Original subtitles

- Hello. - Hi, I'm Louis.

I'm Louis.

Oh, I can't shake your hand.

[laughter]

Louis narrates: For 25 years,

I've been making programmes about life

in all its strangeness...

Stand by, information to follow.

- ..mystery...

- Who are you? - I'm Louis.

- Who's Louis?

Louis narrates: ..and angst.

You OK, Nicky?

Louis narrates: Trying to make connections with people

who are, in different ways, on the edge.

Not all of us want to be like this.

Recently, I decided to take a pause

and trawl through my old shows,

looking again at some stories that stayed with me.

Yeah, this has stuff in it.

Louis narrates: And to reach out to those I'd featured...

- Look at you, Mr Beard and Moustache.

I know, don't I look distinguished?

- ..to see how their lives have changed.

You've been married six times?

Henry VIII was married six times,

so it's not unprecedented.

[laughs]

- Hey, how you doing? - Good, how are you?

Louis narrates: From all the hours of programmes,

I've teased out a handful of themes.

- This is gonna be the start

of the second American Civil War.

White revolution!

- You OK? - It seems like every day

I get delivered from something else

that I didn't even know I had.

Louis narrates: All of which, in different ways,

go to the heart of what it means to be human.

What connection is there between a birth mum

and a child?

[woman whimpers]

Louis narrates: Trying to figure out

what I've learned about life.

- Do you think this relationship could survive outside here?

- Oh, it will.

- Yours? - It will. Absolutely.

Louis narrates: And about myself.

- Do you feel you've got a life in here?

- You can make a life as comfortable

as it can get in here...

..if you put your mind to it.

- You see them police right now?

It's them against us.

It's not a white-on-black, it's a BLUE-on-black.

Radio: A state of high tension tonight

as the country braces itself

for another wave of protests

over the death of George Floyd.

The unarmed Mr Floyd, who was Black,

died in Minneapolis

after being pinned to the ground

by a white police officer.

He was the latest in a string of African-American men

to die through police action.

There've been protests in at least 30 US cities,

with violence, looting and arson in some,

and several cities have imposed curfews.

Louis: Among industrialised nations,

America has a unique and fraught relationship

with its system of criminal justice.

Police radio: Attention all units, tear gas

is now being used in the area

of 34th and Prospect, New York West.

- I pledge the oath to launch a war

against the filth peddlers

and the narcotics peddlers who are corrupting the lives

of the children of this country.

Louis: It is a country preoccupied

with the threat of crime,

and also how to protect itself against it.

- The American people do not feel safe

on their streets, in their schools,

in their homes, in their places of work and worship.

Louis: Politicians run for office

based on how tough they are on crime.

- We will be a country of law and order.

[cheering]

Louis: Many states still have the death penalty

and there is a policy of mass incarceration

that far outstrips any other country on Earth.

Louis: Criminal justice in general,

and crime, was a subject I'd always

been interested in.

Up until then, I'd mainly been making episodes

of 'Weird Weekends', which were just much lighter

and more humorous in tone, so it felt like a big step

to take on a really serious subject.

And it wasn't clear how I'd get involved in the story.

And then I had the idea of getting inside

a huge US prison

and that that might be a way of looking at

the American criminal justice system in microcosm.

We did a deep trawl of prisons around the US.

We visited three - that 'we' being my director

and my producer, right?

And they came back and said, "San Quentin's the place."

Thank you.

San Quentin is one of America's oldest

and most notorious prisons

and one of the largest in California,

with over 3,000 inmates.

- These are the real bad guys.

Murder, rape, robbery, extorting stuff

from other inmates.

They're considered extremely dangerous.

What are you in for?

- Assault with deadly weapon.

- How long? - 15 years.

[banging]

- Alright, it's cool.

It's like a playground here, man.

It ain't nothing, man.

Ain't nothing scary about this.

I've been in a cell by myself for three years.

No windows, no sunlight.

Just locked up. 24 hours a day, locked up.

Louis: What is it that makes you keep coming back?

It's too easy to do the time.

- In what way? - I don't know.

To me, it's worth taking the risks

to live the way I want to live.

- What's up, boy? Give me no fear...

Alright, alright.

Louis: You're slightly on show when you parade

in front of all those cells.

It's an intimidating sensation.

There's a lot of catcalls and screaming,

shouts and people say,

"I'm being held against my will!"

And just some of it comic and some of it like,

"Fuck off!" and, like, whatever.

- Hey, what's up, dawg?

Louis: One of the first inmates I met was David Silva.

What's your stretch? What are you serving?

Erm...

..first I got to do 521 years,

and then 11 life sentences.

How come so much?

'Cause I was on a...

..brutal...

