July 1, 2020 • 48 mins
This is an updated episode that originally aired on August 13, 2018.
Since his release in April 2018 and the ultimate end to his legal troubles in August 2019, Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill is using his voice to fight on behalf of those entangled in the many trappings of the criminal legal system. He is joined by his friend, e-commerce billionaire, and co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, Michael Rubin, to discuss their shared hopes for reform.
Learn more and get involved at:
https://www.wrongfulconvictionpodcast.com/with-jason-flom
Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
On January twenty third, two thousand seven, in order to
obtain a search warrant, a narcotics officer claimed to have
seen Meek mill selling crack out of his home. The
following day, Meek was stopped on his way to a
corner store and they found a gun. He was badly beaten,
arrested for illegal possession of a firearm, and later charged
(00:21):
with assaulting arresting officers who claimed that he had pointed
the gun at them. In two thousand eight, due to
the cost, Meek waved a jury trial, was tried for
drug and weapons charges and sentenced to two years prison
plus eight years probation, which kicked off his storied clash
with Judge Genie Sprinkley. Over the decade that followed, parole
(00:43):
tight restrictions and his contentious relationship with Brinkley made more
punishment almost than inevitability. In November of two thousand seventeen,
she sentenced him to at least two more years in
prison for alleged violations, including popping a wheelie without a helmet.
This gained plenty of outrage and public support, largely due
(01:06):
to a police department whistleblower who exposed Meek's two thousand
and seven arresting officer as a liar and a thief.
His two thousand eight conviction was overturned. He was granted
a new trial under a new judge, bringing his two
thousand seven criminal case and probation to a long overdue
close in August of two thousand nineteen. However, his litigation
(01:30):
was still ongoing at the time of this episode. It's
original release, Meek Mills Notoriety shines a light on the
regularity legalized harassment by authorities and the recidivism that results.
A docuseries chronicling his legal saga called Free Meek, is
now streaming on Prime Video, and Meek's friend Michael Rubin,
(01:50):
one of the owners of Philadelphia seventy six, is joined
us for a discussion that unfortunately is as relevant today
as it was back then. This is Wrong Contion with
Jason Flam. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
(02:18):
That's me and today we have an extraordinary show and
you're about to find out why today's guest is the
one and only Meek mill Um and Michael Rubin is
with him and Meek. You need no introduction, but welcome
to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me Man. I
appreciate you for bring me on the show. I appreciate
all the work you're doing, and we're gonna get into
(02:39):
that right away. But with him is Michael Rubin m
who is the owner of this Philadelphia seventy sixers and
has an amazing background as an entrepreneur and businessman, but
who has become a tremendous advocate for criminal justice reform
and is about to really shake things up. So Michael,
(03:00):
I'm thrilled to have you in the movement, and I'm
glad you're here on the Showy, thanks for everything you're doing.
I'm glad to be here. So Meek, one of the
reasons I wanted to have you on the show is
because your original case was in fact a wrongful conviction,
and that's something a lot of people don't understand. And
there's a lot more they don't understand about the circumstances
(03:23):
in which you were arrested and how this nightmare saga,
which is now in his second decade in the criminal
justice system, has unfolded. And it's important to tell this
story because it shines a light on so many aspects
(03:44):
of what's wrong with the criminal justice system. And we're
here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, Mississippi. But even still,
the system here has been so backwards for so long,
and you were born right into the thick of it.
I mean, let's talk about that. Because US seven. So
the number of people in cars for the United States
stayed relatively constant from nineteen hundred till about nineteen seventy,
(04:08):
and then it went crazy. It doubled and tripled and quadrupled,
and Philadelphia was a hotspot, and you were born into
a situation in which black men were being incarcerated at
rates that were unprecedented actually in the history of the world.
There's a book that really touches on everything that you
(04:28):
went through, called On the Run by Alice Goffman, Princeton, PhD.
Sociologists who went and lived on sixth Streets in Philadelphia.
She said, in the first eighteen months that I spent
in the the neighborhood, at least once a day, I watched
the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, searched them,
run their name for warrants, asked them to come in
for questioning or making arrest. In that same eighteen month period,
I watched the police breakdown doors, search houses and question,
(04:50):
arrest or chase people through houses fifty two times. Nine
times police her helicopters circle overhead and beam search lights
on the local streets. I noticed blocks taped off in
traffic be directed this police search for evidence fourteen times
during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I
watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat
young men with their nightsticks. That's what the situation was like.
(05:14):
It's what it still is like, and that's what has
to change. Can you talk about that about how you
grew up and how this you know, it was almost
almost a faded complete you know. I come from Philadelphia,
actually the North North Philadelphia which now is like called
the Temple area, and uh, you know, we grew up
in an environments where like drug infestive environments where a
(05:36):
lot of violence, a lot of drugs, a lot of
things taking place. So it's like you could be standing
in the wrong place and lose your life, or you
could be standing in the wrong place and get charged
with a crime you didn't do. That was just like normal. Actually,
I've been hanging with my friend p mind probably fifteen
years and I remember back he went to jail when
he was probably about fifteen years old. He just turned
(05:57):
thirty one, and like, yeah, the first time I went
to prison, he said, a white guy just pulled up
in the back of a car and just pointing at
me on the car and said, I arrobbed him for
seven dollars, but he had three and eighty dollars in
his pocket, and he went to jail for that. He
ended up doing I think like two years and that
in the juvenile facility. But that wasn't the worst part.
