

Where are the inspectors?

Yeah.

How are they allowing any of that?

Yeah.

You know.

And that's one of the great things about your documentary is it's clear.

I mean, there's no ambiguity at all.

It's like laid out there, full color.

You could see the blood on the ground.

You 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, face, he's faced down, bleeding all, they thought he was dead and 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.

And had those cell phone cameras not existed, you'd have zero idea.

Like if those guards only decided to sell money, bringing drugs in and not phones with cameras, who knows what you would know?

You would know very little.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it does.

I mean, you know, I would like to believe that the average American does not want to harm the average other American.

And even if you get hyped up on Twitter or you get to see too many videos of people blowing up stuff or whatever, ultimately people have that experience of saying,

I went to that coffee at the church and I sat there with that guy who I really can't stand.

And we ended up having a conversation.

People are kind of amazed at how much commonality they can feel with people where if they just see the person.

And we all know like if you text somebody, your kids or your wife or whatever, there's just some places where texts are not good.

It's not enough.

It's not enough.

It's going to make some of these feelings hurt, you know.

But when you get to sit down across from somebody, you realize that it's another person you can kind of relate to.

So it's really disturbing that 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.

And distract yourself from your own problems.

That's a big part of it.

People love something that takes the focus away from whatever shortcomings they have or whatever things in their life they don't like.

They'll focus on external things.

I know some people whose lives are completely fucked up.

In so many ways their health is fucked up.

The relationships are fucked up.

Their job is fucked up.

And all they want to talk about is politics.

Like hey man, clean up your backyard.

Like clean up your life.

Like why are you spending so much time paying attention to what's going on with the USA?

Like how much does that affect you?

Does it really affect you that much?

All this fucking fraud.

Right.

But what about your life, man?

Your life is a fucking disaster.

And all you care about is the government.

You know?

And what they're doing to fuck the people over.

Like I don't think that's really the problem.

I think you're getting your own way, son.

You know?

And that's a lot of people out there in this world.

And anything that you do distract yourself, whether it's start drinking, gamble, get on pills, whatever it is.

People find ways to distract themselves from whatever is wrong with their life.

And that's part of what social media is providing you.

It's providing this alternative avenue for your attention to divert you from all the things that really are making your life a fucking disaster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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.

So if you say to somebody, hey, like logging people up for 75 years probably doesn't make a lot of sense, that's complicated.

Wait, now I got to make a determination of what's the right thing to do with another person.

And, you know, so you end up with a lot of politicians who say, well, I know this is these the bad people.

These are the good people.

We got to promote the good people and get rid of the bad people.

Not recognizing that like everybody is a little both.

And that some people certainly do a lot more bad stuff in the world than good stuff and vice versa.

But 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.

You can't say, well, look, I'm always right.

My neighbor's always wrong.

And therefore I'm just going to keep raging over this.

You have to say like, you know, I could see myself doing something.

I could see myself, boy, if I really got out of hand, I could see myself having a, you know, taking a swing at somebody.

And it's probably not a good thing.

But I don't want to say that somebody else that did it is automatically just a horrible person.

And that's what, you know, if you see this attorney general in Alabama, you know, this idea that, you know, he says they're 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.

But he hasn't imagined that he's part of the problem, you know.

Respect 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.

Yeah. So it's a very topsy-turvy.

Yeah, like what in the world?

You know, and also cruelty plays a part in it.

You know, we know that if you, sometimes we say about this film that, that, you know, it's about what we do to each other when no one's watching.

Like, 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.

You know, there's a level of cruelty that I think we have intrinsically.

You know, certainly once you're other a person.

Right?

Absolutely.

And I, 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, yeah, I wouldn't want to do that in front of my kid.

Right.

I wouldn't want to do that if it ends up in the paper.

I wouldn't want to, you know, and I think that is kind of a balancing effect, which is one of the reasons why this like war on, you know, on transparency is a, it's a huge problem.

Right.

We're not allowed to see what's happening in prisons, even though we're paying for them.

Right.

You know, in the Supreme Court had this ruling that said that wardens could deny access to journalists simply by citing safety and security.

But meantime, in the last 20 years, no journalist has been harmed inside of prison.

So who's all the secrecy keeping safe?

Right.

Right.

It's where we're sort of perpetuating a system.

Our job going into the Alabama State prison system was to shine a light on that.

It 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.

Right.

You know, we're spending, you know, $116 billion a year in the United States on prisons, jails, parole.

That is an insane number.

And if we're spending that much money, we should sort of know what every one of those dollars is going to.

And we should have watchdogs who will say, hey, guess what?

In Alabama, they're supposed to be paying for a drug treatment program.

We don't know where the money's going.

Right.

You know, yeah, transparency is always good, especially in something like that.

I mean, to me, the idea of preventing journalists from it almost is 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 they would be bad for business.

You know, it's just fucking crazy.

Like it should be bad for business and people shouldn't tolerate it and they should take their business elsewhere, which is what transparency is all about.

You don't want to buy chickens from a place that brutally beats their chickens or pigs or whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And 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.

Well, what are you doing something for inside a slaughterhouse that would upset the public?

Like they're ways to, if you want to euthanize an animal or something like that, they're ways to do it where you're not using like a bolt and smashing your skull with it.

Well, the bolt is actually the most humane way.

It kind of instantaneously kills them.

The other way is when they hang them by their ankles and slip their neck.

