The Making of ‘Two Strikes’: A Conversation With the Filmmaker and Reporter
The Marshall Project reporter Cary Aspinwall (L) interviews Mark Jones (R) in prison in September 2021. (Douglas R. Clifford, Tampa Bay Times)
In 1997, Florida passed the Prison Releasee Reoffender Act, also known as the “two-strikes” law, which gave prosecutors the power to seek the maximum sentence for certain felonies if the defendant was released from prison within the past three years and had previously been sentenced to at least one year in prison. As of November 2021, there were about 2,100 inmates serving life sentences in Florida because of the law — about 15% of the state’s total life-without-parole prison population — according to The Marshall Project.
This law is the focus of the documentary Two Strikes, produced with The Marshall Project and directed by Ursula Liang, a 2021 FRONTLINE/Firelight Investigative Journalism fellow. The documentary tells the story of Mark Jones, currently serving life in prison for an attempted carjacking, and how this law has shaped his life.
FRONTLINE spoke with Liang — who also produced the documentary along with Tessa Travis — and with Cary Aspinwall, co-producer and reporter for The Marshall Project, about why they chose Jones’ story, the process of gaining access to Jones in prison and what they discovered about those serving life without parole under Florida’s “two-strikes” law.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What drew each of you to Mark Jones and his family as the story to focus on?
Aspinwall: Well, we focused on Mark in the original story for The Marshall Project because he’s not somebody that you find a lot of in prison in that he went to college, he has a degree and has a middle-class background. So, he’s a little bit of an outlier in that way. What we liked in his story is that it shows just how devastating addiction can be and how closely that ties in with a lot of incarcerations.
Your life can take a turn, even if you have a lot of advantages in life, and that the way that [some people] deal with these issues, like the post-traumatic stress disorder that Mark has, is alcoholism. In a way, his story is very emblematic of a lot of folks in the system. There’s a public safety problem, but also a public health problem and this is what we’re doing instead of solving that.
Liang: The film really emerges from Cary’s reporting [for] The Marshall Project. I was captivated by Mark’s story in her reporting because his story involves many big institutions in Florida and in this country. It involves the military. It involves carceral systems and involves politics. I thought that was an interesting opportunity to look at this case specifically, but also look at the statute which put him in prison.
What was the process like getting access to Mark in prison for an on-camera interview?
Liang: It was a little bit of a dance. Cary had lined up a lot of the ducks for us, and we were just waiting for permission to go down. We were given one hour to interview Mark and that was really one hour. We knew that we would have limited time with Mark. From a filmmaking perspective, that makes it a little more challenging. I didn’t have a ton of time to develop a relationship with him. We had to be very pointed with things we asked.
Mark was very motivated to do the interview. He’s in prison and he wants people to hear his story. He came prepared to talk to us, which was great. Sometimes it’s difficult with subjects to get into the right space, to get the right conversation going, to get what you need in an interview. But Mark wanted to talk. He wanted to say certain things, and we were ready to receive them in a very short amount of time.
Aspinwall: They don’t make it easy. The Florida Department of Corrections, I will say, is much better than other departments of corrections in that they will allow media visits and interviews under certain circumstances, but it’s very strict. You have to follow the rules very carefully.
Liang: We had to quickly decide which way we were going to shoot. We didn’t know what it was going to look like in advance of getting in there. You see Mark in the interview in this big, cavernous space and behind us, there are many, many people watching. Imagine you are the person being interviewed and not only do you have me — the person you’ve never met before — sitting in front of you asking probing questions, but you also have a whole bunch of people who manage your day-to-day activity watching and, also, walking off to the side and going to the bathroom and flushing the toilet in the middle of the interview. It was quite an ask to ask somebody to really give us their story in as intimate detail as possible with all that commotion.
Ursula, what did you consider when you were thinking about the best way to tell this story on camera and through film?
Liang: We wanted to make sure that this was a film that audiences could experience on their own and come to their own conclusions by watching. So, making sure that we were very fair and journalistic, of course. This is my first time working with FRONTLINE, and it’s imperative to make sure that you are following the book, journalistically. We were trying to create a picture of what life was like for Mark inside and, also, what life was like outside without Mark. We interviewed his wife, and we spent time in Florida to create a picture of what life would have been if he was not incarcerated.
What is the latest on Mark Jones’s case?
Aspinwall: His most recent appeal didn’t go anywhere. There have been some cases in Florida where people have gotten clemency from the governor in some way or another. A pardon might be his only option. I don’t know if he’s in that phase yet. There’s a process that you’d have to go through, but clemency is very, very rare in Florida.
