For years I’ve labored under the misapprehension that Werner Herzog was simply what we in the film trade would call an auteur — a gifted and compelling filmmaker fascinated by people who test the limits of madness and folly, as he demonstrated in such celebrated films as “Aguirre, Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo.” But in recent years, as he has increasingly turned to documentaries, another side of Herzog has emerged: His fascination with what you might call philosophical journalism.

Herzog’s new film, “Into the Abyss,” is a chilling portrait of a triple homicide case in Conroe, Texas, that resulted in the execution of Michael Perry, a young drifter whom Herzog interviewed in prison eight days before he was put to death. But the film, now playing in L.A. and six other cities, also offers a distinctive Herzogian meditation on the human cost of a brutal killing, much as he did in his 2005 film “Grizzly Man,” which explored the life and death of a self-styled expert on bears who mistakenly believed he could live side by side in the wild with grizzlies.

“I had been thinking about how we are going to die,” Herzog, 69, told me the other day, eating a bowl of chili at a West Hollywood restaurant near his editing facility. “When you go to death row, you find a group of people who know exactly when they are going to die. You are given a lethal injection at 6:03 a.m. and you will be pronounced dead less than 10 minutes later. I was drawn to Michael Perry because the crime he committed was so utterly senseless and the story of the people around him was like a tapestry that touched on the deepest, darkest recesses of what lies inside us all.”

It is hardly a surprise that the film’s original poster featured a blurb describing “Into the Abyss” as the cinematic equivalent of Truman Capote’s 1965 book “In Cold Blood,” a groundbreaking work in new journalism that featured Capote’s reconstruction of a bloody murder of a family in small-town Kansas. Herzog performs a similar cinematic autopsy of the murders committed by Perry and Jason Burkett, who was given a life sentence instead of death, in part because of testimony from his father, a career criminal who was transported from his own prison cell to the courtroom to testify on his son’s behalf.

Burkett’s father ends up being a major figure in “Abyss,” as does a death-row team captain who straps inmates down into a gurney before they are executed and a woman who married the younger Burkett after he went to prison and has become pregnant with his child through some form of artificial insemination.

Because he’s such a sharp-eyed but cerebral sleuth, Herzog is the best kind of documentarian, one with the inquisitive mind of a journalist but the sensitive soul of an artist. A host of novelists have doubled as journalists over the years, and like the best of them — think Norman Mailer, Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace — Herzog is fascinated with the ingredients of the human psyche that have always kept writers spellbound, be it hubris and ambition or vulnerability and human frailty. Herzog wants to hear people tell their stories in telling detail. Facts, as he once said, are for accountants.

Wherever Herzog goes, he discovers strange, oddly compelling characters. He pursues their stories the way a great journalist would — by posing the questions hardly anyone else would imagine to ask, all given an extra portentousness by Herzog’s thick, Bavarian accent.

In “Encounters at the End of the World,” his documentary about scientists living in Antarctica, Herzog speaks with a taciturn marine ecologist who spends most of his time in the company of penguins. Dispensing with any cuddly creature banter, Herzog asks: “Is there such a thing as insanity among penguins?” In his last film, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” a study of 32,000-year-old cave drawings in France, Herzog interviews a mild-mannered cave specialist who reveals that when he was young, he performed in a circus. Herzog immediately asks: “What were you, if I may ask — a lion tamer?”

In “Abyss,” Herzog asks a variety of far more unsettling questions, often with a more philosophical bent. Listening to a prison chaplain describe his death-row duties, which include holding the ankles of the inmates as they are given a lethal injection that ends their life, Herzog cuts to the chase, simply asking: “Why does God allow capital punishment?” The chaplain says he has no answer, but jarred by Herzog’s blunt query, he launches into an oddly contemplative recollection of an encounter he had with a pair of squirrels he came face to face with on a golf course. His eyes glazed with tears, he grapples with the idea that the squirrels are allowed to go on with their lives while the people whose ankles he holds are sent to their deaths.

“Nobody else would’ve asked that question,” Herzog said. “But somehow, sensing the heart of the man, I knew how to open him up. When people ask me why I do such things, I say that it is because I’m a filmmaker. It’s my way of finding the big wrench to open up the hood.”

To me, that is what makes Herzog a journalist as well. He vehemently disagrees. “I’m more like an explorer, like the first men who crossed the arid Sahara in the 19th century. When I do an interview, I have no prepared questions. I engage in discourse, because I want to know what is in people’s minds.”

When I spoke with Herzog, I asked him for his own thoughts on capital punishment. “I am not a religious man, but I was intensely religious in my adolescence,” he explained. “I probably know the Bible better than my peers. And I’m pretty certain that Jesus would not have been an advocate of capital punishment.”

Being a journalist myself, I wanted to better understand Herzog’s own very public refusal to embrace capital punishment. He has repeatedly said that, as much as he loves living in America, he will not become a U.S. citizen as long as the country puts people to death.

“It is not a statement just about America,” he reminds me. “I cannot become a Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Egyptian citizen either, since they practice capital punishment too. I am from Germany, a country, in the time of the Nazis, that conducted an enormous campaign of capital punishment against its own citizens, and on top of that, carried out genocide against 6 million Jews. So from my standpoint, no state should be allowed to kill its citizens.”

Whatever Herzog’s own views about the death penalty, the film is not an assault of facts and figures marshaling a case against capital punishment. To hear him say it, the film’s intent isn’t to change people’s minds. He is more than content to simply explore the paradoxes of a complex issue and get others to think about them as well. “After all,” he said, “would you want me, as a German, to try to teach Americans what to do?

by NPR Staff

November 5, 2011

Federal and state officials are increasingly contracting private companies to run prisons and immigration detention centers.

