Pooja Rangan: Hello and welcome to Unmaking the Prison Image, a three episode series exploring the role documentary can play in imagining a world without prisons. I’m your host, Pooja Rangan, and you’re listening to episode three Against the Carceral entertainment Complex. This episode includes references to the film predators, which examines cases of child sexual predation. We recognize that this topic may be difficult or distressing for some listeners. Please take care while listening and feel free to pause or step away at any time. I’m the author of several books on justice driven documentary, including mediations and the documentary Audit and co-author with filmmaker Brett Story of the forthcoming book, Why Look at Prisons? In this short series, I speak with filmmakers, scholars, and system impacted artists and organizers who are doing the hard, necessary work of shifting how we see and how we think about prisons. Together, we talk about the challenges and the possibilities of this work. From teaching abolition in the classroom to addressing sexual violence without reproducing more violence, to interrupting collaborations between the carceral state and entertainment media. I’m joined today by visual criminologist and legal scholar Michelle Brown, community organizer and policy advocate Vidal Guzman, and documentary filmmaker David Osit. I am so delighted that the three of you were able to join me, Michelle Vidal, David, for this conversation about the carceral entertainment complex. I’ve been really excited about bringing you all together first, because you all have such distinct vantages onto this topic. Michelle, from your work as a critical criminologist writing about media spectatorship and how that shapes the way people think about crime and punishment.

Pooja Rangan: Vidal from your policy advocacy work as a returning citizen campaigning to close Rikers and get incarcerated reality TV shows off the air. And David, as a documentary filmmaker who’s, you know, both working within and against the genre conventions of true crime. I’m a documentary scholar, and for the past several years, I’ve been quite concerned with the market dominance of true crime as one of the only genres of documentary that are being funded and commissioned and platformed today. And this concerns me for a few different reasons. You know, not only because of how documentary tropes and documentary talents are being used to expand the spectacle of crime and punishment, but also because the line between documentary and tabloid journalism and crime media is becoming harder to hold. And because of the shrinking space for other, more daring forms that challenge the hold that carceral frameworks have on our imagination. So yeah, I’m really eager to hear from you all about how you’re finding ways to inhabit that space, that opening limited as it is and where you’re facing resistance. So to start us off, maybe I could ask each of you to say something about how your own life and work has brought you face to face with what we’re calling the carceral entertainment complex, and also how you understand what that is and what it does.

Michelle Brown: I think my work began at the moment when mass incarceration was just being coined as a term and normalized in a particular way. And I entered that work both through the humanities and through criminology. I think a lot of that work took shape, uh, around both my own, um, background with family members who were also facing conditions that looked a lot like what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls that premature kind of exposure. Extra, uh, legal differentiation of populations where people are exposed to the conditions of incarceration and premature death. So my family, of course, was facing issues around addiction, around the threat of jail in prison, but also the possibilities of working, limited possibilities of working in those spaces as well. So a lot of contradictions were arising. There was also a fairly long history of a very punitive religious framework and a lot of religious harm in that background. I’m only just putting all of that together as somebody who my father’s family comes out of Cherokee Nation, uh, and my mother’s is, of course, carrying a settler colonial legacy. So really trying to think about the way in which what we’ve inherited as a space and a culture of punishment and a carceral state take shape in all of our lives. But that then did lead me to go doing work in my own graduate career in prisons, working with folks who were caught in prisons, their families, and their communities.

Michelle Brown: And most of my work comes out of that today. So I still continue a lot of that work here in Appalachia. And I continue to think about that last question about what exactly is this carceral entertainment complex? I view it as inseparable from the conditions of ordinary life in the US, which I think are just bound up with what it is to exist in a carceral ideology, a carceral framework, and to be caught in the structure of that. I’ve spent a lot of time really trying to think about the spectacle of crime and punishment, punishment in particular, and the the way in which we all, to a certain extent, engage in a kind of penal spectatorship around these issues. So what it is to, to look and see like police, cops, uh, guards in this culture and the way we really fuel through the funding flows that you just identified, kind of, uh, what a capitalist colonialist, uh, racialized framework that we live in extends itself to. I often think at the structural level of how we’re generating particular logics and ways of viewing, uh, around these things. So happy to talk more, but maybe stop there.

Vidal Guzman: I think for me, when I first came into this space, I’m formerly incarcerated. You know, storytelling was a very powerful tool in New York that was used to advocate to close Rikers. You know, they say that we live in a city with two tails, right? The rich and the poor. Um, and you know, that storytelling was the part that closed that gap and humanized people who were coming home from incarceration. Right. So my experience telling stories is so powerful because it led to policy. I was someone who watched, um, beyond Scared Straight when I was 15. So I remember that show being shown so much, people watching it, people in my neighborhood talking about it. And for me, years later, I started talking to a lot of directly impacted people internationally and on national level around how do they see incarcerated reality shows or true crime impact their work or, or their life? And, you know, I really just went down the rabbit hole and started learning about how much money these TV networks make, how the contracts are really ran up and hearing stories that are unbelievable. We already know that incarcerated people don’t have any worker’s rights. Right. You know, the 13th amendment for a punishment for a crime. People are slave to the state. We kind of knew that TV networks, being able to go into facilities record without paying them, without talking about what contracts they’re signing or what show they’re being featured on. And then on top of that, we learned from lawyers who represented people in Jailbirds, the reality show that was shown on Netflix. A lot of lawyers were saying, why is my client being shown on these spaces without our knowledge? What we started learning is that that also creates a ripple effect that, um, really impacted their, uh, on day cases that they go to court for. Um, and this is something that we, we kind of sat down and we said, you know what? We need to launch the Campaign because we felt that our work was a part of, if we believe, of ending mass incarceration, we need to be educating the community, empowering directly impacted people. So the AIRS campaign, it stands for abolishing incarcerated reality shows. So, um, that is a way to basically start at the beginning. And so, you know, our goal is to hold TV and production networks accountable when they’ve released carceral entertainment. That is derailing the movement. So we have a big base of directly impacted people, film writers that we deal with, organizations that signed to the campaign. Um, so it was just that end vision of understanding, like we know who we are, like our organization, America on Trial that’s working on reentry, working on policies. Um, because we know that, you know, what people are watching is what shapes people’s minds. And that’s the same thing for incarceration. I’ll say this is really just trying to educate the movement around why is this important, and why do we see this part of ending mass incarceration, and where do we see ourselves in that space?

David Osit: Thanks for having me. I my entry way into this space has absolutely come from my experience, uh, in documentary filmmaking. And I’ve been working in documentary filmmaking for about 15 years. I always hated true crime television, but could never figure out why, which basically became the genesis for my most recent film, which is a documentary called predators, which is about, um, the television show To Catch a Predator, which aired on television about 20 years ago as a segment on Dateline NBC in the United States in the 2000 that would set up hidden cameras in a sting house where men who were having online chats of a sexual nature with decoys pretending to be minors, would then show up to a house, meet the decoys, and then they would meet a journalist named Chris Hansen who would interview the men, then tell them that they were being filmed on national television. Then the men would be told they were free to go after a sort of brief, forced interview, and then they’d be arrested at gunpoint by law enforcement. This formula happened around 550 times over the course of three years and led to a basically a cottage industry that’s far more popular than the original show of imitators, which proliferate TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, social media to this day. And I was interested in dissecting what this show was, which led me down a fascinating rabbit hole of understanding so much more about true crime entertainment. So. So making a film about this television show really led me to understanding what true crime is.