..erm, home invasion series type of thing.

Multiple home invasions.

Brutal in what way?

Just a lot of torture tactics.

Were there any fatalities involved?

Did you actually kill anyone?

- No, nobody died, but some people...

..probably were at points

where they wish they would have died.

Now, I guess I don't worry about getting out no more,

I just got to...

..make my bed and...

..live on through.

Louis: It was like a city

with its own districts and suburbs,

with its own culture and its own areas

that had distinct personalities.

Quite quickly, one of the things you notice is,

especially during yard time,

how segregated the place is by race.

- Tell me what you're doing over here,

- you're just relaxing? - We're the white guys.

- Are you the white gang? - That's right.

- Yeah.

- Do all the different races have different areas?

- Yeah, that's like the Black area over there,

the Norteño area over there, white area over here,

Indians over there.

- We keep it segregated. - How come?

Because we don't want to programme with them.

- Keep a clear line. - Pretty much.

Hell, white power, you know?

I ain't programming with them.

[makes braying sounds]

How did you hook up with these guys?

- He's white. - Yeah, yeah.

- We take care of our own.

- Did you spot him? 'Cause he looks kind of new.

You know, did you spot him and think,

well, you know, "We'll look out for him?"

- Oh, yeah.

- Yeah, we work in the kitchen together.

We try to take care of everybody.

We work in the kitchen together, too.

- Yeah.

Louis: In a way, it was accepted by inmates that you didn't mix

with other races.

And, in fact, there were stiff penalties if you broke rank.

If you were Black and you offered me

some of that food, I couldn't take it.

Why?

It's just part of the rules, man.

- Prison rules?

- If you did, you'd get beat up.

- Who would beat you up?

Me.

[laughter]

Louis: I tended to see those guys as people who were working

within a system, a system that they hadn't created.

San Quentin isn't the kind of place

that gives you the option of being a kind of modern,

cosmopolitan and enlightened dude.

Many of the people at San Quentin

are passing through to other facilities.

It is the reception centre

for Northern California prisons.

There are also inmates on short sentences.

So there's a lot of traffic.

I was keen to speak to somebody

who was about to be released.

An officer checked on the system

and found someone called Bradley Todd Worledge.

We went to the cell and our prison contact checked inside

and then came out and said,

"You're gonna be interested in this

"'cause, actually, this person goes by Deborah."

- How are we doing?

My name's Louis, I'm from the BBC.

Hi.

- So tell me a little bit about how you ended up here.

- OK, well, I guess, erm...

..I've been doing this for like

- almost 20 years, so... - What?

- Coming to prison. - In and out?

Yes.

What were your convictions for?

For robbery and a stolen car,

being with guys that were criminals,

kind of going along with them.

How long were you in this time?

- Three months. - Three months.

- How's it been? - It's been OK.

Aside from always having to worry about getting moved.

- While we were talking,

I noticed she was looking inside...

..as though someone was in there,

and I was like, "Well, who's in there with you?"

And it was this guy called Rob.

- May I open it? - Yeah.

Here, let me put my shoes on.

Louis: Kind of a good-looking, long-haired...

he looked vaguely piratical,

like he should have been an extra

in Pirates of the Caribbean.

What is it that works about the relationship?

I don't know. It just does.

She's real special, you know what I'm saying?

Shut the fuck up!

Do you think this relationship

- could survive outside here? - Oh, it will.

- Yours. - It will, absolutely.

- A lot of times, something like this could be,

- you know, situational. - Yeah.

- Forced together, making do. - Yeah, just making whatever,

but I don't know, you know?

People are jealous of us,

you know what I'm saying?

People really hate on us.

- You mean people in here

- can be close-minded? - Absolutely.

- They judge you? - Yeah, you know?

That's not always it.

It's that usually... You know,

somebody wants to get one of the girls in their cell,

or whatever.

What it is, is, you know, these guys are like...

- They're starved for companionship.

- Yeah.

- They get to have a relationship

and they get to have a little house

and go to work every day

and come home every day, you know?

- I know you said, Rob, that you'd like

to continue the relationship on the outside.

- Do you feel the same way? - Absolutely.

I'm almost 40 years old.

He's barely 30.

So why not?

No, he's a lot better than that,

it's a lot more than just that.

I actually like this guy.

[inmates shout in background]

- Bye. - Bye, guys.

Bye. [buzzer]

Louis: Shortly after the interview,

Deborah was released.

She kind of, to me,

represented something about San Quentin,

which was that very often things

weren't quite as you would expect.

Nothing was quite as simple as you might imagine

that it would be.

- We'll squeeze you in, if need be!

Louis: You expect brutality in prison

and violence and antagonism,

so what becomes surprising

is when you see something else.