Critics have long questioned the quality of private prisons and the promises of economic benefits where they are built. But proponents say private prisons not only save taxpayers money, but they also generate income for the surrounding community.

In 2004, officials in Hardin, Mont., agreed to a deal for a private prison to be built in town. The idea was that the county would pay for the prison and the state or federal government would fill it. Hardin would get tax revenues, new jobs and economic benefits while a private prison company would run the place and get a cut of the profits.

The Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility, a 464-bed $27 million private prison, was completed in 2007. Since then, the facility has remained empty and unused because the builder never landed a contract with the state or federal government for inmates.

In 2009, the facility made national news when, in an attempt to recoup the money it had spent on the facility, the town offered to do something almost no other town in America was willing to do — house prisoners from Guantanamo Bay.

That didn’t happen, but it’s a testament to how desperate Hardin is to fill the prison, get it up and running, and create jobs for the town.

Another Town, A Different Prison

About 1,500 miles south of Hardin in Karnes County, Texas, you find a very different story.

Last year, the county agreed to let a private prison company build a new 600-bed immigrant detention center there. It wasn’t a tough vote because the company, GEO Group, already had one facility in Karnes County it built in 1998.

“They have been tremendous corporate partners with the county and the people here in Karnes County,” former Karnes County Judge Alger Kendall says.

Each year, Kendall says, GEO Group gives the county $4,000 for school scholarships and $6,000 for maintenance and upkeep of the city’s courthouse.

GEO Group also gives money to the local Rotary Club, Toys for Tots, the Little League, Relay for Life and other local organizations and events, he says. And the people who work at the facility also help feed the local economy.

“I mean, that employment translates into other money being spent in the county,” he says.

When the detention center is complete, Karnes County is banking on 140 new jobs and $150,000 in tax revenue.

The Economics Of Private Prisons

Increase In Private Prison Populations

ACLU

David Shapiro says that promise of jobs and tax revenue is eerily similar to what some officials in Hardin said back in 2004.

Shapiro, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union National Prison Project, is the author of a new ACLU report that’s critical of the private prison industry.

Shapiro says it’s possible a town could reap some small economic benefits from a private prison, but it may not bring the larger economic boost the county is hoping for.

“That’s what the empirical evidence has shown … and there are various theories for why that may be the case,” Shapiro tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan.

The presence of a prison might actually squeeze out other businesses that could bring greater benefits than the prison itself, he says. Also, many of the jobs created by a private prison don’t actually go to people in the community.

The bigger problem, he says, is that state and federal taxpayers — who in the end are paying for these prisons — aren’t getting the most value for their money.

To cite just one example, he says, last year the Arizona auditor general found that it actually might be more expensive to hold Arizona prisoners in private, for-profit facilities than in public ones.

Despite these findings, the state has plans to award contracts for 5,000 more private prison beds.

The safety and security of private prisons is another concern. Shapiro says some studies have found that the level of violence is actually higher in private prisons.

“Private prisons have incentives to make money [and] to cut costs,” he says. “One of the ways they do that is by slashing pay for staff, which leads to much higher rates of turnover.”

That high rate of turnover and guards who lack the experience to properly respond to situations like escape attempts is dangerous, Shapiro says.

The savings from those cost cuts do not get passed on to the state, he says.

Shapiro’s report criticizes both GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America, the two biggest private prison corporations in the country.

GEO Group declined to comment, but the Corrections Corporation of America said in a statement from spokesman Steve Owen that the report “does not enter the realm of credible discussion.”

In the statement, he called the report “an exceedingly thin, old mix of dated news, willful bias and unfounded opinion. It’s being advanced by a familiar cast of industry critics and is blind to our industry’s many benefits.”

The Prison Business

Despite the criticism private prisons face, as an industry they do very well. They make money, a little for some of the towns where they’re built and a lot for shareholders and investors.

“This is an investment that we talk with investors about on a regular basis as a good idea,” investment analyst Tobey Sommer tells Sullivan.

Sommer, director of equity research at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey in Tennessee, says both CCA and Geo Group made more than $1 billion each last year and their CEOs took home multimillion-dollar bonuses.

The recession could actually make them more money, Sommer says. With budgets stretched thin, states might look to private prisons to house and secure even more inmates. Only 10 percent of all inmates in the U.S. are housed in private prisons, he says, so that other 90 percent could be seen as an opportunity for growth.

But not everyone sees opportunities for long-term growth.

“Crime rates are declining, the prison population is declining, and many states, in large part motivated by the economic downturn, are realizing that they can’t keep building their way out of the problem,” says Michele Deitch, who teaches criminal justice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.

Deitch says the new growth market for prison companies is immigrant detention, like the facility in Karnes County. New prisons, possibly for state inmates, like the one in Hardin, Mont., are on the decline.

The continuing flow of prisoners from the state isn’t what it used to be, Deitch says, because of new treatment models and other alternatives to prison.

But Sommer says, while an empty prison just off Main Street could be a problem for Hardin or any other town, it’s not a problem for the private prison industry, especially for companies hoping to fill those beds with immigration detainees.

“That enables kind of last-minute purchasing by their customers,” he says, “so as a need arises, from a state or federal customer, Corrections Corporation can say ‘I’ve got a facility with 1,000 beds available for you.’”

And right now, it has one ready. It just has to turn the lights on.

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CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CASEBOOK

” … There is, as it happens, honor among thieves, a fact that worked mostly to Madoff’s benefit. In the context of prison, he isn’t a cancer on society; he’s a success, admired for his vast accomplishments. “A hero,” wrote Robert Rosso, a lifer, on a website he managed to found called convictinc .com. “He’s arguably the greatest con of all time.”