David Osit: In some ways, I think my biggest takeaways were that it’s not beholden to journalism, but it hides behind the defenses that journalism has afforded, like the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Men’s faces were never blurred on the television show. There was never an expectation of privacy for any of these men, obviously, and Chris Hansen would not disclose his identity as a journalist to these men while interviewing them on camera. Uh, basically acting as an agent of law enforcement, despite the men not understanding that. And they would then be kind of speaking to him as though they thought he was a therapist or something. Uh, and this came up multiple times that these men were not read their Miranda rights or given their protections. But what it really was, is I think it was the birth of a law enforcement and journalism working together to create entertainment, which is the modern template for true crime in general. And it really is the antithesis of the notion that people can be more than their crimes. And it lubricates our societal inability to separate the crime from the offender, which I think has created far more damage in terms of public perception of criminality than almost anything in recent modern history. So I really learned so much more about that while making this film. And, and, uh, and among many other things. And I’m really happy to, to be talking with everyone here about that.

Pooja Rangan: I just want to like pick up on something that both Vidal and David mentioned, which is the way that this uncertain boundary between journalism and tabloid entertainment is something that is leveraged and exploited by, by these, by, by, I guess, like the larger universe of collaborations between law enforcement and entertainment media. And I think we’re talking about a few different things over here, which is, um, you know, the sting operations on the one hand. And then I think incarcerated reality TV shows are operating perhaps even in a, in a slightly different domain.

Vidal Guzman: I would kind of say in some way it feels like it is separated, but it’s not, you know, it makes it feel like it is. I think there are the same some of the same players there. You know, TV networks are always working to really push out these these these content or reality shows, their true crime. What even when we look at like “60 Days In” that was on A&E, you know, we learned about that a lot in, you know, people who were incarcerated and where the filming was done, they didn’t even know that they were being filmed. They, they will get they will tell them they will be filming happening, but they won’t actually know what exactly the filming is about. Right. And what that happens is, is it confuses people who are inside about, um, why, why they’re being recorded. Um, it confuses people, um, on what exactly they were trying to do. And we hear that so many times because, because incarcerated people, they, they knew like, okay, if these shows are being shown, like, am I going to be shown on it? What is it, you know, like, am I going to get paid for it? Right. And that’s one of the easiest way that we’ve seen “60 Days In” actually avoid paying people because they didn’t have to tell people what show they’re going to be on, right? And when these shows get released and they see themselves on these shows, they were like, wait a minute, they’re making all this money and I’m not, I’m not getting a dime from this. Right? And I think for us, when we look at incarcerated reality shows and true crime, we see them that they’re similar in the same, the same, some of the same players. Um, but it’s just a way that I kind of feel like true crime has been a little bit more aggressive in the way that they want to tell people’s stories. Right. Um, we hear of individuals who, um, uh, example of someone who was, uh, basically a production company came to see her and they told her like, hey, we want to tell you a story. And her say back was like, are you going to tell my story as a survivor of domestic violence? Or are you going to tell, well, how are you thinking about telling my story. And they told her, we’re going to tell your story in how the court says to to kind of tell your story. And she was like, no, I’m not doing it. And from there, it was like, well, we’re going to tell the story with you or without you. And that is just the the scariest thought to know that people can use your story, derail it. Um, and hearing also that, you know, parole hearings get impacted by these shows as well. Right. People get shown on these shows, they go to parole hearing and they’re like, well, we seen you on this show, how do we really believe that you changed? Right? They create this stigma and this already existing, um, struggle that someone is dealing with coming home. Right. Um, trying to say I’m changing my life and I want to do better and I’m prepared to be paroled to come home, but it’s just scary how, how, how loose these reality shows and these true crimes are, you know. Since 2000 there, I think right now we’re at like 200 carceral reality shows and that’s including true crime that are out. And it’s just scary how how easy they multiply and also understanding how easy it is to produce these shows. They’re so they’re cheap. They’re they cost 150 K to produce each episode. That’s what we learn from A&E. You know, when I worked with the sheriff, they paid them 60 K. And when it came to incarcerated people, as I said before, they paid them $0. So it tells us that there is a real risk. And it, it is scary to know that this is happening to people. Um, and while they want to use their story to change lives and, and change policy, when you got, you know, TV networks like this, um, being predators, right? I think that is a very important way to say it. Uh, it scares us.

Pooja Rangan: Could I ask one follow up question? You know, you’ve talked about how contracts are structured on some of these shows. Could you say a little bit more about that?

Vidal Guzman: Yeah. So when it comes to 60 Days In, they don’t actually, uh, give any contracts to incarcerated people to sign. Um, basically those contracts are signed by the sheriff or the warden. And between the TV network and the production network. Right. Um, but when it comes to Love After Lockup, because it’s a little bit different than 60 Days In it, Love After Lockup follow a family, one that’s incarcerated and one that’s outside. I would say like, um, very, very, um, they take advantage, right. Um, basically meaning when example, if someone has to go to the hospital or counseling, they want to hear those meetings, they want to hear what’s going on. Um, and if you go into the, any situation that is very private, they still want to hear that. And that is scary to know that you’re when you sign up for these shows, every single thing is being recorded. And we hear a lot of the times when, you know, when people join these shows, they’re they’re thinking in a good heart that they’re able to tell their story, hopefully encourage and teaches people how to help, you know, their, their family member return back to society. And it doesn’t happen like that. We hear stories of people telling us that, you know, I almost took my life because I, I started reading what people were saying about me and my family and, and that’s just scary to even know that these contracts that, that, you know, people who participate in Love After Lockup, they don’t even get additional investments in counseling, therapy after they’re done with these shows. And, and we know that these shows do create a ripple effect in their life. Um, so the contracts that we are seeing is scary. And it really just tells us that, you know, incarcerated people are free settings, free labor. Um, and we have to stop that.

Michelle Brown: I mean, I would just respond by saying that so much of what you’re talking about, Vidal, is this formula, right? We see coming out of the scared straight phenomenon of the 1970s forward, but there’s also this really long standing history of the way in which Hollywood has also been deeply implicated and complicit with law enforcement, the FBI, and different organizations across time, something my colleague Travis Linnman writes about. But beyond that, part of what I hear that’s so important is how deeply entrenched this has become and how much control, really narrative control, has really turned into the cop or the court or the prison. How, um, police control with narratives is, is part of the conventional format of any kind of media engagement right now. One of the things that I think is remarkable about what we see with kind of this carceral visual regime is the way in which deputization works that constantly we are deputizing filmmakers and all sorts of people, um, in spaces or family or therapists to really play this role that is the conventional kind of formula and critique. Uh, that’s that you’re talking about. So there’s a kind of impunity that folks operate with, um, around all of this because of how culturally, deeply it’s embedded, which then makes the story itself as a form, I think, interesting, like, I’m so deeply grateful that you’re doing the work to try and get stories out that are with the folks who actually experienced, uh, you know what it is to live in a carceral regime. And at the same time, the resistance to that by this kind of capitalist, uh, carceral formula. I see this in the work you did in Predators too David, where there’s just such a deep resistance to, um, even having access to the most basic needs, the most basic material needs, which often came out in those interviews,David, you would see in the aftermath where people are people are actually with the police, uh, doing their interrogations, and, you know, the plea for therapy, the plea for support comes really through in this kind of confessional space. But there’s a way in which that’s so quickly, I think, ramped down in these other spaces where everybody’s doing the work of deputization. So the struggle to get these stories out is just something I’m greatly appreciative of.

Pooja Rangan: Michelle, I had been hoping to ask you to just say a little bit about the history of your work. You know, I mean, like you’ve done tremendous work on, on just the prehistory of how we got to this point of. And one of the anthologies you’ve published is on how crime and criminality are visualized in popular culture. And one of the anthology described these shows as crimesploitation. It would be amazing to just hear you say a little bit about the history of shows like To Catch a Predator and, um, and 60 Days In because there’s, there’s a longer tail over here.