It's not simply chaos, mayhem, negativity.

Do you feel you've got a life in here?

You can make your life as comfortable

as it can get in here,

if you put your mind to it.

The only thing that you don't have in prison

is freedom to an extent

and no, you know, women, as far as...

But other than that, that's just, you know,

that's just little helps in life, you know?

But you can get over all that, you know?

- Shirt off.

Louis: If you get institutionalised,

if you're habituated

to a certain way of living,

then that becomes more normal,

or at least more known,

than what you have on the outside.

- Obey the law now.

- We made the film in 2007. In 2008,

so the following year after I filmed,

Deborah, I guess, was back inside,

and then released.

"Today's a different day." That's the little pull quote.

"Deborah Lee Worledge was released from jail.

"She died of a drug overdose on September 4, 2008."

Two days later.

"She is missed by many."

She had a sort of romantic notion

of being an outlaw.

She was the one who said to me, you know,

"It's just like in the movies,

"there's cops and there's robbers,

"and we're the robbers."

She seems to have seen the streets

as a more accepting place than,

as it were, mainstream society.

There's a kind of self-respect

in aspects of the street code.

It might seem sometimes self-destructive,

but in other ways it's the best they can do

in the situation they're in.

Here's Philadelphia.

These are just photos from when we were out there

that were taken by our sound recordist,

Freddie Claire.

We had to wear flak jackets,

which looked completely ludicrous.

I mean, the houses themselves,

it's just abandoned, boarded-up, derelict.

That gives you a little flavour.

San Quentin was the first story I'd done

that was squarely in the world of crime.

So, naturally, our minds as a production

went to the world

of crime as it exists out on the streets.

So we got access

to the Philadelphia Police Department.

26 and Silver, guy with a gun.

A guy with a gun?

[tyres screech]

[radio chatter]

[sirens wail]

I got him. I got him.

- There he is, there he is, right there.

Right there, right there. Go, go.

[sirens chirp] - Close the door.

Hey! Yo, yo.

He's running. He's got the gun in his waistband.

[indistinct radio chatter]

Over, get over, got over, get over!

Turn over!

[man cries out]

[siren wails] Turn over.

Could have got your fucking self shot to death,

what's your problem?

Stand up. Stand up.

Louis: What is it? - .42 calibre.

- Why did you have that? - Have what?

- That gun. - I don't have no gun.

- This one. - Huh?

This one.

- The one that we took out your pocket.

- The one you were trying to pull out of your pocket.

They have it on film, dude!

Police radio: Do you have that contact

with whoever's following?

Louis: North Philadelphia - the area's called Kensington -

is quite a place, you know, visually.

You've got block after block in which houses

were being used for either drug dealing or drug taking.

I mean, there's areas all over the world like this.

But this one was... it was unlike anything

I'd really seen before,

in terms of the extent of it.

The police unit I was embedded with

was known for its aggressive tactics.

Don't "come on" shit. Is there open bottles of beer

and are you smoking weed in the car? Yes or no?

[indistinct]

- Yo, bro. Yo, bro.

Relax yourself. What is it...?

- I'm asking you a question,

do you belong right here on this porch?

- Stay in the car, stay in the car.

Louis: What becomes clear,

this dilemma the police faced,

which was they wanted to arrest the drug dealers,

but that to them meant running the risk of making

enemies of other citizens

who had nothing to do with drugs.

[siren wails]

- Did you lose anything up there?

- Where?

- Be quiet and don't move. - Oh, my God, my mom.

- Relax, your mom ain't here. How old are you?

- 19. - 19?

- Roll over on your stomach, towards me.

- I chased him before! - Put your hand straight out.

Why did you run?

- Because, around here,

they have random drive-by shootings.

- Why would they shoot you, though?

They shoot anybody.

They don't care who it is.

Point-blank range, they'll pull the gun out

and shoot you.

And don't nobody care.

Don't nobody care how old you are,

don't nobody give a fuck about you.

Louis: And behind everything, in the background,

we increasingly became aware as we filmed,

was this figure Reds,

the drug lord.

Then, by chance, we were called to the scene of an incident.

It turned out Reds was involved.

We just ran up and started filming.

- Everybody back. Everybody back.

- As it turned out, he was high on PCP

and he seemed quite tickled

by the presence of the camera and me talking to him.

Louis: So what was it over, do you know?

- Over a girl fight! - Why?

'Cause they... I don't know, man!

I don't know, they fighting over girls.

Girl situation.

What y'all locking me up for?

Yo! Y'all is playin' games!

- [giggles] You playin' games. - Not at all, come on.

- Why you playin' games? - Not at all, Reds.

