Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki
Uploaded: 2026-03-27T17:00:10.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-27. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2026-03-27. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2475 - Andrew Jarecki

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
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 such 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.
You know, 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, 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, you know, we treat them sort
of like
black sites, there's no way for us to really look inside.
So the press doesn't get lit in, and the public doesn't understand what's
happening.
And we know that, you know, 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.
It's 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, that there, I asked 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
1500 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, you know, what's the nature of cruelty?
What's the nature of punishment?
Are we putting people there to try to make them better, rehabilitate them?
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 catchall 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 Old 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 camera, sell the, 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.
And you're seeing just high, high percentage, maybe 80% 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 $70,000 or $75,000.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
So, what are the main drugs these guys are addicted to?
What are they getting them?
Well, there's originally, right, it was sort of more traditional drugs.
And people were using heroin and using whatever they could get a hold of.
But as the drugs have gotten more complicated and easier to bring in, now they
can actually put – there's a drug called Flocko, which is a very significant
problem there.
Fentanyl, obviously, also.
But these drugs can be brought in on a piece of paper.
So, somebody could send you a letter and it could be in the letter.
They can actually put the drug into the paper.
Oh, sort of like acid when they put acid on paper?
Yeah.
And so, you know, there's this effort to kind of stop that.
But then does it lead to people being unable to communicate with their loved
ones?
Ultimately, the easiest way to get the drugs is for the officers to sell the
drugs.
And so, you know, we say – and I think it's sadly true that the Alabama
Department of Corrections – and it's not just in Alabama, but obviously, we
use that as the lens through which we saw incarceration more generally.
But the Alabama Department of Corrections is the largest law enforcement agency
in the state of Alabama.
And it's also the biggest drug dealing operation.
You know, you're much more likely to die of an overdose inside the prison than
you are out on the street in Alabama.
Really?
Statistically?
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Oh, boy.
You know, one of the things that is – what was very heart-wrenching is this
callous approach.
You showed at the one time where all these prisons went on strike.
So they all communicated with each other through these contraband cell phones
that they all got from the guards.
So I guess it's ubiquitous throughout the state.
It's not just this one.
Correct.
And these people on the radio were like, well, it's prison.
It's supposed to suck.
You know, maybe if they had saw your film, they wouldn't have such a cavalier
attitude about it.
Yeah.
But it's that attitude.
It's like these are human beings, and some of them barely did anything.
Like one guy that wound up dying from – you think they did something to –
or they think they did something to a cigarette that they gave this guy.
He – all he did was break into an abandoned building.
Yeah.
He didn't steal anything.
Entering an unoccupied building.
Yeah.
Yeah.
His name is James.
I mean, I don't even know if he broke in, right?
If it was unoccupied, it might have even been open.
Yeah.
It said entering.
So he entered a building that he wasn't supposed to enter, and he got 15 years
in a cage.
And then on his way out, at least they're inferring that they killed him
because he had too much information about what was going on inside, and he was
going to get out.
Yeah, this goes back to the story of a woman who we had met and her son when we
were first communicating with the men using these contraband cell phones.
And they were telling us what was going on inside the prison, and they were
telling us what was going on inside the prison, inside the various prisons.
We sort of – in the early days, we couldn't believe it because the way we got
into the prisons to begin with is I had gone down to Alabama because I was
always interested in incarceration and the problems of that system and the
justice system.
I made other films about the justice system.
And I was always curious about Alabama because it's sort of famously maybe the
worst prison system in the country, but it mirrors a lot of others.
And my daughter was 14 at the time, Jeremy, and she said, you know, I'm reading
this book by a guy named Anthony Ray Hinton, and it's a book about his wrongful
imprisonment in Alabama, and maybe you should read this with me.
So we ended up reading the book together, and then we both sort of just
spontaneously decided to take a road trip to Montgomery because we just didn't
know anything about it.
It had never been there.
She was growing up in New York, and it was just not in her frame of reference.
So we went down there, and we met a man who was the first black prison chaplain
in the state of Alabama, Chaplain Browder.
And I said, well, I'm really curious about what's going on in the prisons.
And he said, well, you should just come in with me.
And I said, well, I'm a filmmaker.
They're not going to let me just walk into the prison in Alabama.
And he said, well, just don't come in as a filmmaker.
You just don't have to bring a camera.
Just come in and talk to some of the guys.
So I went in to film.
Ultimately, we were allowed to film ultimately in one of the prisons.
And when we were in there to film this revival meeting, just because we were
lucky enough to find a warden who felt like he wanted to show an example of how
Christianity was active and important in the prison system, which I agreed with.
But then while we were in there filming with like five cameras, which was just
unheard of, the men inside couldn't believe that there were any cameras in
there.
And they started taking us aside and saying, listen, what they're showing you
here is a very curated version of what's going on in this prison.
You have to get into these other buildings.
You've got to see what's going on in that dorm over there called the behavior
modification dorm where guys have been killed by guards.
And you've got to look in that dorm where people have been in solitary
confinement for five years at a time.
You know, don't let them show you just what they want to show you.
And I felt much safer, you know, even though the warden had said to us, when
you go in there, you know, don't talk to any of the men.
They're all very dangerous.
I immediately felt safer talking to the inmates than I did talking to any of
the guards.
And when we left, it was really because we got kicked out, right?
We start, you saw in the beginning of the film, we sort of start getting nosy
and we start trying to look in some of these other areas.
And then they shut down the filming, they throw us out.
And then we thought, well, you know, maybe we're stuck now.
How are we going to make a film about this?
We feel we have to because we're the only people that know what's going on in
here, but they're not going to let us back.
So it was then that we found out that there was this network of men inside who
had access to these contraband cell phones who were documenting what was going
on.
So that was our way of getting into those buildings that we couldn't see inside.
And one of the first things we learned was one of the guys inside, Melvin Ray,
texted us to say, hey, you know, this guard, it was a guard that we had been
tracking already, who was a particularly violent guard.
He just beat somebody very badly.
And he's now that person, the victim is at UAB Hospital.
So we jumped in a car and we went to UAB Hospital and just walked up.
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 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 kn