Michelle Brown: Yeah. So I think it’s gone through various iterations and various names that have been attached to it, most of which were not my terms, uh, as these things go, but, uh, I’ve done a lot of work initially around punishment and culture, which I think is where primarily my work’s been anchored. So I became pretty active in a sub area that came to be known as visual criminology, which really is dedicated to looking at kind of the the power and ascendancy of crime and punishment as spectacle. Uh, so really trying to look at how power is configured through crime and punishment. Um, and, uh, kind of the, the proliferation of those forms. So the, you know, the rapidness within which we all exist in this mediascape and how so much of it is anchored, as we’ve talked about today, and something like true crime or the cop caught in the cage. What crimes does this is I usually pull this from work by, uh, yeah. Uh, Paul Kaplan and Daniel LaChance, who, uh, have a great book on it, but are really trying to use it to talk about the ways in which, of course, a crime and exploitation merge. Uh, and most of that’s through kind of a true crime formula that we could consider low brow culture, but also high culture and prestige. I mean, we could think about it in terms of both, you know, prestige TV and the documentary form Pooja. I think you’ve troubled that form in so many ways, but also continue to try and, and think about ways we can use it, um, and kind of salvage it from the ways it has been used in the work that you all are doing to David and Vidal. But, um, crimesploitation tends to have kind of, I think, a lot of common features.

Michelle Brown: It is an individualized framework that’s largely looking through the lenses of guilt or innocence. It has that, I think, to use your term, David, that “why bother” sensibility to it. So generally it’s, it’s framing, uh, guilt in a way so as to largely leave that to dispossession or disappearance. Right. It’s not really interested in any kind of if it is interested in redemption, it’s through a very specific kind of formula. Um, there can be a certain amount of interest in stories around innocence, but mostly stories around monstrousness. Uh, and that is all kind of anchored in, um, the dehumanization of, of humans and the complexity of harm and violence, so it takes us away from the things that might actually help us get at the root causes or the root conditions that are driving violence. So I do think, not to get too abstract, it’s really anchored, especially in a kind of neoliberal framework, um, that really seeks to responsibilize as individuals, uh, and, um, move away from any kind of like we’ve been talking about any kind of institutional accountability or social accountability in all of this. So, um, it’s a fairly tried and true logic that really operates to around a catharsis or affective registers. So it is very much about asking us to feel, inviting us to feel, Um, and that sense of feeling is always framed usually around the voyeuristic. Um, so it’s, it’s a space that’s kind of dedicated to building entertainment around human suffering. So I think that’s kind of the legacy out of which a lot of my work comes. But just to slightly shift it, I’ve been kind of committed to not just naming, um, you know, the, uh, the incredibly damaging ways the carceral state’s affected us, but also the ways out.

David Osit: Yeah. That’s interesting that you say that because I was thinking a lot about, obviously the perspective I was taking with making Predators. And what enthralled me most was thinking about what people get out of true crime. Why have we enabled true crime, uh, entertainment, to be as successful as it is? Which was something that wasn’t the case as much 30, 40 years ago. And, um, I think that if you had a, you know, an x, y axis of, you know, uh, the, the, the volatility of a, of a country’s social floor and the ascent of true crime entertainment, you’d see a sort of related, uh, proportion in that, you know, we, we do have police as our societal caretakers in the United States. That’s the only type of caretaking we really enable. And that’s true in a lot of Western countries, even in countries that purport to have higher standards of social welfare than the United States. Um, so policing becomes this means of societal support and true crime shows are kind of all reifications of, of that concept of, of policing. And you even see that in the ascent of things like honestly, like things like QAnon, which was essentially a true crime story that was born on, on message boards. Uh, it’s, it’s a cousin of true crime and that it’s this faith in a police state, but a frustration with the lack of the police state’s efficacy and power and a desire for more of that. And what really helped me understand that was the rise of sort of citizen journalism and the fact that now true crime shows are on our own phones and, and, and people can can conduct their own investigations in the sense that sort of fandom of police sleuthing and, uh, being involved with the community-oriented search. Search for justice has now led normal civilians to feel as though they’re imbued with as much authority as policing. And I think that’s that’s where we, I think, um, have have seen sort of our modern crisis of true crime taking as much power over our entertainment as it has.

Pooja Rangan: David, I want to pick up on what you just said, the way that all of these social functions that should be disaggregated are living in this one institution of police and law enforcement. And, and perhaps there’s a relationship between that and the way that these spaces of, of entertainment journalism and of independent investigation, which I think of as the domain of documentary, right? The way that all of those boundaries are being blurred. I have a sense that in predators, you, you really want to think about the space that documentary occupies that is distinct from something like, you know, the To Catch a Predator style crimesploitation. There’s a couple of moments in the film, and Michelle already mentioned your, you know, the way that you dwell in the raw footage of that that’s being filmed in these sting operations, which of course, you know, to connect to what Vidal was saying earlier, these are people who don’t know that they are being filmed. So again, there is like a profound ethical breach or trespass happening here, which is being justified by the assumption that these are people who have done or are about to do something so bad that they deserve no inclusion within some kind of concept of humanity. So anything that can be done to them is okay. And I think some similar assumptions are operative in the incarcerated reality TV shows as well. But there’s something very interesting in what you do with those scenes, and I wonder if you could say a little bit about them, and then perhaps we could even go to and watch a scene from the film and think about it together.

David Osit: Absolutely. Yeah. I can speak to basically what the origin of of the project was, which would answer this question, which is that I remembered watching To Catch a Predator. I had never thought to myself, I’d like to go out and make a documentary about that show. I even at some point learned about why it was ultimately canceled, which is that assistant district attorney in a wealthy Dallas suburb who was embroiled in one of the conversations that the show would host with decoys. And the police and camera crew showed up to his house and ultimately took his own life. And the show was, was, was canceled shortly after that. And for me, I remember even still thinking, well, well, I don’t know what a documentary about that story would be other than basically yet another salacious true crime narrative that’s asking us to point fingers at something that happened. And to what end is kind of the question I’m always trying to ask myself as a filmmaker, what is the goal of peeling back layers of an onion except to cry is is kind of how I think about it sometimes. But then what what changed things for me was finding the online fandom communities for To Catch a Predator, which for two decades have been collecting raw footage from the show and watching a 75 minute long interrogation video of one of these men from a single mounted camera versus the three minute edited version of these men’s, uh, gotcha moment was a profound experience for me as a person and as a filmmaker.

David Osit: I wasn’t coming from a place of feeling tremendous sympathy for these men prior to, uh, the, uh, prior to, to watching this raw footage. And just to qualify that for a moment, I’m personally of the mindset that you can be sympathetic for someone without exonerating a crime. And I think that’s a really fundamental wall that a lot of audiences of both To Catch a Predator and my film predators have hit up against, is that we live in a society where we’ve decided that we cannot feel sympathy for people who commit crimes, that someone is reduced to the worst thing they’ve ever done, and that defines their lack of humanity or their humanity. So I’d watch this raw footage and find myself seeing a human at the other end of what I was looking at, which, and the show was basically designed to reduce humanity to, to an infinitesimal or a nonexistent degree. These men are a formula on the television show to Catch a Predator. They they rinse and repeat. They have the same responses. They’re cut together as though. It’s a sort of dark comedy of of errors of these men showing up, and you’re laughing at the fact that they are saying the same thing over and over again. It’s that repetition creates the humor, the uncomfort of the moment where they realize their life is over is played for a laugh, basically. But it’s also played straight with a journalist who’s ostensibly there to understand. Is this the thing that he would say in his interviews to help me understand why why you’re here? But if the show is not built around the concept of understanding, it’s built around the concept of watching these men’s experience of crumbling on, on, on TV and their life ending on television.