That's a little rougher, but that's if you want kosher.

There'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.

Because there's been some videos that have been released to people like beating animals with crowbars and stuff for no fucking reason.

Just sadistic, sadistic, sick people that just happen to work in these places.

They become very accustomed to treating these animals badly, just like security guards, become very accustomed to treating prisoners badly.

It's kind of been on the same lines.

I totally agree.

And just imagine what would happen if, you know, what if 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.

Well, it should be non-negotiable.

It should be a part of the ability to run a facility like that because of the consequences.

Because if you don't do that, there is the potential for you being a horrific abuser of animals.

Of course.

And nobody wants to buy your chicken or your pork or whatever it is if you're doing that.

And we should know.

But like criminalizing taking video of animals being abused.

Crazy.

Like how could you justify that, you know?

You would only do it if you value profit over ethics over morals.

It's the only thing.

If profit is more important than educating people on the horrific nature of how these animals are treated.

Yeah.

It's more important to you.

Wow.

It's really important.

We have cheap bacon.

Okay.

Yeah.

But it is a big, it's like a big tapestry because the diffusion of responsibility figures into it.

Right.

And, you know, the perverting effect of money figures into it.

But it's a very, I mean, I think just being accustomed to horrors.

You know, I knew a guy worked at a slaughterhouse.

And he told me like, you never get the smell of blood off of you.

And he goes, and you never get just like the image of animals dying.

He goes, you got to understand, like, if you're working at a slaughterhouse, you're seeing who knows any thousands of cows die a week.

Just thousands, just thousands of death, constant death.

Most farmers never saw that.

Like the way people used to raise animals for food, you know, you would kill a cow and you would eat it for six months.

You know what I mean?

Like, you would kill the occasional chicken.

You weren't seeing thousands of dead animals a week.

You weren't like seeing thousands of them get disemboweled a week.

It's like after a while.

And you were at a factory, they're going by on hooks on a conveyor belt.

Like, what are we doing?

I went to visit a prison, I went sort of on a series of prison visits in Berlin and Norway and a few other places.

And 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.

And I loved her. She was so smart.

And the first thing they do is they bring you to a concentration camp.

So they bring you to Soxon House and before they take you to the prisons to see how the prisons are run.

And 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.

And then this is where they would, you know, shave their heads.

And then they would strip them down.

And they would spray them with firehoses and water.

And then they would put powder disinfectant powder on them.

And they would take away all of their, you know, any kind of distinguishing marks that put them all in the same outfit.

And they would give them a number instead of their name.

They would be, you know, and everybody started looking at it like very disturbed.

And Ginny leans over to me and she says, you know, Andrew, we do every one of those things in our prisons today.

And 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're, look like bad people.

Because, you know, 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.

You've turned them into another.

Yeah, you've turned them into another.

And 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.

And it was all horrific.

And 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.

No, these are evil people.

These are others.

They killed them.

These are fill in the blank.

These are the Japanese.

These are the Germans.

These are the this.

These are the that.

Whatever it is that we're at war with, those are the people that are not us and we kill them.

Yeah.

And that's how you feel about prisoners.

And then there's the other side where you go too far the other way and you have these crazy no-cash-bale policies where you've got violent offenders in and out of jail constantly.

You've got people that have been arrested 40 times pushing old people in front of the train in New York City.

You'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.

And you go, how is this possible?

How is this okay too?

Yeah.

No, that's not good either.

Yeah, you can't.

But I think to the extent 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.

It's okay to be tough on crime.

It's okay to recognize that some people need to be separated out from society.

But if you, if it becomes so polarized, then you get that progressive DA who, you know, there's 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.

And that scares everybody.

And probably doesn't lead to any level because we all want public safety.

Like everybody wants to be serious about public safety.

That's different than being tough on crime.

Yes.

Well, 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, this is, you don't have like this rampant crime that's developing in Beverly Hills, right?

It's all happening in these impoverished gang infested neighborhoods.

Like why has there been no resources put into that?

Imagine the amount of return that you would get.

Like I always say, if you want to make America great again, here's the best way.

Have less losers.

How do you have less losers?

Give more people an opportunity to succeed.

Well, when it's not like we're all at the same starting block, we all know that.

No one will say that.

No 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.

Well, that's not true.

So how do we figure out these people that are at the farthest end of the starting line?

The most fucked.

Put some money into that.

Fix that.

Put some engineering into that.

Put 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 hope.

And you would have better neighbors.

You would have more people that are thriving in whatever business, more people that are artists, more people in the economy.

The world would be a better place.

Like why wouldn't you invest in that?

Well, because there's no money in it.

You have to spend money on it.

Okay, so there's more.

There's money in it, but nobody really wants to do the work to figure out.

There's money in it, but you can't make that money.

They're going to make that money, right?

You're going to help people make money.

And it'll contribute to the GDP.

It'll contribute to the tax base, to the overall economy.

But it's not a business where you can say, oh, if I get into that business of helping people, I can get rich.

And that's the problem.

Yeah, I mean, if you try to make...

If the ultimate adjudicator of everything is whether it is turning a profit, you would sort of erase to the bottom.

Everybody's sort of...

Nobody really wants to do anything smart.

They just want to do things that enable them to get the most money the quickest.

But ultimately, right now, spending $116 billion a year on our prison system,

we've got 5% of the world's population.

We've got 20, 25% of the world's prisoners.

Crazy.