Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day What's happening, man? How are you? I'm good. How are you? 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 just an unbelievably awful situation.
And I think you covered it really well. It's very, very heartbreaking.
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.
Chapter 2: What is the documentary 'The Alabama Solution' about?
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.
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. Yeah. Because, you know, you even detail that at the end, like since then, how many people have died. And it's just like, good Lord, you're thousands.
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?
of cruelty? What's the nature of punishment? Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them?
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Chapter 3: Why are people unaware of local prison issues?
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 ills 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.
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?
Robert O. Council. 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. From the guards, yeah.
The guards sell the phones to the men inside. Which is also crazy. 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 percent 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.
Oh, God. Yeah.
Yeah. So what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to?
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Chapter 4: What are the conditions like inside Alabama prisons?
I just put my iPhone in my pocket and we just walked up to the intensive care unit. And when we got there, we found that this young man, Stephen Davis, had died from his injuries. And as we started to get deeper into it, we went and visited his mother. Because we didn't even know if she knew that she had lost her son. But in fact, she had been with him when he passed away.
She had sort of turned off the life support. And we said, we want to make a film about this. We're trying to tell the story. And she immediately said... I'm in. I want to help you. I don't want this to happen to any other mothers. And this is a very nice white lady from Uniontown, Alabama, with an oxygen tank. I mean, she's not somebody that you would see ordinarily as kind of a heroic person.
But when she loses her son, she really becomes so activated. And she ends up telling us the story. And then she says, look, you know, they're lying to me already. You know, my son just died last night and they're already calling me and telling me things about how he was the one that attacked guards. And none of this is true. This all seems like it's fake. So teach me how to record my phone calls.
You know, so this older woman suddenly became a really important partner in making the film. And this gets back to your question about Stephen Davis. So her son, who was a drug addict... Right. Didn't kill anybody but was in a car when a drug deal went bad. He went to try to buy drugs and his friend went in the house and they had a fight and somebody got shot.
And then he got arrested and was charged with murder because that's how the felony murder statute works. And so here you have a drug addict who goes to prison in Alabama and is in the highest security prison there and is targeted by a particular guard who is especially violent and is just beaten to death in front of 70 witnesses.
And then, of course, as we go through the film, we start tracking that in our investigation and we start looking into the cover-up and why they lied about how he had died and how they scrambled the witnesses and how the Department of Corrections is organized so that they prevent people from finding out what really happened to their kids or their loved ones and they avoid liability and so on.
And there was one person that we ended up hearing from, this guy James Sales, who originally tells just the police side of the story, just says, well, you know, yeah, it's exactly the way that the guard said. But then he kind of hints on the phone, listen, when I get out of here, I'll tell the real story.
Now, do they have access to these communications? Is there a way they could be hacking into it and know that sales had said that to you?
Well, the person that he said it to was the lawyer for Sandy Ray. So he was supposed to be on a private attorney call. But we do think that... The Department of Corrections doesn't abide by that. I think they do listen to attorney calls. Sales didn't say exactly on the phone what he was going to say, but I think they knew that he was a problem because he was a good person.
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Chapter 5: How do drugs and contraband affect prison dynamics?
Like, look, I can do anything that I want. I can say that he's resisting. Isn't it funny? You know, and and the way you know, the way he kills him. He stomps on his head with his size 15 boot. This is a guy who's almost 300 pounds. I think he's about six foot five. And he's been implicated in 24 other excessive force cases.
And the attorney general in Alabama every single time is defending the guard. How many other people died in those cases? There have been a lot of other injuries. The only – I think that there have been two people who have died out of the 24 or 25 cases that we know about. But there are a lot of just maimings. There are a lot of situations where people are just damaged often permanently.
You saw what happened at Kinetic Justice when he – Robert Earl Council, when he leads a nonviolent work strike. that guards come and attack him and he loses sight in one of his eyes. He's dragged out of the cell. There's a huge amount of blood. So especially these guys who are leading a nonviolent effort to try to improve conditions, they're always met with violence. Right.