David Osit: So watching the raw footage, you get to see a completely different journey. And it was staggering to me because I felt myself having an emotional experience watching the unedited material, but having no emotional experience watching the edited material. And as a filmmaker, that’s an interesting thought because we typically think of storytelling as the provenance of an authorship, right? And this is actually the story was, was was erased. Uh, in true crime, the story is erased except for perhaps a story of victimhood, um, perhaps a story of good or a story of evil. We have biblical words to describe true crime because that’s in essence, to kind of paraphrase Vidal, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s the original story, right? Is, is the idea of good versus evil. And that is, I think what sells the concept of true crime so effectively to audiences is that you’re seeing what’s supposed to happen, happen. And it’s not only that, but it’s, it’s built within a model where we have decided that our stability as a society is built around the incarceration system and built around men and women being put away out of sight, deviant behavior, being punished. And, um, and so, so that’s, I mean, that’s really what the origin of the film was for me.

Pooja Rangan: Would it be okay if we go and look at a scene from the film. I can just show you a scene of where we witnessed the raw footage, and then I’m going to skip to a moment where we see it edited together.

Man in documentary: Are you a counselor too, or?

KBI Agent in documentary: No, I’m. I’m an agent. I’m with the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation.

Man in documentary: Okay. I saw it. Okay.

KBI Agent in documentary: So you are under arrest. You understand that?

Man in documentary: Oh, yeah. Definitely. Okay.

David Osit in documentary: So this is this is raw footage from the show, from the interrogation rooms after Chris would do the arrests.

Academic in documentary: Okay. Well, it’s never aired.

David Osit in documentary: Some did, but not in raw form like this.

Academic in documentary: Okay.

David Osit in documentary: But this is what I find interesting for me. Watching the raw footage gives me a very different feeling than the broadcasted episodes.

Man 2 in documentary: Can I talk to you off camera?

Chris Hansen: I can’t do that. I’m sorry.

Man 2 in documentary: Do you guys have any help for me?

Chris Hansen: There are a number of ways to get help, and we’re going to get into that in the story.

Man 2 in documentary: I mean, my insurance covers therapy and that’s obviously what I need for obviously more than this issue. But another number of things if I. Even if it was something you, I just don’t I don’t want this to ruin the rest of my life. I’m sorry, Mr. Hansen. I’m sorry, all you guys. I’m sorry if this doesn’t. I’m sorry.

Academic in documentary: To show these men as human beings. The show kind of breaks down. Maybe that’s why I didn’t make it on TV. Yes, he’s maybe done and said awful things, but it shows some humanity that’s hard to ignore.

KBI Agent in documentary: John W Elliott. A lot of Elliott’s where I grew up.

Man in documentary: Where’d you grow up?

KBI Agent in documentary: Grew up in Bell County. You know where that is?

Man in documentary: Sorry, I don’t.

KBI Agent in documentary: You don’t know where Bell County is? I thought everybody knew where Bell.

Greg Stumbo former Attorney Genral of Kentucky: It’s where the Cumberland Gap is.

Man in documentary: It sounds pretty.

KBI Agent in documentary: It is. It’s nice. Maybe you can go there sometime. Got a PGA tour golf course.

Man in documentary: Sorry.

KBI Agent in documentary: Yeah. All right. Yep. And you’ve been through a lot.

Man in documentary: No, I don’t I don’t deserve any remorse.

KBI Agent in documentary: I don’t you know what, John? I know you’re going to live through this.

Man in documentary: All right. I don’t like it when anybody sees me like this. I’m just embarrassed.

Greg Stumbo former Attorney Genral of Kentucky: This is not typical of a criminal interrogation. This individual, you know, if he serves his time, if he goes through some sort of rehabilitative process, maybe he won’t do it again. Maybe he can come back and and and become a productive member of society. Um. But he needs to be punished for his crime.

Michelle Brown: Uh, and can you remind me, David, who is the individual who’s watching the interrogation?

David Osit: The person watching in this clip is, uh, a man named Greg Stumbo, who was the attorney general of Kentucky at the time of the production of the episode. And he authorized these things.

Pooja Rangan: And this is a moment when you see the trailer that has been edited together, uh, with material, but not this particular material, but material like it.

Man 3 in documentary: It’s a nice house.

Decoy adult in documentary: Thank you.

Trailer narrator: Nice house. And guess who’s home?

Chris Hansen: Don’t you have a seat right there, please get ready.

Trailer narrator: Here come the cops.

Cops in documentary: Pull over! Get on the ground now! I guess.

Man 4 in documentary: I’m under arrest.Huh?

Cops in documentary: Do you think?

Trailer narrator 2: Also tonight. Something that has never happened before. Police move in on a surprising suspect. And there are deadly consequences.

Interview in documentary: We all knew who he was.

Trailer narrator: Nobody anticipated the kind of outcome that resulted.

News anchor in documentary: And I talked to Dateline’s Chris Hansen about this tragic turn of events.

Vidal Guzman: Can I say something?

Pooja Rangan: Yeah, absolutely.

Vidal Guzman: I feel like the Catching the Predator theme is still out there, right? Like I see that. Um, because I’m always on TikTok because a lot of, you know, individuals, uh, use their voices, um, especially a lot of directly impacted people use their voices to talk about the experience of being incarcerated. And I bumped into some content creator creating this same, this same catch a predator, uh, mindset. And it just tells me like, just because the show has, you know, left the air doesn’t mean it hasn’t not left the community that have been watching these shows. It’s just a scary moment for me to watch this. And as you said, like people are humans before they do a crime, right? Like people are, are we all in some way make mistakes? You know, we all in some way, um, you know, maybe in high school we smoked some a little bit marijuana or something like that. When in certain state, the law, uh, restricts us from having marijuana on us. You get what I’m saying? It’s just like this moment of like, it’s somebody. At the back end, you’re the worst of the worst without actually knowing who they are first. It just scares me, right? Because even for me, being formerly incarcerated every single day, I feel like I’ve been home 11 years. I’m 34 years old. Every single day I feel like I’m still, uh, am I doing things right? How do people look at me being formally incarcerated, even in relationships, right? Like, how does you know this person that I’m dating? How do they think about me and who I am? Right. So it just scares me. Uh, that redemption, where is that at? Right? And it’s scary because even me seeing like one thing that I said to you, David, that seeing these TikTok people doing the same thing as catch a Predator, but then they start beating up the person and. And when I seen that, it scares me to let us know that our society is moving in this thinking.

David Osit: No, absolutely. I agree with you. And then, you know, the film goes on to follow some of these sort of modern day copycats, I call them who, who have been inspired by To Catch a Predator, um, very directly in some cases, and some are doing it differently, but the formula remains the same, which is that police neither condemn nor condone what the activities of basically the sort of vigilante predator hunters are doing. Because again, it’s born out of this concept of, you know, well, the police aren’t able to, quote unquote, do this enough. So why don’t we take justice into our own hands and a sort of subhuman attribution to the context of this particular type of crime. And just to speak on that for a moment, you know, let’s take this example of this crime, in particular online sexual solicitation of someone believed by the offender to be a minor. Right? So in the case of child predation, 90 to 95% of predators are already known to the victim. The vast majority of these crimes are from family members, school people, people who are already known. The vast minority are people online. Um. Plus, predation is even less likely to be reported when it’s someone known to the victim. So we’re probably talking in a skewed number in the first place. So TV shows though, like To Catch a Predator and these online sort of gotcha catching to catch, like catching predator situations that we’re talking about on TikTok. They’re waiting the issue towards the one that’s actually harder to solve, ironically, than the one that requires us to look into our family units, that requires us to look into our communities and the one that requires us to increase mental health services for our society.

