Andrew Jarecki on Joe Rogan: Why prisons work as black sites

1. SPSpeaker0:02

   Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night. All day. [upbeat rock music]

2. JRJoe Rogan0:12

   What's happening, man? How are you?

3. SPSpeaker0:14

   I'm good. How are you?

4. JRJoe Rogan0:15

   I'm great. I watched, uh, your documentary, The Alabama Solution, last night, and it was wild. It's very, very disturbing. Um, kind of shocked I hadn't heard more about it, you know, 'cause it's such a terrible, terrible story. It's such a, just an unbelievably awful situation, and, um, I think you covered it really well. It's just, it's very, very heartbreaking.

5. SPSpeaker0:40

   Yeah. Thanks for watching it. Yeah, it's sort of a question of, of, sort of a question of why people, uh, don't know about things that are happening with our tax dollars in our backyards. You know, are there things that we don't wanna know? Um, 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 doesn't need to be great, and if anything terrible was happening back there, somebody'd probably tell me about it." But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, um, 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 let in, and the public doesn't understand what's happening. And we know that, you know, when you give people total control over other people, bad things happen.

6. JRJoe Rogan1:31

   Bad things happen-

7. SPSpeaker1:32

   Especially-

8. JRJoe Rogan1:32

   ... every single time. And this is one of the worst things. It's, what's really terrifying is the sheer numbers of people that died there with no investigation. That's what's really terrifying.

9. SPSpeaker1:44

   Yeah.

10. JRJoe Rogan1:45

    Because, you know, you even detailed at, at the end, like, since then, how many people have died, and it's just like, good Lord, you're, you're, thousands.

11. SPSpeaker1:56

    Yeah. Well, there's a attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall, uh, who's always run on, like, tough on crime strategies and saying, you know, "We gotta lock more people up, and people who are in prison for, uh, violent crimes should potentially never get out of prison, ever." Um, and he says in the film, as you remember, um, that, uh, there... I, 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 started making the film.

12. JRJoe Rogan2:35

    Right.

13. SPSpeaker2:35

    So this question of, like, who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys, and, you know, what's the nature of, 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 catchall for the ills of society. So if you have mental illness, much more likely to go to prison. 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.

14. JRJoe Rogan3:18

    Well, you, you even... The, the, it's the old expression, who's gonna watch the watchers, right? 'Cause 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, um, with the glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name?

15. SPSpeaker3:45

    Uh, Robert O'Council.

16. JRJoe Rogan3:48

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

17. SPSpeaker4:00

    From, from the guards. Yeah, the guards sell the camera, sell the, uh, sell the phones to the men inside.

18. JRJoe Rogan4:04

    Which is also crazy.

19. SPSpeaker4:06

    Yeah. I mean, there's so many drugs in the Alabama state prison system, and I, I spoke to one of the people who was incarcerated there early on on a contraband cellphone, and I said, "You know, where are all the, the drugs coming from? The amount of drugs here, this is incredible, you know, human wasteland, and 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 cellphones?" And the guy looked at me like I was, you know, uh, uh, stupid. [laughs] 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've said, you know, "We make $36,000 a year without the drugs, without the cellphones, so of course we gotta sell the cellphones and the drugs because that takes us up to 70 or 75,000."

20. JRJoe Rogan5:04

    Oh, God. Yeah. So what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to? Where are they getting them?

21. SPSpeaker5:14

    Well, there's, there's, uh, originally, right, it was sort of more traditional drugs, and people were using heroin and using, um, whatever they could get ahold of. But as the drugs have gotten more, uh, complicated and easier to bring in, now they can actually put, there's a drug called Flakka, which is a very, uh, significant problem there. Uh, fentanyl obviously also, but these drugs can be brought in, uh, 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.

22. JRJoe Rogan5:45

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

23. SPSpeaker5:48

    Yeah. And, and so, you know, there's this effort to kind of stopThat, but then does it lead to people being unable to communicate with their loved ones? Ultimately, the, 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 in 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.

24. JRJoe Rogan6:24

    [laughs]

25. SPSpeaker6:26

    You know, you're, you're much more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison than you are out on the street in Alabama.

26. JRJoe Rogan6:32

    Really?

27. SPSpeaker6:32

    Yep.

28. JRJoe Rogan6:32

    Statistically?

29. SPSpeaker6:33

    Yep.

30. JRJoe Rogan6:34

    Oh my God. Oh, boy. You know, one of the things that is, uh... what was very heart-wrenching is this, uh, callous approach. These... You, you showed at the one time where all these, uh, prisons went on strike, so they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones they all got from the guards. So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state. It's not just this one.

Episode duration: 2:40:59