Andrew Jarecki

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.

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 would probably tell me about it.

But because of the secrecy that surrounds prisons, 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 when you give people total control over other people,

Bad things happen.

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 –

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 what's the nature of crime?