David Osit: Right? The the New York Coalition for Women Prisoners did a 2009 study. They found that 82% of women in prison in New York State were abused as children. And a study like that’s never been commissioned for the male population of any prison in the United States. But as a result of that study, ten years later, we have the Domestic Survivors Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act. Right. Which is saying and that applies to men as well, which is saying you can issue lower sentences to domestic violence survivors if abuse significantly contributed to their offense. So we have literally something baked into our laws in New York State now, just six years ago, that saying, we want to look at why people are incarcerated, which is things like this can at least attempt to build empathy and, and, and understanding and humanity into how we treat our prison population. And what I can’t help but think is that that can slowly start to infiltrate how we understand criminality to take place, right? And empathy should be offered based on who we are based not on. Not based on what someone. Let me say that again. Empathy shouldn’t be offered based on who someone is. It should be offered based on who we are, based on what our society is built on. And, and I think that’s what shows and content like To Catch a Predator and modern day iterations of it will never be able to succeed at doing.

Michelle Brown: Like this really has me thinking. And I think one of the things about the film, David, that I really walked away from it thinking about was just because of the way you film it. We can see the layers of mediation, you know, and just how many cameras are in a room at any one time, and how many different vantage points and different intentions, um, or in the space. And, you know, I think that really matters in terms of thinking about some of the questions we’re asking here about the clip. I’m struck, Vidal, when you say every single day. I have to ask, how do people look at me? I think that’s incredibly revelatory of that same kind of layering and how it’s structured and or baked in, and that that layering necessarily creates a space, another kind of culture where we gather around these scenes, the scene of the crime. Um, and I think the kind of watching that’s being generated out of that, like my children don’t watch anything directly. They watch it while other people are watching it. Right? So they’re watching influencers do this work of interpretation. So there’s all these meta layers. I think that’s important because it gets back to, to the fact that the carceral space is also a surveillance space and that we’re chronically caught in these, these spaces of looking with very few vantage points that can interrupt it. And I think, you know, Vidal and David are both doing work to try to do that in that space, though, one of the things that happens is it’s just so hard to reveal the complexity of the human, uh, and to try and talk about how and why we commit harm, or what attractions to violence look like, or how those conditions might be addressed.

Michelle Brown: And I think you say something really important, David, when you say folks are not necessarily interested in those questions about how to move in and think about those things, which are the, the things that will absolutely make us safer, the things that will actually generate a meaningful form of accountability. Whereas the accountability we’re given always looks like humiliation or looks like, um, you know, a very closed prison door so that we don’t have to think about it anymore. I constantly think about, well, what would it look like to generate all the scenes ever created when a person was put in the cuffs at the end of a show and just to ask, what else could we do? Like what? What would it look like in this moment to do anything else? And I think there’s a question there, too, for me at least about the story as a form and the work it can do and the limits of the work that it can do, because it’s an individualized framework. And so part of me is always like I do. I do think generating empathy is obviously something we do. I really believe also in generating solidarity. So the idea that we’re actually using, um, the visual languages, the imaginative capacities that we have to really generate something else out that will let us stay in that space of complexity and connect. You know, because I think it’s going to take that kind of work to actually make a political demand that can shift this. I’ll stop there. But that’s where you have me thinking.

Pooja Rangan: Yeah. Um, I just want to say in response to those two clips, there’s, I mean, I’ll just describe something that’s happening there in a very basic way, which is that there is a moment where, um, where the ban is, is speaking with someone who he believes to be a counselor. At the beginning of the clip, he asks, are you, are you a counselor? And she says, no, I’m a police officer. And then later on, when we come back to it, she says to him, you will you will get through this. You know, this is not the end of your life. And there’s something greatly contrasting between the both, the pacing of that and yeah, the capacity of these two people to interact outside of the institutional positions that they have been positioned into. I mean, we’re watching them all through a surveillance camera. So, you know, what is possible in this sphere of life, shot through a surveillance camera is already so limited. So I don’t want to frame this as being some kind of opening for us. But but it is so it is so highly distinct from the edited footage that we see, which is, you know, made to seem thrilling where, where there’s already a kind of fictional scenario that is informing how we’re even watching this thing be carried out. People are waiting for someone outside to come outside, and then they pounce on him. And it’s made to seem thrilling and even humorous. And I just I just want to kind of pause and say, it seems like by contrasting these two things, David, you’re asking us what can be gained by holding documentary, maybe like as a practice, as an orientation to the world, to a different standard in terms of like duty of care, but also a different social horizon than legal justice. Um, and in this case, I mean, we’re, there’s something extra legal happening here in the form of vigilante justice, which is being brokered by Chris Hanson.

David Osit: Well, you bring up a really interesting point, Pooja. And basically you kind of describe where, where the film goes after this, which is that in many ways, I, I feel like being involved in the very documentation of this, uh, of this type of entertainment in a certain way fosters my own complicity in it as a documentary filmmaker. And, uh, you know, I, as a, as a filmmaker, I’m, I’m, for example, following one of the modern day predator hunters on a, on a sting filming, uh, what he’s doing. And at a certain point, I realized that if I kind of look out and looked at what was happening with an outside eye, I’d have to really squint to understand the difference between what my camera was doing there and what his camera was doing there. At a certain point, I’m also offering a spectacle to an audience by virtue of my own presence as a filmmaker, and the uncomfortable truth that a lot of documentarians probably won’t want to admit is that we’re all part of these cycles of, of documentation and, and fostering pain as entertainment and for keeping us unable to heal based on, uh, sort of the, the entertainment that we’re delivering to people. And it’s uncomfortable to call it entertainment, obviously. Um, and I’d like to think that an audience for a film I’m making is different than an audience that’s interested in punishment, but the film kind of goes on to engage with some of those very same themes where I ultimately interview Chris Hansen, and I think an audience is looking for answers at that point, and perhaps even looking for a confrontation at that point.

David Osit: The challenge is that I think documentaries, as well as true crime entertainment, is, uh, something that turns people into good and evil. Uh, it is sort of the nature of the beast. Even progressive documentaries, uh, with left wing or socially minded agendas are oftentimes oriented around a desire to have an audience leave the cinema just being angry and unified. And to paraphrase you, Michel, if the only thing we are is unified in anger about something because it basically can remove our own culpability. Uh, and, and, and well, it can, it can let us avoid interrogating our own culpability, I should say. And I feel like that’s a really important element of the work that we do as documentarians as well is, um, that, uh, you know, there’s, there’s something more honest and true than the typical arc of crime and punishment. And there’s something more honest and true than the fact that I’m the benevolent documentary filmmaker who’s asking you to consider something and that I’m not a part of that cycle either.

Michelle Brown: I, I’m thinking with you there, David. And I think one of the things that’s really important about what you’re saying and is, is worth naming is just how incredibly difficult it is to interrupt the terms we’ve been given, uh, or to, you know, shift something when ideologically that is the structure we exist within. So I think we also exist in a moment where everything is directed at exhausting our political imagination. Um, I think Angela Davis, a lot of folks have talked about like, it is really, really hard to imagine beyond the prison. And, um, but, but I also think like being as experimental and as messy, which necessarily sometimes involves complicity. I think the, the, the distance between a non-reformist reform, which abolitionists would point to, um, and reform or that liberal perspective, um, even when we’re really trying to work at the limits of abolition and be and push this as far as we can, we often feel that tug pulling us back necessarily into, um, the kinds of conventions. And there’s just something so specific about the cultural fascination and Commitment. The desire in some ways for a kind of violence which allows for police violence workers to really be entitled to carry that, um, is, is really it’s tough. I just wanted to name that.

