#2475 - Andrew Jarecki

**Joe Rogan** (0:03)
The Joe Rogan Experience.

**Joe Rogan** (0:06)
Trained by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.

**Joe Rogan** (0:13)
What's happening, man?

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
How are you?

**Joe Rogan** (0:14)
I'm good.

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
How are you?

**Joe Rogan** (0:15)
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 such a just unbelievably awful situation. And I think you covered it really well. It's very, very heartbreaking.

**Andrew Jarecki** (0:40)
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 tell 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 when you give people total control over other people, bad things happen.

**Joe Rogan** (1:31)
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. Because you even detailed at the end, like since then, how many people have died. And it's just like, good lord, you're thousands.

**Andrew Jarecki** (1:56)
Yeah. Well, there's an attorney general in Alabama named Steve Marshall, who's always run on like tough on crime strategies and saying, you know, we got to lock more people up and people who are in prison for violent crime should 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 started making the film. So this question of like, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? And, 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 ill 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.

**Joe Rogan** (3:18)
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 nonviolent people who spend all their time writing and reading, and they're getting retribution because they're calling attention to the terrible conditions at the prison. So the one guy with the glasses who was beaten blindly, what was his name?

**Andrew Jarecki** (3:45)
Robert O. Council.

**Joe Rogan** (3:48)
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.

**Andrew Jarecki** (4:00)
From the guards, yeah. The guards sell the camera, sell the phones to the men inside.

**Joe Rogan** (4:04)
Which is also crazy.

**Andrew Jarecki** (4:05)
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, where are 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 70 or 75,000.