In 2014, a sergeant at a California state jail despatched James “JJ’88” Jacobs, who was 25 on the time, to “the opening” – 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 homicide. Alone within the gap, Jacobs thought, as he all the time did, about essentially the most devastating month of his life, April 2004: on the sixteenth, he shot and killed a younger man in Bellflower, California. Three days later, one other younger man shot and killed his beloved older brother Victor. For years, Jacobs was caught in a horrible cycle of grief – for what he had achieved, for what had been achieved to him.Within the gap, Jacobs would lie on the ground, eyes closed, and picture his life exterior jail. He’d make beats by pounding on his bunk or chest. A proficient singer and rapper, he started to compose songs on pocket book paper, together with therapies for imagined music movies. His lyrics that grappled with therapeutic and reckoning – easy methods to preserve self-worth within the face of devastating interpersonal and systemic violence, easy methods to reconcile the worst factor you’ve ever achieved along with your dignity as a human being. The jail saved Jacobs within the gap for two.5 months – far longer than the 15 days the United Nations acknowledges as torture. “Being in right here, dying all the time feels imminent,” Jacobs says in a recorded jail cellphone name at the start of the exceptional new documentary Songs from the Gap. “I’ve to fabricate hope. And the way in which I manufacture hope is by writing music.”Jacobs ultimately managed to report tough demos of his tracks as JJ’88 and, a number of years later, performed a few of them for Contessa Gayles, a documentary director then filming The Feminist on Cellblock Y on the jail. Jacobs and his co-facilitator of a jail studying group, richie reseda, “had a keyboard on a trash can within the nook of the fitness center – richie was on the keys and 88 was singing and rapping”, Gayles recalled lately. “I simply noticed how extremely proficient they had been and the way lovely and intimate the storytelling was in 88’s lyrics.” The three stayed in contact, and as soon as reseda was launched, started engaged on an concept, lastly realizing a music video or two based mostly on Jacobs’s unique therapies.The result’s Songs from the Gap, a deeply shifting and unconventional documentary that weaves Jacobs’s musical visions first developed in solitary – bits of his handwritten “first drafts/therapies for the visible album” seem on display – with extra conventional narrative footage of his life and family members exterior jail. “On the outset, we had been actually making an attempt to be intentional about it not feeling like a standard or acquainted incarceration movie,” mentioned Gayles. “We all the time understood this as not simply an incarceration doc, however a music movie, firstly. Artistic expression was on the middle.”Fittingly, a lot of Songs from the Gap performs out because the hip-hop visible album Jacobs initially envisioned in solitary – tales of his household, the west coast gang tradition through which he was raised, and the jail industrial complicated that entraps and punishes Black males, with actors enjoying his youthful self and Victor. Gayles, reseda and Jacobs maintained an analog collaboration for years, a few of which performs out on display – handwritten snail mail, jail cellphone calls all the time capped at quarter-hour (“I didn’t all the time know after they had been coming in, so I simply needed to be prepared with the cellphone and the recorder,” mentioned Gayles). The manufacturing workforce would mail stills from the dailies, printed on paper, again to Jacobs for his enter.Although the movie consists of recreations of incarceration in addition to images and audio from jail, the trio had been “intentional to not embody any voices from the system”, mentioned Gayles, as an alternative specializing in the expertise of incarcerated folks and their family members. Over many months and appeals to the state for clemency, Gayles checks in on his mom, Janine, father William, sister Reneasha, and his accomplice Indigo, whom Jacobs met when she visited jail as a part of a bunch working for restorative justice. The aim, mentioned Gayles, was to make Jacobs “really feel as current as doable whereas additionally placing the viewers ready of experiencing him in the same method as his family members do – at a distance, primarily by way of the cellphone and letters”.In track and in these 15-minute jail cellphone calls, Jacobs describes how he adopted his brother into life on the road and turned to violence as “a device that I used for every part”. Weapons had been straightforward to come back by. Jacobs describes, with hard-earned readability, his adolescent mindset; at 15, he believed that capturing somebody would earn him respect, make him a person. That perception shattered rapidly, compounded and twisted by the fad and grief he felt at dropping Victor three days later. “A part of what compelled me lots about [Jacobs’s] story was the truth that he and his household had been on this place of being on either side of that kind of lethal violence,” mentioned Gayles. “He had the expertise of taking a life, after which having a life taken from him.”For years, Jacobs felt offended and hopeless. He contemplated suicide. Then he met a fellow incarcerated man named Jay, who spoke with real contrition, regret and beauty in regards to the life he took as a younger man. Jay impressed Jacobs to assume deeply in regards to the household he had irrevocably harmed, a path ahead that didn’t foreground anger. (The household, by no means named, didn’t take part within the movie.) Jacobs’s journey towards forgiveness, each for himself and for his brother’s killer, involves a head in a latter-half scene that left my jaw on the ground – each on the human capability for compassion regardless of every part, and on the carceral system’s complete lack of curiosity in it.Repeatedly, the California correctional system continued a cycle of violence, predicated on vengeance, that Jacobs sought to flee. “Violence isn’t the one reply to violence,” mentioned Gayles. “When hurt and violence occurs, we don’t have to reply it by introducing extra hurt and violence by way of punishment, revenge, retribution, incarceration.” Jacobs’s accomplice Indigo places it extra bluntly: “My therapeutic will not be present in another person’s punishment.” {Photograph}: Courtesy of NetflixDespite the heavy material, Songs from the Gap is something however a portrait of despair. Jacobs endeavors to seek out pleasure – in training, in his household and fiancee, within the reality of being alive, within the “manufactured hope” of his artwork. And, lastly, freedom – in 2020, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, commuted Jacobs’s sentence based mostly on the age at which he dedicated his crime and his rehabilitative work, making him instantly eligible for parole. In 2022, after 18 years in jail, Jacobs walked free. The movie ends with footage of him within the studio recording new music, singing, having fun with the liberty to mess up a observe, then report once more. Jacobs’s burgeoning music profession is proof that “there are sensible artists who’re incarcerated, who’ve tales to inform that may impression and shift tradition,” mentioned Gayles.At one level within the movie, nonetheless incarcerated and defeated by one other authorized setback, Jacobs made an inventory of causes to maintain dwelling. It included his household, his accomplice, his artwork. The final one was a perception: “My shortcomings don’t diminish my good.” Over 106 minutes, Songs from the Gap makes nearly as good a case as one can to consider it.“All of us have issues in our lives that we have to heal from – hurt that we now have skilled and hurt that we now have brought on,” mentioned Gayles. “I hope that this movie is simply an entry level, and doubtlessly a device, for people to heal.”
Songs from the Gap is out now on Netflix
This text was amended on 13 August 2025. An earlier model erroneously referred to a capturing exterior a nightclub in Lengthy Seaside. It occurred in Bellflower, California, and was not exterior a nightclub.
