A local film crew goes to jail
To put it mildly, Wild Eyes Productions is a Hermosa Beach-based film company that specializes in setting foot in places a little less safe than usual. That’s how they’ve ended up in Afghanistan, Colombia, the Sudan, and Somalia. Executive producer David Keane once did a series that looked at the most dangerous prisons in the world. More specifically, while creating a piece about Pelican Bay State Prison in northern California, Keane learned that there’s a specialized police unit that exists solely to investigate crimes committed within the prison. He figured that such a task force commanded more attention – a subject, perhaps, calling for a revisit by Wild Eyes.
“So we did some research about other groups like this,” says Aaron Bowden, “and it turned out they exist in pretty much every state in some capacity.”
As co-executive producer, Bowden worked with Keane in contacting the various non-fiction television networks with which they’d already established relationships. They pitched their idea for a documentary series about these investigative teams, and A&E signed on for 10 episodes.
The end result is “The Squad: Prison Police,” which airs on successive Thursdays at 10 p.m., beginning on Aug. 5. But let’s go back to the beginning, after A&E green-lighted their proposal.
Behind bars
The first order of business was to find a prison system that would allow a documentary crew and its cameras to document their facility.
“That took a little while,” Bowden acknowledges, “and we wound up with this wonderful group in Tennessee. Their formal name is the Internal Affairs Unit of the Tennessee Department of Corrections. At the time of filming they were these eight special agents who respond to any major crime that takes place within the Tennessee prison system” – about eight such facilities altogether. “They get a call from the prison and they show up with their crime scene bags and their job is to determine who is responsible for what, and who needs to be punished.”
Or as Keane points out, “They’re like the SWAT team, the detectives, and crime scene investigators all wrapped up into one.”
“You think that when you put these criminals away that that’s sort of the end,” Bowden continues. “You lock ‘em up and forget about them, when in fact prison is a place where crime thrives. The inmates actually call prison ‘college for criminals,’ because of the new tricks that you learn there that make you a better criminal.
“The stakes for the person at home are that there’s not enough room in the prisons for all these people, and so some of them are gonna get released. If there’s not anyone keeping tabs on whether these people have been rehabilitated, you might be letting out some pretty bad people.”
In some respects, though, being locked up is hardly a deterrent.
“Organized crime on the streets is run from prison,” Keane says, and he not so facetiously likens it to “a corporate headquarters for gangsters and criminals. They’re literally running criminal enterprises on the streets back home.” That’s the main reason why the prison police are so important.
Predictably, the next question is: How do gangsters manage to run things when they’re supposed to be sealed off from the rest of society?
“That’s what makes it interesting,” Keane says with a smile.
“We get into that quite a bit in the show,” Bowden says. “The simplest way is just by cell phones. Cell phones have become an enormous problem in American prison system, not just in Tennessee. It’s been made illegal to smuggle them into prisons: In many states, like in Tennessee, it’s actually a felony for a prisoner to have one.”
That doesn’t seem to have stemmed the problem. “They find three, four, or five cell phones a day,” Bowden adds, “in some of the worst parts of these prisons, with murderers, rapists, guys who are acknowledged gang leaders who literally have tattoos on their faces. They could call anyone they want at any time.”
“They get messages out, like coded hit lists,” Keane says. “They do it sometimes through their attorneys if their attorneys are corrupt. Sometimes through the guards. It’s really kind of an eye-opener.”
Perhaps not so surprisingly then:
“Some of our episodes don’t even take place entirely within the prison,” Bowden explains. “They all originate there. When the investigation is triggered, there’s always something happening inside the prison – but it did lead them (the prison police) outside the prison. They go out and make an arrest out on the streets.”
Viewers will see this, for example, in episode five, “Extortion.”
In the field
Filming for “The Squad” began in the spring of 2009.
“It took less than a year,” Bowden says, pointing out that they weren’t filming the entire time. “We basically had to wait for things to happen. That’s how we were able to have such an extended stay in the prison system. It’s tough to get them to let a film crew stick around for as long as we were there – and maybe [that was] because we weren’t always under their feet.” And of course they were onsite for a very specific purpose.