Vidal Guzman: I was stuck in, in the amazingness of that, of what David said. And Michelle said, I, I think it’s just important just to see how much it takes us to kind of think outside the box. Right. I think, you know, I’m a student of abolition. I think that ribbon was pulled a lot when I did a lot of work around the closed Rikers campaign, where, you know, when you’re trying to shrink a system, but then you have other abolitionists say, we need to just not do anything at all. Just, you know, like, let’s just close Rikers and release people. And, and remanding is a real thing. And for the Ayers campaign, we really are like always in that trying to reform some issues to abolishing other other type of. Thinking like 60 days in. We look at that show like we need to abolish it because it’s really not, uh, it’s really not going to tell us why in this particular season, your example, you’re in Chicago and in a facility. Why, what is going on there? What, what fixing can you do? Um, and how do you actually change, uh, the situations that people are, they’re dealing with, right? So, you know, we, we, we have the ears documentary that we’ve been showing around and it features, uh, lucky Chucky, who was on 60 days in and he told me most of the time, like, you know, I advocated, I have to advocate outside of the facility.

Vidal Guzman: I had to call my own people and, uh, like, you know, elected officials and organizations, uh, started to know that this, this show was being filmed. And they were like, well, what changes are you actually making? Right? Because you’re not separating people who have mental health problems. You’re also not even letting people have razors to at least cut their, you know, to be able to take care of themselves. So it took, you know, him and other advocates being vocal and say, yo, we need to fix some of the issues that’s happening right now. And that was like super powerful because it humanized people. Right. Um, but then for us, we also saying these shows are truly harmful and there hasn’t been any type of solution or nothing has been solved while 60 days has been shown or, um, what we have learned is that, you know, these, uh, sheriff operate as micro celebrities. They control the narrative of what exactly is coming in and going out mostly. Um, and basically meaning that they can cut certain scenes that will align to what they want viewers like us to see. Right. And one of the things that we started seeing on 60 days in where they started to use ratings fighting as ratings, right? Like we heard of stories of an individual, um, telling the production company from 60 days in, um, lucky eight say, hey, lucky, you know, I cannot be in the same area as this individual because we’re going to get in a fight.

Vidal Guzman: And what they did was actually get them in the same space so they can create a fight scene. And that was the scariest moment that we’re like, wait a minute. These these shows need to be abolished. I need to scratch this off, go back into the writing rooms. And it’s not just getting black and brown individuals in these spaces, getting formerly incarcerated individuals to give their thoughts around how this show is going to impact not just them, but the movement overall, right? So for us, we really are always, you know, as a student of abolition, I understand the importance of reforming and also the importance of abolition being an organizing tool. Um, and I think there it’s just, it’s really hard to, to kind of see 60 days trying to come out with another season knowing how much pressure has been done. Example, the sheriff from season one actually got locked up, right? Because they found out that he was abusing his power and was selling the keys to the woman, uh, facility. Um, and they were getting harmed, right. And to hear that is, is like, wait a minute, you, you can be on a show and say you want to hold, you know, incarcerated people accountable and control the narrative, but then you’re creating the harm as well. So it got us to really think about like, what exactly is going on here and how much power do these sheriffs have actually have? And we even learned about some of these sheriffs using these shows to, um, get more further in their careers, right.

Vidal Guzman: With running for different offices and stuff like that. Example in Indiana, when they did a season of 60 Days In, they talked about how the facility was crumbling and that we. We needed a new facility. That narrative actually pushed elected officials when they were creating the, um, the women’s, uh, basketball, you know, they created the facilities for them that also came with a new facility for Indiana, uh, where the 60 days, uh, filmed that. So it just tells you how a ripple effect can happen when these shows are filmed, how do you make changes and make sure these guys are getting programs that are needed, investments that are have them think outside the box, not, you know, yeah, that is a step to humanizing people saying they can stay out there, sell more longer. But what is more to that, right? Because resources are essential. And the job of the Department of Correction is to serve the public and also serve the incarcerated population. And if that is the job, that means that their job is to make sure that the programs that are getting into these facilities are fully preparing their population to come home and never come back. Not that’s not what happens.

David Osit: I didn’t know that there were shows like this. So I’m just kind of like sitting wide mouthed as Vidal is talking about some of these shows, again, not believing that they can even exist. It’s wild to me. But something that he said made me think of, um, you know, the sheriffs and running for elections and, and, you know, and it’s sex crimes. Things are like a, a incredible way for, uh, local sheriff’s offices to increase popularity among their constituency. Because again, I, and I think I need not say any more than the name Jeffrey Epstein to kind of point at how we can see that these are the ultimate evil crimes, right? As far as the population is, is concerned. And, um, and it’s, and it’s extraordinarily popular to act on, uh, in training people for this crime. There’s a major disconnect that’s not discussed, uh, or present at all in any of these shows, which is just the, even just the nature and the disclosure of how some of them are made and to what ends and by what means would make a huge difference in helping people understand that there’s someone benefiting from this that is not simply society.

Pooja Rangan: Thank you for that, David. Yeah, we just did. One of our previous conversations was about the extent to which, um, you know, the testimony of survivors of sexual violence is leveraged politically to purchase sanction for worse and worse sentencing for violent and sexual offenders, and essentially to grow the carceral state. And my friend and collaborator Brett Story, is written about how the feeling of catharsis is sold to us as a substitute for any kind of meaningful change or anything resembling actual justice. I just want to hold that on one hand, and maybe we can come back to that at some point. But but I wanted to ask Vidal, you know, because you’ve been working on the Close Rikers campaign and because you just spoke about reform and abolition. Vidal, like how you feel about Stanley Richards’s appointment as commissioner of New York’s Department of Corrections, because this is the first formerly incarcerated commissioner that New York has.

Vidal Guzman: Yeah. I am a fan of Stanley. I’ve been in the work with Stanley for a while. Um, we still have to hold them accountable. I think that is a very important part to, um, understanding that there is someone who has experienced, um, mass incarceration. When I was organizing, I used to be in front of Gracie Mansion. That’s where our mayor lives. Watching to see where he’s going to go. Like literally, our organizing was very important to us and to that to see Stanley there, that was a lot of organizing and a lot of storytelling. Um, and as I said before closing that, that, that gap between our, our, um, as, as our, the tale of two cities. Right? So it is to see him there. It was a domino effect that happened, um, that he got that position because it was so many people advocating, so many people wanting to see a different way of how our city look at mass incarceration and hopefully right now continue to really invest in and things that are not being invested in. Um, so yeah, I’m happy he’s in that position. That’s a game changer. Um, hopefully that creates also a domino effect around the country to get, um, formerly incarcerated people in these positions. Um, because they understand how to talk to incarcerated people. They also to it becomes a little bit of importance for people who are incarcerated. Seeing somebody, uh, who was also was incarcerated, seeing them in that position of power, it changes their mindset and saying, wait a minute. Whoa, you know, it hopefully it gets them to, to think about themselves and come home and say, I can do that as well. Maybe I’ll run for president, you know? So yeah.

Pooja Rangan: Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, I was thinking about, um, the figure of Stanley Richards because in some way, I think there’s something resembling his position of infiltrating this system in your position, David, when I watched this film, I think of you occupying a kind of position of an infiltrator in some sense, because you’re, you’re kind of you’re you’re you’re in some uncomfortable locations with regard to true crime, with regard to documentary, with regard to Chris Hanson. And, um, and I can see you having to negotiate with that, with the access that you’re getting in order to, to document and say something about it. And I’ve been thinking about this in relation to your work. Vidal um, on, on the arts campaign, I’ve been thinking a lot about carceral access and issue because carceral facilities are incredibly secretive and closed to public scrutiny and, um, and then, you know, and so on the one hand, this is, this is, this is a real issue for those of us who want accountability and transparency, but then access to film inside is often brokered on the promise that what is revealed happens on the terms of the wardens or the prison administrators. And so this is, you know, a situation in which anything that is shown from inside is just incredibly compromised to begin with. And, um, so yeah, I’m just curious also about how you, you all think about access and, and compromise.

