Andrew Jarecki

And

just the brutality of the situation.

You can't run that without knowing it.

You can't say, well, I wasn't aware of it because there were enough layers between me and the people that were, you know, actually in the trenches doing the business of killing people.

It was probably the state I knew the least about in the union.

You know, it's just not something, if you grew up in New York city and you study history, you're not spending a ton of time on Alabama.

Um, I knew a little bit, you know, like there, I don't know, like the state motto of, you know, a typical American state will be like the sunshine state or the show me state, you know, Alabama's motto is we dare defend our rights.

Which is really like, if you want to come and have an opinion, you can go fuck yourself.

We're not interested in your opinion.

We're just going to do our thing.

And certainly we don't want you telling us how to deal with our Negroes or our population of prisoners or our crime or any of it.

It's just, there's a wall.

It's kind of amazing you're saying that because the chaplain who I visited and met and encouraged me to come back, Chaplain Browder, after I was in it for six months or the first year or two, and I stayed in touch with him constantly.

He's quite a bit older now.

He's seven years older than when I first met him, but he's still...

very thoughtful guy and he said i'm telling you andrew alabama ain't in these united states yeah but you know then you ask yourself whether that's even right you know the reality is is it you know upstate new york robert brooks just got killed in upstate new york by corrections officers who beat him to death and the only reason we don't think it was natural causes or a drug overdose is because they were

I don't even want to say dumb enough.

They were entitled enough to just leave their body cameras on because they just assumed that nobody was ever really going to try to figure out what happened to poor Robert Brooks, who was handcuffed when they beat him to death.

So it's happening in New York.

You know, if you had put your dog in upstate New York in a kennel because you were going on holiday and you saw this, you would say, I'm calling the ASPCA.