Liang: He sent me a message. I can’t pull it up quickly enough, but I think he is gathering all his paperwork for clemency appeal. [Editor’s note: Jones is now making a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.] If I’m allowed to make a comment, it’s that [these email systems are] expensive.
Aspinwall: The family, whatever state they’re in, whatever county they’re in, these phone calls are heinously expensive, and most places are not free. Florida did away with snail mail. If you send a loved one snail mail, Florida will scan it and [the prisoner] can only see it on their tablet. They can’t even have the tactile letter from their mother anymore.
Liang: They instituted something now where you can print it out, but they charge you additional to print it out. So, someone will have sent you snail mail, they’ll scan you something, a photo or the letter, and then you can print it out. Some things can be printed only in color, which is almost a dollar more than the black and white.
Aspinwall: The expense of all of this is outrageous for these families, and especially for these people that are going to be in for life. That [can be] a huge burden on them. I think you have to look at Mark’s case and look at what he’s done with his life and how well he’s done behind bars and think, “Well, what is the purpose of prison? Is it to just lock people up forever or is it to really rehabilitate them and see if they have changed their lives?” His story really makes people think about that.
Ursula, how did you get into documentary filmmaking?
Liang: I stumbled my way into it. I was working in print [journalism] for a long time and felt that the demise of print was on the horizon and that even people working in print were being asked to do multimedia. So, I took some editing classes. I bought a camera and taught myself how to shoot with it and made a film. That was sort of my entry point into documentaries, just going out and doing it.
I’ve always been interested in storytelling. I’m particularly interested in visual storytelling, and I think once you start working with the people that work in docs, it becomes a very addictive place to be because they’re really good human beings. I don’t want to totally plug FRONTLINE and make this sound ingenuine, but I was going through a lot of things while making this film and it was an incredibly warm and caring team of people that I was working with that made this film possible. It’s a tough space to work in, but the people that you work with make it 100% worth it.
What types of people are most impacted by this law in Florida?
Aspinwall: It’s the poorest and most vulnerable, generally. A lot of these folks in Florida who got these sentence enhancements had repeat minor offenses. Sometimes the families were worn out with them because they were going through addiction and burning through money. I talked to one mother who’d said her son asked her to hire him a lawyer. She was so tired she thought he would use a public defender. ‘I don’t want to put up the money for that. I’m tired of your shenanigans.’ And he told his mother, ‘No, mom, you don’t understand. I could get life.’ And she’s like, ‘You’re not going to get life for that. It’s a minor crime.’ Then he got life, and she carries that guilt with her to this day.
In some cases, they were from all different backgrounds, but had fallen on hard times. The majority of these folks are poor. They’re disproportionately Black, especially compared to the prison population of lifers as a whole and [the population of] Florida as a whole. When you look at who’s serving these sentences, there are some people who committed multiple violent crimes or armed robbery where they held a gun to someone’s head, or they threatened somebody with some kind of object, but many of them were low-level offenders who were stealing money to feed their addiction or to get by in life.
Is there anything else that you want to add?
Aspinwall: Tessa Travis, [the producer], and I had the pleasure of going and seeing it premiere at the Florida Film Festival, and that was so cool because of the audience’s reaction to it. Mark’s wife was there. People were coming up and hugging her and saying we are so sorry that this happened to you. That was amazing to see because it’s so hard for people to have empathy for people who are in prison. Ursula did such an amazing job of really putting this in a human context and showing the human cost of all of this. It was cool to see the audience connect with it in that way, because a lot of times, we put these long narrative stories out there and you hope that people read them, and you hope that they connect with it. But this film will let people connect with Mark’s story in a whole new way.
Liang: There’s a point in which you’re filming it that you have sort of the emotional, real connection with the person that you’re making a film about, and then you get into the edit and you’re doing all these things to make it work and you take a step away from that. For our film festival premiere, Mark sent me a message because he wasn’t able to be there to share with the audience, and it said:
“Due to my incarceration, I am not able to be there with you, but Rose and I want to thank each and every one of you for attending and watching the film. You are the type of people that make a difference in America, people that care, and people that create change for the better.”
It really reminds you that what you’re doing really affects real people. The goal is just to let people experience what happened in a way that throws aside some of the politics and lets you have a human connection with the subject on screen and then come to a conclusion about whether or not you think this is just. If we allowed people to have an open mind and a space in which to feel their way through this law, if we accomplished that with the film, then we did what we were setting out to do.
Aspinwall: I think this film is going to mean a lot to the other families of people in Florida who are serving under this law.
Liang: The film may not move any mountains at all, but it will at least make people feel heard, which is important.