David Osit: Yeah. It’s interesting. I felt like I had to set some some rules for myself at the outset of filmmaking, which I think I would do for any movie, but for this one in particular, I had two really important rules, which is one, uh, I’m not going to tell you who’s good and bad in this movie. Was, was, was a really important rule for me. Um, I’m not going to, um, I’m maybe I’ll give people enough rope on their own, but I’m not going to go out and try to interview somebody. And with the mindset that this is a person who I disagree with, every time I would interview anybody, any time I would speak to anybody in the film. And the reason that I was able to get access to all the people I filmed who were part of the show or critical of the show or, or fans of the show, was that I was genuinely interested in people’s interests and motivations. And ironically, I guess you could say I was asking the same questions as the original To Catch a Predator. Why are you here? What makes you do this? What makes you think this way but with a genuine interest to understand why. And I think that people can appreciate and understand and feel seen. When I think people can have a good read at radar for for genuine curiosity, I think, you know, you can always lie to somebody, but I think people can tell when you’re actually interested in them.

David Osit: It’s a hard thing to fake. And, uh, and I think for me, that kind of work is absolutely vital when it comes to this type of work, and especially when it comes to, um, fostering more of a dialogue with people who, uh, would, would, would instinctually turn off when posed with the idea that, uh, incarceration is not a binary of bad people in jail, good people out of jail. I think the biggest obstacle I feel we have, and I felt this way while releasing predators was the the slew of of comments kind of heading towards me in either my inbox or in various message boards or, or so on of people accusing me of, of being evil, for attempting to humanize people who, as far as they were concerned, why bother? Like that was the prevailing sentiment, which I can you can see on any message board whenever you look at stuff of people talking about my film. Uh, on a sort of mass cultural level, I, I noticed a huge difference between releasing my film at film festivals in the United States and having reviews in the New York Times and The New Yorker and our sort of popular culture landscape where people are asked to look at the film versus a television going audience watching the film on Paramount Plus, expecting to see a true crime documentary with all of its flattening of of binaries. Right. And, and seeing a film that’s actually quite difficult and challenging in some ways, or at least is inviting you to even be frustrated at what I’m doing.

David Osit: Uh, which was a hard decision to make as a filmmaker, but there’s times when I’m asking you to be mad at me and maybe question what I’m doing in my morality. And it’s, it’s, you know, it is maybe one of the more fundamental questions that we have to reckon with in this landscape is that there are people who, why even bother attempting to, um, there are people who, who don’t want to even engage with the idea of trying to think about restorative justice or, or how to, um, kind of systematically end some of these crises that plague our populations. Uh, because why bother extending that level of grace to quote unquote, bad people when we have and this is my opinion, when we have a society of people who aren’t themselves getting the social and mental health services that we need, I really think that this comes from a scarcity mentality that people have on the outside, people feeling like, well, we’re not getting taken care of by our society. We can’t pay our bills. We can’t, you know, feel good about the world we’re living in. We feel like the world’s dangerous. Why should they get a better life than I do? And that, of course, is is capitalism’s fault in certain ways. Right? But it’s also like it’s a real question for our times. Sorry. I know your question was about access and I kind of took it somewhere else.

Michelle Brown: I have like three pages of notes just on access in the past few minutes. I mean, access is just messy. Again, any way we we think about it in an effort to create change, we need access to the carceral state. You know, I love the idea of infiltration. Um, and trying to think about how you hold that space once you become part of the institution. Right. Vidal. And so, you know, watching New York right now and how these things take shape, but it’s, it’s, it’s not a space we can avoid either. Right? I think it’s just we, we do need to be in that space. I’m in the space every day in my work, um, engaging with jails and prisons and sheriff’s departments and, you know, police departments where people work. And I see it both as a site of work and labor, um, that we generate in a particular way, but also as a space that’s, um, institutionally bound up with the project of violence. So in seeing it that way though, like I also try and think as a researcher, I guess, and as somebody who’s doing a lot of work around, uh, community collaborative research, a participatory action research. We are working with folks who are directly impacted by all sorts of things right now. And increasingly, they become the interviewer. Uh, so these are spaces where the, where we’re doing a lot of work to train up community interviewers and harm reduction spaces in spaces directly involving police violence, um, in spaces directly involving ice. Um, so, you know, I’m learning a lot in that process about how we access or how we can and should access and how we build principles in and with community, not about community, which research is such a long research and media have such a long history of being extractivist in this way.

Michelle Brown: But again, I don’t feel like in the work of an aspiring abolitionist that I can not be engaged with people who do this kind of work and what it means to kind of move through that space. I’m also thinking about, you know, again, how intervention takes shape. What is the the locus? How do we find that that contradiction? And Vidal, I think you named a lot of them where suddenly an opening takes shape. And I do think we still work in the realm of openings in some ways. And how do we access, you know, when you start bringing up, uh, the cathartic reactions and the idea of feelings and David, you name that. So, I mean, I’m, I’m really, your film does so much work to show us how people feel into these spaces. Um, and how you interrupt that. I do like to think it’s a logic of scarcity that says, why bother? Uh, and that beneath that is the potential for a coalitional politics that can be activated. Um, and that the notion of starting with those who are the most vulnerable and the most directly impacted by these things is the way that all boats rise. So how do we make that visible? How that becomes a visual language that can be more attractive than the murder scene is, uh, a real a real question, though. So I will leave that to the people who do that work.

Vidal Guzman: I think, I think for us, access was a lot different because we, we first didn’t know what we needed access to. Right. Like who for us when we were thinking about incarcerated reality show, we were just asking ourselves, who are watching this? What age bracket, why they’re watching this. And I think that’s data that we can’t really get. But we, we really found out, you know, how much people are watching this, right? Like there’s millions of people who are, you know, a majority are young people, 18 to 35, even as you get what I’m saying that are just basically having access to, uh, you know, mass incarceration through an app. And, and what I mean is like, do these incarcerate reality shows you can go to, to be or whatever, and you just be able to just look at any incarcerate reality show and just, you’re just right in into that space. And that’s the scariest moment for us. So like access was for us is creating conversations around how do we talk to young people? Right? About, um, not feeding into the algorithm of cultural entertainment, right? I think for us, it’s been very hard, right? So we spoke to a lot of directly, um, young people around. Why do you, you know, why do you watch fight scenes, right? Like what, what, what amazed you about that? Right? Like, you know, what, what, how do you think about incarcerated reality show all around our country? And all you can see young people are creating these true crime podcasts.

Vidal Guzman: Um, that is basically creating more harm than actually creating more of a change, right? And me as an organizer saying we need to create toolkits. So you parents can also talk to their young people around being careful how they’re talking about and what they’re watching. Right. And I think for us, it’s like access mean, we needed to create lanes that are not being seen done. Um, and also that can push the movement forward, right. Uh, you know, the ears campaign like, yeah, I’m a Democratic, but we have people who are Republicans, right? And it’s so weird to have so many different mindsets that politically, we’re not even supposed to be in the same room. But when we really get in the same room, we talk about what it means for these TV networks to not to take advantage of us. And that is a very powerful scene that for us at the ears campaign, we just keep getting more in shock to know that, you know, our our allies are very different than what I used to work on the Close Rikers campaign. So I might have somebody who I’m talking to who is Republican. And, and we’re, we might disagree on, on one issue, but we we totally agree on how TV networks are going, are freely being able to be in a facility and record. And it’s just so weird. But I think access is creating lanes that have not been seen before. Right? And that means also like on to be truthful, even for funders and, and grantees to see advocates and, and film makers collectively joining together and understanding.

