"Driver, take me to jail."
That's the beginning of Maryum Ali's trip to a different kind of reality-TV challenge: jail.
60 Days In jail.
The Los Angeles social worker and six others with no arrest records signed up to be undercover inmates (and witnesses) for the 12-episode series on A&E, premiering with two episodes Thursday (9 ET/PT, moving to 10 on March 17). The volunteers came from different places and backgrounds, were booked on fake charges and held for 60 days in Clark County Correctional Jail in Jeffersonville, Ind.
Why did they participate? "I've always wanted to know what jail was like," Ali says. "I spent the greater part of my profession trying to prevent at-risk kids from going to jail."
Ali, the eldest daughter of boxing great Muhammad Ali, had to use an alias. And the jail, where about 500 inmates are housed before being released or going to trial, is in a town just across the Ohio River from Louisville, her father's birthplace.
"When they told me the location, I almost said, 'I'm not gonna do it.' I might have cousins in there. I have family members in Louisville," Ali says.
Dad didn't know about the show, Ali says, who was "arrested" on charges of domestic battery and intimidation with a knife. "I might watch an episode with him if I'm in Arizona standing right next to him so he knows that's not real."
Each volunteer told just two other adults about their participation in the project. Ali informed her sister and an aunt. Stay-at-home mom Barbra, 25, told her husband and her mother, who helped take care of her two young children while she was locked up.
Barbra, a stay-at-home mom and military wife, is one of the volunteers who went undercover into jail on '60 Days In.' (Photo: A&E)
"I really was looking to gain a new perspective. And try to really help this jail out, and I really wanted to help the sheriff as best I could," says Barbra, who is not using her last name and was taken into custody for fraud.
Clark County Sheriff Jamey Noel, a veteran of the Indiana State Police, worked with producers to select the participants. Because he had just been elected to local office, he was interested in overhauling the Clark County Jail, which had been notorious as a source for drugs.
Noel, who had invited local news stations on raids, says he thought that if it could let the public "know what's going on behind bars, maybe it'll start clicking with people that 'that's not a place I want to go.'"
60 Days In executive producer Gregory Henry says that Noel realized the value of having real people offer their perspectives, and the idea for volunteer inmates "really rolled from there. It starts with an audacious notion of, how do you put someone who has not been arrested into a jail? And it really resonated with the reforms that he wanted to put into place and the things that he urgently wanted to know about his facility."
But how frightening was it for the participants?
"I felt nervous at the booking process," Ali says. "At booking, you really have to be this other person. You can't say anything."
And once behind bars, the noise didn't help. "Jail was not peaceful. That kind of wore me out, mentally a little bit."
But she was lucky, "I never saw violence on a level that scared me."
When she started her time,
Barbra says, "I was terrified. I was absolutely petrified — the most scared I've ever been in my life." But she says the series had a big impact on her own life, which she described as having fallen into a gray area with her daily routine.
"I am seeing in colors for the first time in a long time," she says. "I am so thankful for everything I have."
Participants housed in the same unit had not met each other before entering jail, which
added to the paranoia. "Oh my God, the mind games are ridiculous," Ali says.
The sheriff and the producers weren't resting easy.
"I watched these undercover participants like hawks, along with the producers," Noel says.
Henry, who explained that the show helped upgrade the jail's security system and participants were compensated, says, "I've never worked on a project where I have no control. This show is so real that it hurt. We all just had pits in our stomachs because we had, in addition to the 300 cameras, we had roughly 70 microphones. We could hear every conversation. We could hear every cell. ... You hear what you've never heard before."