Andrew Jarecki

You know, when you see somebody who you've been trained to believe is going to be a hardened, terrible criminal...

But we sort of know really what he was was a drug addict.

And now you see a picture of this young man with his hair shorn and his face pale and wearing a jumpsuit that's exactly what everybody else in the prison wears.

And he becomes totally homogenized and dehumanized.

And then you get to see a photograph of him as a child, you know, with a smile and just seeing pride on his face or him starting to play Little League or something like that.

And then you're just reminded that I have somebody in my family who is playing Little League and then 10 years later was a drug addict.

you know, was playing little league and 10 years later was an alcoholic and his life was falling apart.

So you make a connection to those people that goes beyond whatever their, you know, their, their crime was.

But you're bringing up an interesting point that I've not talked about, uh, regarding this film, which was that there were people who came to test screenings of the film and literally said the following, uh,

I'm uncomfortable if I don't know what crime they committed.

So could you have some kind of a device where as soon as I see somebody on screen, there's some kind of a chyron or a little designator on the bottom that says murder one or that says burglary or that says...

And I was so instructive to hear somebody say that, right?

And of course, you could have the debate with them or you could say, so you're saying that it's okay for a prison guard to beat somebody to death.

You're going to make the evaluation of whether that's reasonable or not based on whether they had a burglary charge or an aggravated burglary charge.

Yeah.

And then they always say, well, no, no, no, of course, of course, of course, of course.

But they're revealing that they're propagandized.

They're revealing that like nobody, everybody wants safety.

Everybody wants their family to be safe.

Everybody doesn't, you know, people don't want,