Why y'all playin' games?

- We're not playing games. - Yo!

[speaks Spanish]

Have a seat. Have a seat.

Come on, have a seat. Have a seat.

What's the location on the medic?

So then a few days go by.

We had this weird introductory scene with Reds.

I'm conscious that we need to follow up.

I should really try and talk to him again.

How do you make an appointment with a drug lord?

And there he was on his corner,

and so I jumped out of the car and started talking.

What's the story with your chain,

are those real diamonds?

[laughter]

- Yes. - Are they?

How much for something like that?

- Probably 24. - 24,000? Maybe a bit more?

Maybe. Gold is higher now.

If I asked one of those police what you do, what would he say?

That, that I'm a...

That...whatever.

I don't know. They got their own opinion.

They'd say that you're a big-time drug dealer.

I'm not man, for real, man.

Look...

Look, I pay rent.

Have you ever shot anyone?

No, no, I never shot nobody.

You know what I mean? I never shot nobody.

Did you ever hurt anyone physically?

Oh, always, yeah.

Yeah, we always beat people up.

I'm not gonna lie to you. We always fight.

But family problems, you know?

Sometimes you do what you got to do to survive, man.

You think it's good to have someone who's...who controls

a bit of the area, so that he can keep the peace a little?

Yes, I think that play a part in society.

- Rather than have smaller little factions...

- Yeah. - ..fighting each other...

Exactly, 'cause then everybody want to do whatever...

anything anybody want to do.

And that's when chaos come.

Somebody got to have control of something.

Look, I'm about to leave all of this shithole soon.

There's going to be more worser people than me,

alright?

And once... Whatever they say,

there's gonna be worser people

and there's gonna be more problems.

- Out here? - Yeah.

Louis: Philadelphia was my first exposure

to a community dominated

by a drugs industry in which the local population

were held hostage, in a way, by the dealers

and at loggerheads with the police.

I'm not doing nothing.

- You are being disorderly.

- This is what we go through every day.

- Every day. - Fuckin' cops.

Shit is out of control.

Somebody called about you.

They gave your description,

your shirt, your pants, your shoes.

They said... Now, I can go radio it

and let you hear it again.

Yes, we did get a gun. Show him the gun.

We got the gun.

Alright? [onlookers protest]

The problem was they called about him,

his boy had the gun, alright?

So, are we wrong?

Y'all jumped out on me the other day.

- I didn't jump out on you.

No, I'm not saying y'all, you know,

but I'm saying the police jumped out on me,

slapped me onto the grill.

I ain't got nothing on me.

They going to ask me, "What you doing out here?

"You smoking crack?" I don't smoke crack!

I work every day, you know?

But y'all got me gripped up, got all these gripped up.

And then it's a big problem.

[overlapping shouts]

Come on now.

- Them handcuffs too tight! - Stop moving your arms.

- Handcuffs too tight. - The more you move,

the tighter they're gonna get, alright?

Louis: So it's one thing

for those involved in the drugs trade to resent the police,

but I could also see that members of the general public

had grown angry at what they viewed

as police harassment.

Reds was a pretty big fish.

It seemed to me that police somewhat tolerated him.

In fact, it later turned out they were tolerating Reds

because they were building a case against him and...

..waiting for their moment to pick him up.

So four years later, in 2012,

I get an e-mail to my website, saying,

"I am a Philadelphia police officer

@assigned to an FBI task force.

"I thought you would like to know we did a wiretap on Reds

"and 12 members of his organisation.

"They are now serving life sentences in federal prison."

Undoubtedly, Reds was part of the problem,

but it was so much bigger than just him.

You know, it was an area in which

there was a kind of social collapse.

No opportunity, ravaged by poverty,

and a complete breakdown in trust

between the community and the police.

It's in the nature of policing,

and criminal justice generally,

that it's a blunt instrument.

And in the name of keeping people safe,

they sometimes play probabilities,

they sometimes pick up the wrong people.

And in other cases, they get creative with the law

in order to lock people up.

In 2006, I was reading an article

in the 'New York Times' online

about a new policy to do with how America deals

with serious ingrained sex offenders,

involving legislation that even then was controversial.

The Supreme Court is now considering

whether to keep hardcore child molesters

locked up indefinitely,

even after their sentences are up.

Louis: So we looked into it

and there was a whole new facility

that had just been constructed in Coalinga,

one of the biggest civil commitment facilities

for sex offenders and paedophiles

anywhere in the world.

You might ask, well, why was I interested?

Why would I want to go and talk to people

who've raped and molested children?

I've always had a kind of ghastly fascination

with the extremes

at the far end of any conventional morality.

