‘30 Days’ goes behind bars to call for jail reform

Dan Devine

If you give Morgan Spurlock an hour, he’ll give you a month. And if you give him a month, he might just give you a new lease on life.

Spurlock is best known for “Super Size Me,” the Academy Award nominated documentary in which he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month to prove the damaging effects of a fast food diet on the body.

In “30 Days,” an hour-long documentary series Spurlock created for Fox’s cable network FX, he keeps the skeleton of that experiment intact but expands its reach, examining delicate social issues by putting everyday people in positions that conflict with their upbringing, beliefs, religion or profession for 30 days.

In the show’s second season, Spurlock is once again the show’s most compelling character, serving time as an inmate at the Henrico County Jail in Richmond, Va.

“Jail” has become the season’s most talked about episode, due in part to contention about how much time Spurlock actually served. While nobody asserts that he was incarcerated for a full 30 days, Henrico County Sheriff Mike Wade told the Associated Press last month that Spurlock only served 23 days because the documentarian was satisfied with the footage he had accumulated in that time.

Spurlock called that comment “completely not true,” standing by the statement made in the episode that he served 25 days by design because the average inmate in West Virginia serves 85 percent of his sentence.

Regardless of the dissent, Spurlock acknowledges that without Sheriff Wade’s willingness, this commanding hour of television may never have happened.

“We had the idea to shoot inside a jail last year, but to get access is very difficult,” Spurlock said during an interview. “Sheriff Wade was very open to the idea, because he’s someone that’s doing it right, that wants to raise awareness about programs like the one he’s running.”

While the statistics Spurlock narrates are staggering — more than 2 million Americans are behind bars, and a disproportionate amount are African Americans — it’s the bird’s eye view of the lack of structural emphasis on rehabilitation within the prison system that truly resonates.

Spurlock and his fellow inmates at Henrico’s West facility are constantly bored, dehumanized not only by a dearth of activities but by the absence of any real commitment to facilitating positive change in the prisoners.

A light at the end of that hopeless tunnel comes when Spurlock is transferred to the East jail, which offers a drug and alcohol rehab program run entirely by inmates who have gone through it themselves. It was this program that led Spurlock to Henrico.

“When I first heard about this facility, I said, ‘We have to cover that,’ because for me, that’s an important part of the solution — starting to rehabilitate people, to give them the confidence that when they get out, they can change the people and places and things and the world around them, make their lives better and stay away from drugs and alcohol and the other enablers that will eventually get them back in jail,” Spurlock said.

Spurlock sees the fact that most jails around the country don’t have a rehabilitation program like the one at Henrico East as a failure.

“Could the institution of just that little program make a difference? Of course it could. Of course it could when you’re talking about 2.5 million people in prisons around the country,” he said. “Even if it only affects one percent of them, that’s still 25,000 people. And the ripple effect of all the people in their lives that could be helped by them getting clean and staying out of jail — that’s a huge difference.”

While Spurlock is aware that the odds of an inmate succeeding on the outside are short — he notes that two out of three inmates get sent back to jail within three years of their release — he remains optimistic.

“After all of it, you’re left with the question of, ‘What do we do?’ Is it all for naught, or is there hope? I don’t know — for me, I’d like to think that hope springs eternal,” he said.

As does FX. The first season of “30 Days” exceeded expectations. The first six installments included a Christian living as a Muslim, a conservative heterosexual living with a gay man in San Francisco and Spurlock and his fiancé Alex Jamieson trying to live on minimum wage in Ohio. The shows generated a weekly audience of over 1.4 million viewers.

In its second season, which premieres July 26, “30 Days” keeps diving headfirst into volatile issues: outsourcing of American jobs to foreign nations, abortion and, in the season’s first installment, illegal immigration.

During an interview with the Banner, Spurlock talked about the difficulties of addressing the immigration question while adding a wrinkle to the simple “opposites attract” approach that characterized the show’s first season.

“We wanted to try to find somebody different [for the experiment],” he said. “It’s easy to get pigeonholed with this show, because it would be easy to follow the formula of just finding, you know, someone who’s anti-abortion and putting them in an abortion clinic.”

After a casting process Spurlock described as “arduous,” the production team came across Frank George, a 55-year-old California resident and member of the Minutemen, a citizen’s volunteer group that patrols the U.S.-Mexico border. One thing made George a perfect fit for the show: this opponent of immigration was Latino and himself a former immigrant.

George’s family fled their home in Guantanamo, Cuba in 1957 during the Cuban Revolution, but because his dad worked for an American sugar company, they were able to emigrate legally. After assimilating, George became a fervently patriotic American who repeatedly issues screeds claiming illegal immigration is the “beginning of a revolution” and “will bring about the dissolution of this country,” even as he sits down to dinner with a family who illegally entered America twelve years ago in search of a better life.

“To find somebody like Frank George who is anti-immigration but also ... a legally immigrated Cuban, that he’s Latino but against illegal immigration from Mexico, [that] makes him a really interesting character to follow,” Spurlock said.

But while the situations are gripping, the discussions are frank and the character studies are fascinating, it’s Spurlock’s conviction that drives “30 Days.” It’s reality television with the guts to hold a mirror up to some seriously unpleasant realities. But without Spurlock’s big, beating heart serving as both converging point making the stories accessible and engine pumping them along, the result would feel flat. It might inform the audience about social issues, but it wouldn’t inspire them to open themselves to different people, which Spurlock believes we need now more than ever.

“In our culture, we have instant access and an amazing ability to communicate with different people all over the world, but we don’t even know our next-door neighbor’s name,” Spurlock said. “If this show can bring back even a little of that human connection, make anyone pause before jumping to a snap judgment or give somebody the benefit of the doubt, then I think we’ve done a tremendous job.”