Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

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What's happening, man? How are you?

I'm good. How are you?

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.

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.

Bad things happen-

Especially-

... 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.

Yeah.

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.

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.

Right.

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.