“Initially, it was me and a crew,” Bowden continues. “I think the most people we had working on this in the field was six. I went out [to Tennessee] for the first week and then on scouting trips to be sure it was all going to work [and] to get our crew oriented about the shoot.”
Although it was Ryan Spyker who found the unit in Tennessee and then established the relationship that allowed Wild Eyes to film in the prisons, it was Joe Quigley, credited as the show’s supervising field producer, who was the primary liaison between the prison officials and the company back in Hermosa Beach. Quigley essentially lived in Tennessee during the run of the show, and coordinated where the cameras would be going from one day to the next – depending on where the Squad itself was going.
“I was on the phone with him every day,” Bowden says, “as we started to compile story threads. Then we would decide together which of these we should pursue as a potential episode.
“It was a real challenge, because we had a whole state’s worth of prisons to cover. You can’t get very many people into these prisons, and it really wouldn’t serve our purpose even if we could, because the more cameras and rigmarole production stuff there is, the less real it gets just by virtue of that stuff being there. So we had to act fast and be everywhere if necessary.”
Bowden laughs and says that his wife is not going to miss all the late night phone calls that Quigley made from Tennessee.
Much of what was shot depended on sheer luck, simply being in the right place at the right (or wrong) time. For example, the film crew was in one prison, says Bowden, “when an inmate was actually wheeled out of his housing unit with a shank still in his stomach. We followed him into the infirmary… and our detective is asking: Who did this to you? The guy coughs up two names and then passes out.” Bowden laughs, because even a scripted scene wouldn’t have been this vivid and cinematic. “That’s all in the first two minutes of that episode.”
Other segments are no less riveting.
“We did an episode about smugglers,” Bowden continues, “where we see visitors to the prison who smuggled in stuff. That was fascinating and kind of sad, and sort of the theme of that episode is how prisoners exploit their relationships with people. They’re like crabs in a barrel, pulling at anything they can grab into this terrible situation along with them.”
Including the people employed to guard them.
The matter of corrupt correctional officers, says Bowden, “is a major problem in all the prisons in this country. It’s hard for the states to pay correctional officers the kind of money that they can make from inmates by smuggling in very small amounts of drugs.” Two episodes focus on this. “I’m glad that the Tennessee [prison system] allowed us to film those kinds of investigations, and that they are serious about policing themselves in that area.”
Did the prisons place restrictions on you? Did they want to view the tapes before you took them out?
“They wanted to view the tapes,” Bowden replies. “They have some security concerns. They don’t want to divulge tactics or practices that will make it impossible for them to continue doing their job after the series ends.”
Evidently, the members of The Squad didn’t object to being filmed, and apparently many of the inmates were all for it as well.
However, as Bowden makes clear, “We have a pretty strict rule about not agreeing to do any project where we don’t have ultimate editorial control – so they couldn’t say, You can’t show that because we don’t like it.” Which doesn’t mean that Wild Eyes was insensitive. They tried to accommodate all of the security concerns, such as not showing or revealing the identities of informants.
“To Tennessee’s great credit they gave us almost free rein and had a lot of trust. That’s remarkable because a lot of these state systems have a lot to hide, and I think Tennessee is just honest with itself about its prison system. I think ultimately what you see in the series is that it’s a functioning prison system.”
For your safety, did you have someone to guard you while you were inside?
“We were basically embedded with the investigative team,” Bowden says, “so they were sort of our security. We also had correctional officers running the various housing units within the prison who would always know when we were coming.”
Bowden adds that it was not unusual for an inmate to walk up and start a conversation.
“People always ask me if that was dangerous, but there’s sort of a baseline of normalcy that you hit pretty quickly. It comes with just being with guys who work in that environment all the time.” He compares it to being on an airplane; if everyone else is calm, you’re calm too, “and it just seems like business as usual. That’s how it feels inside the prison.” If he wanted to stop and think about it, he says, these unshackled inmates did some pretty horrible things, but at the time, and under the circumstances, “it didn’t even feel like that.”