I admit there's something in me

that kind of finds that both incomprehensible and,

at the same time, maybe for that reason...

..interesting.

- OK. And what are you... what are you in for?

What are you... what are you doing here?

You mean, what's my... my incarceration, erm...

the reason for incarceration?

- I'm a child molester. - Really?

And I never thought for a second

that these little kids were actually people.

They are little people.

- For one thing, I'm reducing

the sexual content of any materials that I produce.

I'm also masturbating less

and I'm working on trying to extend that period.

Louis: So it's a hospital

and it cost $400 million to build.

And, as a result, it's rather nice.

The people there are there to get treatment.

They're not there to be punished.

And they're kept there

until the psychiatric establishment says,

"OK, you're ready now, you can go."

- What does PPG stand for?

It stands for a penile plethysmograph assessment.

It's a phallometric assessment.

- Basically, measuring the penis size...

- Correct.

..in terms of how aroused a man is?

- Correct. So the individual

places this gauge on the shaft of the penis.

- Feel it. You can feel it. - Like that?

So we started by filming...

..the sort of 'model patients', the model citizens.

- Louis. - How you doing, Mr Rigby?

Fine, sir.

- Mr Rigby had been a PE teacher

at a school in Southern California

and convicted in a high-profile case.

And obviously, for the clinical staff,

he represented what they hoped would be a success story.

- Joe, are you Mr Rigby's social worker?

- Yes. - How do you feel

it's been going with Mr Rigby?

- Excellent. He's doing quite well.

He does everything that's asked of him

and he's a...a... He's just...

You can't have a better client.

Any challenge, he's up to face it.

This is your room, Mr Rigby?

- This is our dorm.

There are four men that share the dorm.

- There seems to be an interest

in the male physical form.

- Yes. Yes.

I'm an open gay, er, homosexual man here.

- This seems a little risqué.

That's quite close to the, erm, to the prohibited.

- Well, I suppose that has potential. Yes.

- I don't look at them... - Would that be...?

- Say again.

I don't look at them as teenagers.

I look at them as basically ballet performers.

They all look very mature to me.

- Is that OK? - Is that OK?

Erm, yeah. As long as they're of age, that's OK.

- One of the things I was reading in your file

was that you'd started something,

or there had been something, called The Togas?

- Right.

The club was on the basis of an athletic club.

The problem with it,

it ended up with a sexual initiation.

And these boys, aged...?

Those boys were aged primarily

- 11 and 12 years of age. - 11 to 12.

And what was the initiation?

It was sticking their penis in a tube.

How will you guard against that

creeping back into your thinking?

By guarding my environment.

By understanding, again, our high risk.

And, of course, my number-one high risk

is being around children,

and I can respect that.

I don't probably expect society

to accept me in the long run,

but I'd like to show them I can be a better citizen.

- We'd been invited by the clinical regime, obviously,

not by the guys there.

They were interested in showing us the people

who were involved in treatment.

And it was only after I got there

that I realised that around 70% of them

were not in treatment,

because they were refusing to do it.

There were little murmurings of people saying,

"Hey, what's this crew doing

"telling this story about everything's great here

"and this is a great hospital,

"whereas, in fact, most of us are here

"feeling that we did our time in prison

"and, just when we thought we were going to be released,"

after 20 years or whatever it is, they were like,

"You know what? We're gonna lock you up again.

"And this time, we're not gonna tell you

"when you get out.

"But it's a hospital, so it's all legal."

How do you like it in here?

I don't like it here at all.

The most corrupt programme, OK,

that I've ever seen in my life, OK?

The Phase programme is nothing more than a sham

that's here to hold us indefinitely.

This is nothing but a warehouse.

Look at the big money they get.

They get $200,000 a year for keeping us in here.

Men sing: ♪ They're creepy and they're kooky... ♪

Louis: It's kind of extraordinary,

when you think about it.

$200,000 per person who stays there.

1,200 people there. 1,200 beds.

That's more than $200 million a year.

The numbers are staggering.

Afterwards, I would think,

"I wonder what's going on with those guys."

You know, as is often the case, I kept tabs on the story.

So earlier this year, I wrote to Mr Rigby.

Hang on. There it is.

This is from Mr Rigby. 37918068.

Federal Correctional Institution.

Ashland, Kentucky.

Uh-oh!

"Dear Mr Theroux, thank you for your inquiry.

"Yes, I do remember you.

"I did finally escape the claws

"of civil confinement in 2014,

"being the 14th graduate in their 16-year history.

"You asked about my current situation.

"I pled guilty to one count of possession

"of illegal material.

"I never thought I'd find myself in custody again."

He was given 13 years in federal prison.

"I'd say that 80% of the men at Coalinga now accept

"this institution as their retirement home."

