What living in a bathroom-sized room does to your mind

(SOLITARY Film)

There are more than 40 super-maximum security prisons scattered across the United States, and despite a new, mainstream effort to decrease the number of prisoners living inside bathroom-sized jail cells for 23-hours a day, more than 200,000 Americans are being punished with administrative segregation — most commonly known as solitary confinement.

Years before President Barack Obama published the Washington Post op-ed “We Must Rethink Solitary Confinement,” indie filmmaker Kristi Jacobson was given unprecedented access to document life inside one of the nation’s most notorious prisons, Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison. Inside the facility, prisoners desperately cope with life inside 10 by eight-foot cells, where the most common interactions come through brief moments with correctional officers, and by speaking to nearby cellmates via the prison’s ventilation system, not unlike the telephone game you typically learn in kindergarten.

Jacobson’s documentary was filmed entirely inside the prison’s quarters, it takes you within the Virginia super-maximum security prison and refuses to let you out. The Independent caught up with Jacobson to speak about her visceral new film Solitary, which debuted at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, what it was like being around all those dudes, the psychological toll segregation has on inmates, and how she expects the public to react to the way we treat our most dangerous offenders.

The Independent: What compelled you to do a documentary on solitary confinement and why did you choose Red Onion for your filming site?

Kristi Jacobson: I came to documentary film-making by way of studying sociology as an undergrad specifically studied criminology and juvenile justice and worked in a juvenile courthouse and that was sort of my first interaction with the criminal justice system and deeply understood its brokenness. That’s kind of driven me in all of my work and after making A Place at the Table which kind of had a pretty wide release, I felt like alright I’m going to go back to the stuff that really gets me. I was reading a story about how juveniles are kept in solitary confinement and then read the New Yorker article called “Hellhole” by Atul Gawande and he really described in gripping detail what happens to human beings when they’re deprived of social contact. It was just one of those things— and listed the number of people that are in solitary confinement in the US and at that time this was summer 2012.

There was very little coverage of the issue in the mainstream so I really felt like I couldn’t unlearn the truth and I needed to make a film about this. From there I began to understand what the landscape was in terms of how we got here. As you probably know given where you work, there are over 40 super PACs in the US and they operate more or less without any oversight and without any journalists getting inside. They’re known as black sites. So around that same time, there were a handful of states that were sort of ahead of the curve in terms of recognizing that locking people in cells for 24 hours a day and then releasing them directly out into the streets was unwise.

Virginia was one of those states, so I started to have a series of conversations with the director at the Department of Corrections about the strap-down program that you see featured in the film and why he was doing that. He was remarkably open and it went from a bunch of conversations to I’d really like to capture what’s happening there and sort of the history of prisons is quite representative of all of the super-maximum security prisons that opened across the country in the late 1990s. So it felt like a pretty extraordinary opportunity. We started filming what was supposed to be a three-day shoot in the fall of 2013 and completed filming over a year later.

What were you looking for when you were selecting inmates to interview and what was the vetting process like? How did they fit into your vision for the project?

Jacobson: To be honest, until we arrived on the first day I had visited the prison without cameras to try to meet the warden and get an understanding of the layout of the prison so that we could kind of prepare for shooting. But in a way, it’s a big burden to get into a place that no one gets into to then try and get it right. There are hundreds of stories because there are hundreds of people locked in that prison. So a combination of things happened. One was through their participation in the program I met quite a few people. A few early people that I met, Randall, Luke, who is very present in the film — I think, you know, as a writer I’m sure you can see why he interested me and intrigued me and that’s just because of his ability to tell a really good story. I found that as I got to know people more and got to understand the place more it became more and more important to me to feature in the film people who wanted to trust me with telling their story, their whole life. It became also clear to me as I got to know people I mean I’m not sure how much you have filmed inside prisons before but the worst first question to ask is what did you do to land here.

I think the best first question to ask is how are you, what’s going on? Try to get to know people. That process helped to identify some people. Sometimes we were just inside the infirmary it turns out that Michael who you get to know pretty well was in there that day. There’s a bigger window there and it’s easier to communicate through the cell door and we were able to speak a little bit. So I got to know him and explain to him what we’re trying to do. Sometimes we just kind of talked to people through the cell door, asked them if they wanted to talk to us, they’d come to an interview room and we’d talk. It was a pretty organic process but in the end, in the edit, is the part where the final choices were made. Honestly, the issue was gaining traction while we’re making a film that’s going to take three plus years. It became increasingly important to me as a filmmaker to feature people whose humanity comes through but also who had committed crimes that were violent crimes that really push us an audience as citizens to really ask the tougher questions about whether this punishment is appropriate and whether or not anybody benefits from it.