“For me,” Keane says, “I get a really sick feeling in my stomach just approaching the prison, but once you get in there and start working it really does seem just normal.”
Now, when Keane says normal, you have to remember that this is a guy who’s visited some of the worst prisons this world’s ever seen.
Making it cohere
“There were never more than four cameras during the whole shoot while we were there,” Bowden says. “Again, largely because it’s hard for the prison to accommodate camera crews, and it’s just not safe for them to do that as well.”
But once filming began, footage was sent back to Hermosa Beach at the end of every week, and the episodes were then put together.
This may have been somewhat piecemeal at first, before things really began to happen or pick up. Threads began to appear and were followed, and stories emerged. “The writing of these shows is not writing in the traditional sense,” Bowden explains. “It was just basically structuring the material that we had gathered.”
Naturally, there couldn’t be a set script, which for each installment was determined by the nature of and structure of the material.
“We know that it’s going to be 22 minutes long and that it’s going to be about at least one investigation that we’ll follow from beginning to end.” In other words, “It’s not scripted, it’s real.”
And ensuring that it seemed real entailed some tough decisions:
“It was a hard thing to do,” Bowden says, “but early on we decided that we didn’t want to use narration in the show, which a lot of these kinds of shows do. We just felt that if we could make it work without narration… The narration would just be another element that could cause the audience to ask themselves whether this was real, because it’s basically a layer of television production that goes on top of the unvarnished imagery that you’re capturing in the field. That was sort of a self-imposed challenge – that sometimes I think we wish we could take back.”
“Yeah, that makes it a lot harder,” Keane says, and both of them laugh.
“But we’re really pleased that we were able to carry it off,” Bowden says. “It’s harder to follow these things because the show’s only a half-hour. These cases can be extremely complicated, and a lot of times the narrator is just there so that you can understand what you’re watching.
“So we went for the immersive,” he continues, “like you’re with these guys. This is what it feels like to be there when one of these criminal investigations is going on. We hope that’s enough.”
Keane adds that the investigative team needed to be constantly reminded to think out loud, and to describe their thoughts and actions, “so the audience can understand what the hell’s going on.”
In a sense, then, the investigative team is itself the narrator.
“I give them all the credit in the world,” Bowden says, “for having an extremely difficult job to carry out as is, and then carrying out their job with cameras on them. I can’t say enough about how accommodating they were, and I hope that people understand the important nature of the work that they do. We would not have been able to do anything like this if they’d not had a lot of patience.”
It all depends…
Ten episodes of “The Squad,” airing on A&E. Why 10?
“That’s how many they were comfortable with ordering off the bat,” Keane says. “If it’s successful we’ll come back and do some more.”
If there’d be a season two, would it be in the same places or would you try and go somewhere else?
“More than likely we’ll go right back, as long as they’ll have us,” Keane says. “We really like the people we’re working with in Tennessee. Literally larger than life characters.”
“A lot of what creates a success in a program like this,” Bowden says, “is to give the audience a recurring cast of characters that they can begin to identify with and care about. So we would hope to be able to continue following these guys.”
You feel, then, that you have enough material there so that you could go back and keep doing this for a while?
“There are 20,000 convicted felons in the Tennessee prison system,” Bowden says. “They are not taking a break.”
“Unless somehow they all stopped committing crimes,” Keane says, “in which case we should win the Nobel Prize.”
The Squad: Prison Police airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on A&E, beginning August 5. Appearing on “Larry King Live,” airing on Friday, August 6, are Squad director Jerry Lester, Special Agents Jason Woodall and John Fisher, plus Investigator Valerie Hampton. Regarding Wild Eyes Productions, Ryan Spyker worked with Aaron Bowden in the editing phase to give A&E what they wanted, and Conor Morris – the post-production coordinator – filmed and edited the demo reel that was used to market the series. He was the person who organized the year’s worth of footage, ensuring that it was editable. “Conor,” Bowden says, “was absolutely crucial to finishing these episodes.” ER