As a place, as a hospital

where people are being made fit for release,

clearly it isn't working particularly well.

Like, it's highly inefficient.

We could put it that way.

So few people are coming through

and so few are making it on the outside.

That being said, I think perhaps

it's pretty obvious that the real reason Coalinga exists

is to make the public feel safe.

So it's a kind of monument

to the public's fear of sex offenders.

Very understandable fear. And, in those terms,

I guess you could argue Coalinga works.

The implicit social contract in America is that

"we will make you safe by locking people up en masse".

America has a prison population,

a prison and jail population,

of more than 2 million.

So it was 2010,

and the idea came up of getting into a jail,

a really big jail. In the American context,

a jail is different from a prison.

Many of the inmates are there on remand.

They're basically awaiting trial

and are technically innocent

because they haven't been convicted.

And we found Miami jail.

There were four or five different buildings,

but the building known as 'main jail'

housed many of the most violent offenders.

Louis: What did you do?

Oh, somebody broke into my house,

and when they broke into my house, I shot him.

He was trying to rape my daughter.

I blowed his head off.

Louis: So you might think that,

given that in a jail people are technically innocent,

it would be a gentler, more benign atmosphere.

In fact, the reverse seemed to be the case.

[men yell]

- Fighting is normal.

I mean, stabbings are normal, you know?

- Oh, look, see? Shank.

We find them all the time. They stab.

This is so that they can have a good grip on it.

Louis: The conditions were to the point

of being almost Darwinian.

- How many guys did you actually have to fight?

About 12 of 'em. Yeah, 12...

There was a 'survival of the fittest' mentality.

The strong survive and the weak get preyed upon.

One thing I'm going to leave on camera

for y'all to remember,

this verb right here - 'gabos'.

The name of the game is gabos.

'Game ain't based on sympathy'.

If you got sympathy in this spot,

you ain't gonna never make it.

- This is actually my fourth day here.

It's not a nice place.

It's awful. It's fucking awful.

- Why? - It's a fucking shithole.

It's terrible.

And now they're gonna put me with 20 other crazy people.

And you can't do anything about it.

[chatter and clinking in background]

[exhales]

- How many people would he be sharing with?

16 to 23 guys in one cell.

Depends on the size of the cell.

And, with him, his size,

ain't no telling what's gonna happen

once we close that door.

[loud chatter]

- Many of the inmates were there for very heavy charges -

murder was common -

and were very ingrained in a certain

street code or street culture.

I had about 30-something fights.

Broke hand, teeth stuck, swollen knuckles.

If you want to eat, you got to fight.

You want to use the phone, you got to fight.

Louis: Going into the cells is not something

the guards like to do,

and I can understand that,

but I'm just the BBC journalist.

You know, unless they really hate Doctor Who

for some reason,

I don't think I'm...

Like, I'm not involved in their politics.

So you go in the cell and you're a little bit

trying to read the room.

- How are you doing? How you doing, guys?

Louis: And see who seems to be more in charge,

who's avoiding you,

who's the likeliest person to talk to.

I focused mainly on Rodney Pearson,

whose nickname was Hot Rod.

- One thing that came up last time

was the idea of the paint

as a kind of arena of battle

in which the different inmates

have to prove themselves.

- You ain't got to prove yourself,

you got to get through that reckoning

and see where you at.

"See where you at"? What do you mean?

- See where you at! You might come here

but you might be snitching on somebody,

and you might tell something.

We wanna know who you is, that's all.

How are you going to tell by fighting?

- I could tell you to get out there

and you'd be scared to get out.

That's one sign there's something wrong with you.

- Well, you could be an honest person

and not want to fight.

- Yeah, but you're going to have to fight,

or you gonna get out the door.

- Why? - Shit, that's the code!

That's they rules.

You got to ask the person who made it.

The code is the code. I can't tell you the code.

You got to know the code. You feel me?

You come here and you come in the cell,

you got to get lined up.

- Are you seriously saying that if I,

by some quirk of fate,

if I was sent into this cell, you'd see me

and presumably you would know that I was not cut out to fight,

and you're seriously saying...?

- I ain't going to lie, you might not fight,

they might just slap the shit out you.

[laughter] I'm just being real.

Are you saying I wouldn't have to fight?

- Oh, you...

No, you going to have to fight!

I'm saying the whole cell might beat you.

Why?

- Shit! That's the code they all know,

that's what I'm trying to tell you.

You going to have to figure out why.

We're entering the special management unit at TGK.

Usually it's high-profile cases.

Anyone with serious cases, serious behavioural issues,

they're housed in here.