Vidal Guzman: No, you need to actually start funding more of this work. We can’t talk about narrative change. Uh, you know, it doesn’t stop at just somebody telling their story. I tell you right now, every directly impacted person that, that I spoke to, they want to know that their story is, is influencing a policy or is making a policy change. And, and, and that is always something that people want to tell their story and say, look, listen, this is my story and I think culture shift has to continue. You know, yesterday I was at Youth Bridge and we watched the AIRS campaign, how much the young people started thinking about, uh, what to not watch and how they make money off what they watch. Um, and how, you know, their story can get twisted is a very important conversation. So access, it means getting young people involved. It also means like creating toolkits or conversations that has not happened before. And I tell this to my partner all the time. I said, man, you know, when we get denied by a grant, I’m like, yo, what’s going on? It’s like, you, I, I kind of say her. I, I say to her, I think we’re a little bit too ahead right now on the conversation that’s happening, but it tells us that we there’s a learning plug that we got to fill in. And that’s a part of, of movement building.

Pooja Rangan: I’m really appreciating, you know, just the various articulation of just like big tent politics that all of you are, are putting out here. I want people to understand that you all are flipping the way that we understand accountability, right? Like accountability is often framed as something that we want from incarcerated individuals. And what you’re trying to get us to think about is that we need accountability from, from the state and agents of the state, that we need accountability from television networks, that you’re pushing for compensation and like consent protocols. So I want people to understand that.

Vidal Guzman: I just say one thing I think, you know, for for us as the in the ears campaign, our next step to holding TV production, um, like who are producing in culture, a reality show and true crime. We’re getting ready to organize around the Federal Communication Commission. They cannot actually abolish the show, but they can regulate the language that are being used. And if there is stories of exploitation that is happening. We can make sure that they’re aligned and understand and hear and learn about this. Um, I think they hold a lot of power, um, knowing right now that on the federal level. Trying to pass a policy with Trump in office. So it sounds a little bit not yet. So I think for us, we’re really getting ready to organize around the FCC. Um, and we’ll be reaching out to a lot of our partners and other like minded scholars. Um, when we, you know, draft up something or put reports for them to see what we’re talking about. I think this is a moment of time for us collectively film writers and everybody to say, let’s, let’s put what we have together and, and just say, hey, let’s, let’s put, uh, FCC, uh, to regulate these, these shows and hopefully even some true crimes where they don’t give them their license back. So you never know. Uh, I, I think the importance of storytelling, um, comes from doing things that have not been done. Um, in a way that’s organizing has, you know, basically not having not been thought of. So yeah.

David Osit: You know, the sad fact is that true crime is a reflection of our society. We have a society that’s built on the idea that we can call entire groups of people subhuman. That’s the reason that our government’s been able to justify a genocide. That’s the reason that we’re able to, um, see illegal immigrants and treat them, treat illegal immigrants as subhuman are true. Crime is not the aberration. Our society is the aberration when it comes to how we treat human beings. So I think as much as we want to see true crime change, it’s, it’s, it’s fundamental that we understand that it’s actually just an outgrowth of, of, of the issues we already have to that point. You know, voyeurism has been around forever, but far longer than true crime television. Our delight in the sordid as people has been around forever. In the 80s, it was the VHS tapes of Faces of Death, the snuff tapes that were going around, and before that, the gonzo journalism tapes and the and and, you know, this is not new, but the difference between that and now is that in 30 years ago, the financial motivation for exploitation of voyeurism didn’t exist in the way it does now. I do believe that that is the difference. And as long as people are, as long as the people who are being exploited aren’t seen as human beings, that exploitation is very difficult to tip in a popular field into a a to help inspire a popular mass to demand change.

David Osit: As long as we can’t see the humanity and the people that were that are being exploited. So that’s when conversations become currency, right? Maybe our most valuable currency and debates and gray areas that that that’s when it becomes the maybe the most important tool we have to battle against the tide of, of, of ignorance and of a sort of lack of accountability for the way we treat human beings is finding that nuance and, and articulating it and finding more stories that infiltrate that gray area and, and kind of inflate the balloon inside of our hearts. Uh, I, I, this is the world I work in, right? And I, so I work in film. And the reason I love film is I think that a film actually can’t change your mind. It can change something deeper than your mind. And that’s the only thing I know how to do. Uh, and, and I’ve seen it work because it works on me and I know it works on other people. So, so I try to spend as much time as I can in spaces where we can affect something deeper than than the way we think about something, but more so, and more importantly, perhaps, the way we feel about something.

Michelle Brown: You know, as challenging as as the times are. I take such heart in the work that Vidal is doing and the work that David’s doing and the idea of, you know, I do think there’s something like an insurgent cinema out there in the sense that there are films that have been made that I thought I would never see, you know, probably starting with Brett Story’s The Prison in 12 landscapes, but there’s just a whole host of them now. I use Todd Chandler’s Bulletproof to talk about surveillance and militarization in schools all the time, and fear the logic of fear. Um, I’m also thinking about something like Sierra Pettengill’s “Riotsville, U.S.A.”, and then, you know, the work we’ve talked about today, but there, there are imaginative spaces that are doing well. Um, you know, and I think the fact, David, that your film has gotten attention is important and leveraging these spaces, when we find a way in to talk about these things, as Vidal says, like this is dependent on conversations, it’s dependent on multiple viewpoints being in the room. Um, and I think we’re just at the beginning of what this kind of an insurgency could look like in visual languages. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that in my teaching and my research and in any kind of organizing work that I’m associated with.

Pooja Rangan: Thank you. Michelle. That was beautiful. Yeah. Thanks also for just knitting this to what I wanted to ask you to, to touch on in closing, which is that your, your work is really focused on building alternative visual spaces. Now you’ve spoken about your anger at carceral iconography and imagery, and moving from your work on spectatorship to just collaborations with indigenous partners in your work with the Appalachian Justice Research Center. And yeah, I am happy that you, you, you’ve left us on both the kind of energizing note of thinking about insurgent spaces and possibility. But yeah, just just building alternative sightlines, to use another phrase that you’ve used in your work.

Previously on unmaking the prison image.

Thanh Tran: There’s a closet full of cameras here at this prison that nobody knows how to use. We need you to, one, teach yourself film, teach the rest of the prison population film, and then make films that would get us out of prison.

Brett Story: I can’t just decide that this image gets to be abolitionist. It’s going to exist outside of me. And it might get appropriated. It might get weaponized. Why?

Laliv Melamed: This is the moment where, you know, we kind of like put a barrier to our liberal conscience. We kind of put a barrier to our progressive political views.

Deepa Dhanraj: A rape victim is like a living corpse. The exact word she used, you know, living corpse. You know, in Hindi, it’s like she has no life left beyond this.

Pooja Rangan: Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss any of our conversations with these incredible guests who bring insights shaped by decades of work in the trenches, unmaking the Prison Image is a production of Visualizing Abolition, a public scholarship initiative at the University of California, Santa Cruz, directed by Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson. Learn more at visualizing abolition.ucsc.edu. We also want to learn from and connect with you. You can reach pooja@pooja.com and find Visualizing Abolition on Instagram at ucsc IAS. So please get in touch and follow along. This episode was produced by Alex Moore, Louise Leong and me Pooja Rangan with support from Jason Fox. Eric Maserati E Abercrombie is our editor and sound designer.

Theme music for visualizing abolition is Pray by Terri Lyne Carrington and Social Science. Our cover art features an image from Christopher Harris’s film Still Here. Special thanks to Gina Dent and Rachel Nelson for their vision and support. Additional support for Unmaking the Prison Image came from Amherst College.