In 2014, a sergeant at a California state prison sent James \u201cJJ\u201988\u201d Jacobs, who was 25 at the time, to \u201cthe hole\u201d \u2013 solitary confinement in a 6-by-6 cell. One bunk, one strip of a window. Jacobs had already been incarcerated for a decade by then; at 15, he was given a double life sentence for second-degree murder. Alone in the hole, Jacobs thought, as he always did, about the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the 16th, he shot and killed a young man in Bellflower, California. Three days later, another young man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a terrible cycle of grief \u2013 for what he had done, for what had been done to him.<\/p>\n
In the hole, Jacobs would lie on the floor, eyes closed, and imagine his life outside prison. He\u2019d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest. A talented singer and rapper, he began to compose songs on notebook paper, along with treatments for imagined music videos. His lyrics that grappled with healing and reckoning \u2013 how to maintain self-worth in the face of devastating interpersonal and systemic violence, how to reconcile the worst thing you\u2019ve ever done with your dignity as a human being. The prison kept Jacobs in the hole for 2.5 months \u2013 far longer than the 15 days the United Nations recognizes as torture<\/a>. \u201cBeing in here, death always feels imminent,\u201d Jacobs says in a recorded prison phone call at the beginning of the remarkable new documentary Songs from the Hole. \u201cI have to manufacture hope. And the way I manufacture hope is by writing music.\u201d<\/p>\n Jacobs eventually managed to record rough demos of his tracks as JJ\u201988 and, a few years later, played some of them for Contessa Gayles, a documentary director then filming The Feminist on Cellblock Y at the prison. Jacobs and his co-facilitator of a prison reading group, richie reseda, \u201chad a keyboard on a trash can in the corner of the gym \u2013 richie was on the keys and 88 was singing and rapping\u201d, Gayles recalled recently. \u201cI just saw how incredibly talented they were and how beautiful and intimate the storytelling was in 88\u2019s lyrics.\u201d The three stayed in touch, and once reseda was released, began working on an idea, finally realizing a music video or two based on Jacobs\u2019s original treatments.<\/p>\n The result is Songs from the Hole, a deeply moving and unconventional documentary that weaves Jacobs\u2019s musical visions first developed in solitary \u2013 bits of his handwritten \u201cfirst drafts\/treatments for the visual album\u201d appear on screen \u2013 with more traditional narrative footage of his life and loved ones outside prison. \u201cAt the outset, we were really trying to be intentional about it not feeling like a traditional or familiar incarceration film,\u201d said Gayles. \u201cWe always understood this as not just an incarceration doc, but a music film, first and foremost. Creative expression was at the center.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Fittingly, much of Songs from the Hole plays out as the hip-hop visual album Jacobs initially envisioned in solitary \u2013 stories of his family, the west coast gang culture in which he was raised, and the prison industrial complex that entraps and punishes Black men, with actors playing his younger self and Victor. Gayles, reseda and Jacobs maintained an analog collaboration for years, some of which plays out on screen \u2013 handwritten snail mail, prison phone calls always capped at 15 minutes (\u201cI didn\u2019t always know when they were coming in, so I just had to be ready with the phone and the recorder,\u201d said Gayles). The production team would mail stills from the dailies, printed on paper, back to Jacobs for his input.<\/p>\n Though the film includes recreations of incarceration as well as photos and audio from prison, the trio were \u201cintentional to not include any voices from the system\u201d, said Gayles, instead focusing on the experience of incarcerated people and their loved ones. Over many months and appeals to the state for clemency, Gayles checks in on his mother, Janine, father William, sister Reneasha, and his partner Indigo, whom Jacobs met when she visited prison as part of a group working for restorative justice. The goal, said Gayles, was to make Jacobs \u201cfeel as present as possible while also putting the audience in a position of experiencing him in a similar way as his loved ones do \u2013 at a distance, primarily through the phone and letters\u201d.<\/p>\n In song and in those 15-minute prison phone calls, Jacobs describes how he followed his brother into life on the street and turned to violence as \u201ca tool that I used for everything\u201d. Guns were easy to come by. Jacobs describes, with hard-earned clarity, his adolescent mindset; at 15, he believed that shooting someone would earn him respect, make him a man. That belief shattered quickly, compounded and twisted by the rage and grief he felt at losing Victor three days later. \u201cPart of what compelled me a lot about [Jacobs\u2019s] story was the fact that he and his family were in this position of being on both sides of that type of deadly violence,\u201d said Gayles. \u201cHe had the experience of taking a life, and then having a life taken from him.\u201d<\/p>\n For years, Jacobs felt angry and hopeless. He contemplated suicide. Then he met a fellow incarcerated man named Jay, who spoke with genuine contrition, remorse and grace about the life he took as a young man. Jay inspired Jacobs to think deeply about the family he had irrevocably harmed, a path forward that did not foreground anger. (The family, never named, did not participate in the film.) Jacobs\u2019s journey toward forgiveness, both for himself and for his brother\u2019s killer, comes to a head in a latter-half scene that left my jaw on the floor \u2013 both at the human capacity for compassion despite everything, and at the carceral system\u2019s total lack of interest in it.<\/p>\n Time and again, the California correctional system continued a cycle of violence, predicated on vengeance, that Jacobs sought to escape. \u201cViolence isn\u2019t the only answer to violence,\u201d said Gayles. \u201cWhen harm and violence happens, we don\u2019t need to answer it by introducing more harm and violence through punishment, revenge, retribution, incarceration.\u201d Jacobs\u2019s partner Indigo puts it more bluntly: \u201cMy healing is not found in someone else\u2019s punishment.\u201d<\/p>\n Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n