Louis: High-profile inmates were those

who were either accused of particularly notorious crimes,

or they'd attacked staff or other inmates,

and they were kept in a separate area of the jail.

Robert Shaw, how are you doing?

Yours says "shank history".

Can you explain that?

Louis: He had a kind of charismatic quality,

a twinkle in his eye...

- One step up to the door.

- ..but the crimes he was alleged to have done

were some of the most serious in there.

- How you doing? - Alright.

- Can we come in?

- This is your place? - Yeah.

You said they accused you of murder,

- is that right? - Yeah. Triple murder.

- Triple murder? - Yeah.

- One of my homeboys just got killed.

Baby was 15 months old and they assassinated him.

They say it was a retaliation, so...

- You said one of your friends had a 15-month-old baby...

- Yeah, and he was assassinated.

..and he was shot and killed.

He got executed.

- Really? Why?

It was a drug war.

- Rivalry? - Yeah.

So the prosecution contends that

you and two accomplices went

and executed three of their boys?

- Yeah.

- In what sort of circumstances?

- Coming from court. - Right there,

in the plain...in plain day?

Yeah.

- Do they have a strong case against you?

I wasn't there, so I don't know.

- Do they have witnesses? - Yeah.

They say I was the trigger man.

- Do they? - Yeah.

- What do you say? - I wasn't there.

- Where were you? - I was home.

- Doing what? - Sleep.

- Sleep.

How long could they give you?

I'll face indefinitely.

Louis: I sensed something in Robert,

maybe because he was facing possible execution.

A sense of perspective on life inside the jail,

and crime generally.

- There's so many people in here

who are accused of shooting

and being involved in a gangster lifestyle.

- Yeah.

Why is that so...? Why is that going on so much?

Me personally, it's just, I've always been like a...

..like a slimeball person.

Like, I always be on some... like being a snake.

Because I was raised in a motherfucking squat.

Who I seen as my idols and my mentors was snakes,

and that's the only thing I knew growing up.

Me and you do something together

and it's time to bust out the money,

if I don't cross you out for your money,

I feel like you're going to do it to me.

So it's like my mentors was snakes.

- What about your parents?

My parents? My grandma... I was raised by my grandma.

You know, a grandma can't restrict too much things you do.

And my daddy wasn't around. My daddy was a street guy.

So any time he coming round,

I'm looking at the same shit I'm seeing from dudes

I look up to.

He come around in a nice car and smoking.

The only time he come around

when I be done did something wrong.

They'd call and he'd chastise me

and punch me in the face or whatever, and break me off.

Man, he gone, so I never see him until they call him, saying,

"You know what that motherfucker done did?

"Stole a car or some shit."

And that's when he come around.

So...I ain't never really had no parents like that.

No.

Louis: Afterwards, Robert Shaw's death penalty case was dropped,

but he was convicted on various other charges,

and he's now doing life at a prison in Florida.

It was an extraordinary place.

I mean, that was what I sort of learned

while I was there in a way.

The bigger point, though, was just the strangeness,

that a place like Miami Main Jail

could exist in 21st century America.

It just seemed a colossal failing of the system

to adequately supervise and provide for its inmates.

But what also struck me

was the waste and the human cost

of a lost generation deprived of opportunity,

subscribing to a dangerous street code

and living out their lives in captivity.

[thunder and rain]

It's no secret that the criminal justice system

disproportionately affects certain communities,

and in particular the Black community.

- Stop, police!

Louis: This is true in cities across America,

but especially in certain hot spots.

And one of these is Milwaukee, Wisconsin,

a city in the north. [woman cries]

Even in the American picture, Milwaukee is next level.

- Keep walking that way!

- Nobody cares! Just get out of here!

- Get that thing closed!

- There was a gas leak with a car that is smoking...

[kids laugh]

How old...? [gunshot]

- Fuck! Why would you shoot

with all these fucking people, man?

Louis: Parts of the city are overflowing with guns.

- Because we live where we live,

she's always right here, next to my bed.

This is what the police use.

- I'm just going to point that that way.

Louis: Any disagreement could lead to a fight

and the guns coming out,

and someone getting shot.

- Gunshot wound there.

Looks like they tried to put some pressure

on the neck there.

That's potentially ballistic damage.

That's likely ballistic damage as well.

[sirens wail]

- This was two years after Ferguson,

where Michael Brown was killed by the police,

and the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.

And then, two weeks before we're due

to fly to Milwaukee,

there's a police shooting and killing of a young man

called Sylville Smith.

And there'd been three nights of rioting.

- We're not supposed to do anything at all,

we're just supposed to sit there and take it.

Man, enough is enough, man.

For real. Enough is enough.

Louis: I'd seen a video of a man who turned out to be

Sylville's brother, Sedan.