He was the guy that was at the head of this strike. And then the strike really highlights something that I think a lot of people are unaware of is how many industries actually use the prison system essentially for slave labor.
Sure. Yeah. I mean, that was a shock to me, I think, is that, you know, I guess we all sort of assume, well, if you're in prison and they ask you to mop the floor, you need to help serve the meals or something, you know, that's a reasonable thing to do. I think what we don't realize is that those people are leased out to the governor, to the mansion where the governor lives. Crazy.
That was crazy. Yeah.
People that were denied parole were allowed to be on the grounds of the governor's mansion doing like groundwork. Exactly. Landscaping and stuff. Yeah.
And beyond that. they're used for labor in industry, right? So those guys are sent out in the mornings in vans. They go work at McDonald's. They work at Burger King. They work at Kentucky Fried Chicken. They work at the Hyundai plant. They work at the Budweiser distributorship. And it's all sort of under the heading of, well, this is good for the guys. They get to get out into the community.
But it's a forced labor situation because if they don't accept those assignments... then they're going to be punished, and they're going to be punished with long stays in solitary confinement. They're going to be given disciplinaries so that their sentences can be extended. They are often just beaten for that. So it's really an extension.
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Chapter 6: What happened during the altercation that led to the woman's death?
Yeah, and had a lot of power over her. And so I think something happened between the two of them where they were at their lake house and there was an altercation. He admitted to me that they had had a pushing and shoving argument that night. The night she died. Yeah. And then he – and then he says he took her to the train and sent her into the city. But none of that makes any sense.
So I think what happened was –
Chapter 7: Why did it take days for the wife to be reported missing?
He either accidentally or semi-accidentally killed her. I think they had a fight. They ended up getting into some altercation and she landed on the, you know, maybe on the stone of the fireplace or something like that. And she was dead. And then he thought, well, it doesn't make any sense for two people to go down. I mean, unfortunate that this had to happen, but I got to get rid of the body.
And so he found a way to make her disappear. We don't know exactly what happened to her, but we know that he alleged that he had put her on the train to go in the city and they never found the body. So after that, he's sort of widely believed to be a likely person to have killed his wife. There's no other explanation for it.
And how long did it take before they realized the wife was missing and when did they determine that she was dead?
It was a few days later because he kept sort of – he held off on telling anyone.
Chapter 8: What role does the DOJ play in monitoring prison conditions?
And then later he said, oh, Kathy, you know, I put her on the train to go in the city and then I haven't heard from her. What's going on? So he had a bunch of explanations about why, you know, somehow she had run off with a drug dealer or she had run off with some boyfriend or something like that. But none of those really held water. But it took him a while to report her missing.
He waits five days to report her missing and does a brilliant thing, which is he reports her missing in New York City, even though the last time she's ever seen is in Westchester. So they were at their house, their lake house in Westchester. She disappears. And he goes into the city five days later and he says, oh, my wife was at our apartment. So he complete.
That's why I'm saying he's very smart. He completely redirects the police so that they make because, you know, the police aren't organized for a guy to come in and give a phony story about what happened to his wife. Most of the time, somebody comes in, says my wife is missing and they say, oh, where did you last see her? Let's help you try to find her.
So I think he was smart enough to flip that on his head. And he says that my wife was in the city. And so they do their whole investigation in the city. They don't look at the lake house. They don't figure out where she really truly might have been.
Did they ever do an examination of like a forensic on the lake house?
Yeah, they did. And they – it was sort of – because it was so late in the game, because it had taken so long for him to report her missing, they didn't find anything that showed that she had been killed in the –
the house and she may very well been killed somewhere else but they never find the body ever and so her family is bereft and they don't know what to do and did he ever confess to that he didn't but During the course of his interview with me, I mean, he never did it publicly, but in the bathroom, he says, killed them all, of course.
So he's being accused of three murders, his wife, his best friend, and his neighbor in Galveston, who he then cuts up. And his confession in the bathroom is killed them all, of course. So I think we... I think we know what happened. We don't know how it happened.
Did they find his neighbor's body? Or his best friend's brother?
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