Revisionist History · Pushkin Industries

Behind the Scenes with Andrew Jarecki

March 26, 2026·1 hr 1 min·4 clips

A prison chaplain told Andrew Jarecki that Alabama's death row is a slave ship, sparking his seven-year investigation.

1. Malcolm Gladwell's 'Revisionist History' podcast features a live conversation with documentarian Andrew Jarecki about his HBO series 'The Alabama Solution' on the Alabama prison system. 2. Jarecki is introduced as the director of 'Capturing the Friedmans' and 'The Jinx,' and the conversation was recorded at On Air Fest in Brooklyn following the near-simultaneous release of Gladwell's 'Alabama Murders' podcast series and Jarecki's HBO film. 3. The episode's organizing question is how two parallel investigative projects — one a podcast, one a documentary — approached the same state with different tools and reached complementary findings. 4. Jarecki traces his entry into the project to a 2017 road trip with his then-14-year-old daughter to Montgomery, Alabama, after she heard wrongfully-convicted man Anthony Ray Hinton speak at her school, the Dalton School in New York. 5. In Montgomery, Jarecki met an approximately 80-year-old Black prison chaplain who had been appointed by George Wallace and who told him — after a cautious dinner standoff — 'if you come back, I'll take you on death row at Holman Prison, and you'll see it's a slave ship.' 6. Jarecki identifies that single sentence as the reason he returned and spent seven years making the documentary. 7. After initially gaining access to Easterling Prison, Jarecki and his team began receiving information from prisoners about areas of the facility they were being prevented from seeing — including a solitary confinement building where men had been held for five to seven years and a dorm where a guard had recently killed someone. 8. The documentary's core visual material came from a network of prisoners with contraband cell phones — sold to them by guards — who had been recording conditions inside for years and who began FaceTiming Jarecki directly. 9. Gladwell frames this as overcoming documentary's deepest structural limitation: unlike reconstructing events after the fact, Jarecki was receiving footage live, from inside a closed institution. 10. Jarecki received a text from activist Melvin Ray that a prisoner named Stephen Davis had been badly beaten and moved to UAB Hospital in Birmingham; by the time Jarecki arrived, Davis had died. 11. Davis's mother, Sandy Ray, in Uniontown, asked Jarecki to show her how to record her phone calls from the prison — which she knew were going to contain lies — and co-director Charlotte moved into her spare room for weeks. 12. Jarecki describes the prison's built-in delay for notifying family as having 'destroyed their cover-up' because it gave him time to be present for the mother's calls. 13. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall — also a subject of Gladwell's podcast — told Jarecki in a two-hour interview that he 'wholeheartedly disagrees' with any claim of a systemic problem in Alabama's facilities. 14. Jarecki describes Marshall as 'a self-proclaimed Christian' who 'says the quiet part out loud' without apparent shame, and notes Marshall is currently running for Tommy Tuberville's U.S. Senate seat. 15. Since filming began seven years ago, 1,500 people have died in Alabama's 20,000-person prison system — which also has the highest drug overdose, suicide, and sexual assault rates of any US prison system. 16. Jarecki explains the convict leasing system: Alabama makes approximately $450 million per year from prison labor, with men leased to McDonald's, Burger King, Hyundai parts facilities, Budweiser distributorships, and the state governor's mansion. 17. He reveals a statistic Alabama does not officially track: prisoners deemed safe enough to be leased for outside work have a statistically lower probability of parole than higher-custody inmates, because they are economically valuable. 18. The documentary is largely structured around FaceTime calls and prisoner-recorded video, a technique Jarecki says accounts for roughly 30 percent of the final film and which he believes has not been done before at this scale. 19. Gladwell and Jarecki discuss the contrast between their two projects: Gladwell's podcast provides extensive back-story on individual characters; Jarecki's film moves through personal history in seconds and prioritizes systemic evidence. 20. This episode is best suited to listeners interested in criminal justice, documentary filmmaking craft, or the specific conditions of Alabama's carceral system.

As heard by us

A hard, exacting conversation about Alabama prisons and the moral logic behind them.

This episode uses a conversation with Andrew Jarecki to push Revisionist History's Alabama argument from the death penalty into the prison system.

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Why you'd press play

You want a conversation about Alabama's prison system that keeps tightening the moral screws.

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