So we reached out to him.

- How are you doing? - Louis.

- Are you Sedan? - Yeah.

- Louis. How're you doing? - I'm there.

- Tell me about what we've got here.

Is this a T-shirt with Sylville on it?

- This is one of the T-shirts with my little brother on it.

It says, "Rest Bro. We Got You 5ever".

People come every day

and put their own stuff on here.

- What was the story? What happened to Sylville?

- Basically, he was in a car

that was perceived to be suspicious

- by the police... - Mm-hm.

..which was their reason for stopping the car.

He allegedly got out the car and ran,

and the news said he allegedly pointed a gun.

- Pulled a gun? - Yeah.

But then, the autopsy report,

it shows he was shot in the back of his arm,

fleeing,

and he was also shot under his armpit,

- meaning his arms was up. - Mm.

Given the narrative you describe,

why do you think Sylville

wouldn't have dropped the gun?

- See, in that situation...

- And why did he run? Is the other question.

In that situation, being in situations

where you hear what the police do to Black men

in the community and carrying a gun, and having one,

the way he thought was fear.

So if I'm fearing something,

my first thing is to get away from that.

The officer who shot and killed Sylville

was himself African-American.

- Yes. - Yes.

Now, you could argue that it suggests that maybe

it wasn't at least a racist act.

- No. No, no, no, no, no.

It turned...

We don't turn it into what it's not, you feel me?

At the end of the day, it's not a race war.

You see them police, right here, right now?

It's them against us.

It's not a white-on-black, it's a BLUE-on-black.

Louis: The two or three square miles

we saw the police operating in

was the most incarcerated zip code in America.

So you had a community which was in chaos,

where any police force would have struggled.

- I've arrested people three times,

you know, from age 15 to 18 to 26.

We just had a guy that was killed yesterday

in our district, and I knew him personally.

Does it affect you at all?

You know, not to so sound cold or heartless, er,

you just deal with so many people that if...

if I cared about every single one that I dealt with,

I think I would go crazy.

- What's the story? Were you on the bike?

- Yes, we're going back to his place

and, er, we just got pulled over.

- Have you been stopped before?

- Oh, yeah. - For what?

For exactly this reason.

- Which is?

I fit their description.

- What are you filming? - I'm filming you.

Why did you pick Milwaukee to come film for?

'Cause, for a city its size,

it's got a high rate of homicides.

They got a high rate of police officers

killing the Black community.

I'm a community activist.

The police, they fail to protect our community.

That's why we wear our Black Lives Matter shirt,

'cause we do matter.

They don't care how our neighbourhood look.

Louis: It was a community in which

most of the dads were absent,

many of them through being incarcerated,

and a younger generation

growing up in fatherless families,

surrounded by grief.

- God does not deal in death, God deals in life!

[anguished cries]

- It's a homecoming. This is not no going away.

It's a homecoming.

You have been reborn.

- Amen.

Louis: Four years later, in Minneapolis,

George Floyd was killed by police.

This time, the whole world took notice.

Newsreader: Protesters are taking to the streets

across the country

for a second consecutive weekend.

Louis: Among those leading the demonstrations

in Milwaukee was Sedan,

the brother of Sylville Smith,

the young man who was killed by the police.

So in this recent round of protests

and demonstrations,

have you been encouraged by that?

How do you view that?

- George Floyd's death

sparked something in the community

that I've been trying to get them to see for,

you know, three and a half years.

Erm, it's more people on board,

it's different races.

It's people that are finally waking up and seeing that,

you know,

how can this not be police brutality?

How can this not be murder?

Do you see a real possibility of change now?

- Yes, I've been in communities

where I normally wouldn't even be able

to walk down the block,

erm, without the police being called on me

just for the colour of my skin, and, erm,

now I have people that are in those communities

that will work with me.

And if we can change Milwaukee, as in, you know,

being one of our nation's most segregated cities

to live in, then it should go as an act

to showing the world

that we all can change.

Louis: The global surge of support for Black Lives Matter

feels like a necessary correction

of something that's been in front of us, all of us.

An injustice that's finally beginning to be recognised.

People in prison,

or caught up in the system,

they aren't 'they',

they are potentially 'us'.

It was Max Weber who defined the state as "that institution

"which has the monopoly of legitimate force."

[siren wails]

It's built into the nature of authority

that they are allowed, in lawful circumstances,

to restrain you, to lock you up.

You can't be naive about that.

This is part of how order is maintained,

but it comes with an enormous burden of responsibility

to do it correctly.

It's an unenviable task, in a way.

It's impossible to do perfectly,

but it isn't impossible to do much better.

Captioned by Ai-Media ai-media.tv