Andrew Jarecki

that could be considered a 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, I like that image of the battery.

I think about it as 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.

Well, the genies 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 securists 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.

who are being charged like high 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 healthcare 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 2 million Americans to companies that are accountable to their shareholders maybe, but the shareholders don't know.

Like 11 caught in one night.