 Solitary
 (SOLITARY Film)

You all but answered my follow up which was since the public shift, like President Obama coming out and saying “we must rethink solitary confinement,” what’re you hoping the audience takes away.

Jacobson: I wanted to point out also that in terms of the characters it also became increasingly important to me on each visit to try to share the voice of the corrections officers who worked there and to do that in an equally human way, to treat everybody there the same because we all should be operating in a world in which our humanity and our dignity can remain in tact. I think it’s really been encouraging and exciting to see the issue pick up momentum. My position is that I think we’re all human beings.

As Atul Gawande wrote in that piece, human beings are social creatures and I think there’s a responsibility that all of us have to care about what happens in our prisons and even if we don’t care what happens from a moral point of view over 90 percent of people who are in prison one day get out. I think it makes sense to be smart and be real and treat people like human beings with potential. I also think, this may be evident from the film, it’s not that there’s an easy fix or an easy answer. It requires real thought and real attention. That’s something I hope people come away with. Talking about it, thinking about it, wanting to talk about it more, and move the conversation from broad reform to specific ways to tackle what seems to me to be a pretty broken system.

One of the biggest challenges is that there are so many stories inside that prison, be they the people that are locked inside that prison, the people that work inside the prison, the prison’s own efforts at reform.

What are the biggest challenges you faced while filming and was there anything you left out of the film that you wish you could’ve added?

Jacobson: I think at the end of the day, we chose to focus on a few men that would really help people connect with them and their stories and their lives, that reveal a lot about society not just what’s happening in that prison. There is a lot happening in that prison. There were people who moved through and got to the general population and ultimately got released. There are similar people who are not getting anywhere with the program. I just think the abundance of stories and the responsibility to make a film that moves people once given the opportunity to capture the stories inside was a challenge.

Why did you decide to shoot entirely inside the prison?

Jacobson: Cinematic approach was largely dependent on my VP Nelson Hume who was awesome and also my editor Dan Gold. It was very much informed by our experience in the place. We didn’t go into it saying let’s make a film that takes place entirely inside this prison. I had other stories across the country, in colleges, experts. It just came clear after a few days of shooting and a couple months of editing that it just felt like this was the only way to tell the story and for me as an artist it became kind of exciting exploring the form in a way that I hadn’t before. So that’s something I’m proud of.

It doesn’t answer all your questions as some films might do but it does get you and lets you learn. Interestingly almost all those guys featured in that film were sentenced in the 90s during that period when it was particularly harsh.

Were you at all surprised by the correctional officers’ responses to your questions? One of the answers that received a big reaction from the audience was when he said fighting inmates is exciting, like scoring a touchdown. Another said he’d never pictured himself inside a 10-by eight-foot cell.

Jacobson: I totally get where your question was coming from. That interview I actually shot on one of the last days of filming because it took that long, a longer time, for the [correctional officers] to want to share than it did for the inmates and the people on the other side and I think after that first shoot it just occurred to me that anything I thought about what a CO might feel or what they might say would be rooted in my own experience having never worked there, having not grown up there and that it was really important for me to not have any expectations.

In some ways, there was some surprise but in another, I think I began to understand. It’s like being at war, being in that place. Similarly, we as humans do things that may be hard to understand if you’re looking from the outside, but I thought those guards were incredibly brave for sharing some of their honest feelings about what it’s like to work inside there. That’s honestly what was most unexpected and certainly welcomed in the context of trying to tell the story.

I’m pretty sure that’s when folks sitting next to me in the audience whispered, “Damn, she really got that out of them.”

Jacobson: Yeah, and they haven’t seen it yet so I hope they feel that I got it right. It’s a tough story to tell because the people inside that place all have a different perspective on what’s happening so we’ll see. I hope they’ll see what I was trying to do which is allow people to see the impact that it can have on someone working there as well as people inside there. There are enough portrayals in the media of one-dimensional inmates and one-dimensional guards, and I wanted there to be far more complexity than we are normally given in today’s world of media and criminals and prisons.

I think that obviously, the film reveals the devastating impact that building these prisons have on individuals and society and I think that another layer of the story and the film is like the scene that’s representative of it is the scene with the vent, that’s like there’s beauty amidst the horror. I found that really compelling and inspiring when we began to understand it and I think also that the simple fact that the department of corrections did let me, an independent filmmaker, inside— except for security concerns— without any limitations, I think that that is positive. I think that that’s part of the story of what will hopefully be radical reforms of corrections in this country— not the film. It’s one of many things that are happening right now and I give a lot of credit to them for their willingness to do that.

To learn more about Solitary visit the Tribeca Film Festival website and look out for the film, which is set to release on HBO this coming fall.