(06:18):
The worst part was he got a felony on this
record for arm robbery. And you know, if you know him,
he's not like, uh, it's not robbery, he's not robbery.
And his system, Uh, he made mistakes in his life.
But me being around him, I never knew that. But
I witnessed that so many times. I wouldn't have standing
on the corner and the cop pull up with for
a Mexican guy in the back, and I don't know
(06:40):
to Sometimes we say in the our world, in the
sarcastic way of being funny, we always be like, uh,
white people look the same to us. Some of my
wife friends were like oh black people were saying to us.
But sometimes that is the case with people and they
just pull up and they point people out, and you
stand there on the cops pull up and just be like,
(07:00):
I hope this guy don't point me out. And that's
just one of the scenarios out of a million scenarios,
being caught in the middle of poverty, uh, drug infesting
neighborhood with people are getting robbed left and right where
you know, cops locking people have left and right just
to get stripes on that record. You know what I'm saying.
And we grew up in that and you know, at
eight years old, I was caught up in that system.
(07:22):
And even though I've been on the path ever since
of doing spectacle in my life from where I come from,
that same system is still haunting me and haunking me down,
even at the age of thirty one and having a
record deal and being able to handle business and work,
and still haunted me to pull me back to the
same system where I just left eleven years ago. And
(07:45):
you just brought up a very important point, which is
that we know from decades of research now that cross
racial identifications are extremely unreliable identications in general are unreliable
because when people witness a crime, especially violent crime, they're
d don'tly goes crazy and the perception gets screwy and
the brain doesn't function properly, so it almost becomes like guessing,
(08:06):
but it gets even worse. And there's a movement now
in various places to try to put in a system
where a jury has to be instructed in a case
in which across racial identification is an important factor that
these things are as unreliable as they are because they
need to know, but in most cases they don't know.
They just think of an identification is the most powerful
(08:27):
thing in the core roam too. I pointed you and
goes that to him. You know, it's hard for a
jury to see past that. Yeah, it's like it's a neighborhood.
We all wearing white teas of the summer two thousand
and three, everybody white T shirts is the popular thing
to wear denim shirts. And you got a guy, he
might be Asian. He pull up on the corner. We
all seven of us got braids, and four of us
(08:47):
got a little cuts, but we all look the same.
The ones that got braised to him, that's just you
allow to repick to get caught up in the system,
like whoever you point out, that's you, and you better
hope you don't hand no felonies on your record already
because you might go to jail for a long time.
And sociologically speaking, and this goes back again to the
seventies and eighties. Right at the same time that they
(09:07):
were rolling back welfare and other programs for the urban poor,
they were ramping up the policing and they were Now
you created the perfect storm because what was happening was
you had these these systems coming for tracking arrest You
had so many more cops in fact, and I think
in Philadelphia six more police decade over decade than they
(09:28):
were before, and they had to make arrests. So whereas
before they were largely ignoring what was going on in
the community, now there were heightened penalties for not just
for violent crimes, but also for all kinds of different
drug crimes, for vagrancy, for trespassing, for anything. And they
were in a position where they were arresting people left
and right and creating this permanent underclass. And Michael, you know,
(09:51):
obviously you grew up here too, right, but your situation
must have been very different, very different world. I grew
up maybe twenty minutes from Make, but Make used all
the said to me, and we used to have this
argument for years. He'd said to mean, Michael, there is
two Americans. And I'd be like, like, dude, shut up,
there's like there's there's one America. Like stop, you know,
like you're doing great, Like you know, I didn't understand,
Like what are you telling about these two worlds? We
(10:12):
live in one great country. And and you know, he
would argue about all the time. And I remember the
day that that Meek got sentenced November six, two thousand
and seventeen, he called me from the Philadelphia job before
they transferred to a different jail and said, he said,
you see, I told you this is what happens to
the black people, right, And I just like that, you
know what I said, You're right, I was wrong, and
there is two worlds. And you know, for me, November six,
(10:34):
two thousand seventeen was really a life change in a moment,
because I would never have been able to understand. I
really believe, and I don't think anybody would be able
to believe how crazy a circumstance he was living in
because it didn't seem possible until you sat in the courtroom.
And even people that have come to later court hearings
of Judge Brinkley have said, I've heard everything about this,
(10:56):
but I didn't believe it until I actually saw it,
and it's so crazy. So for sure, I grew up
in a completely different environment. But Meek always told me
from the diametom. Remember we were at a NBA All
Star game, and you know, within a few minutes, you know,
Meek realized I was involved with the Philadephia seventy six ers,
and I was telling me a little bit about his background.
(11:16):
He told me he was charged for pointing a gun
at multiple cops. And he said to me, like, you know,
I didn't do that. If I pointed, you know, a
gun of multiple cops, I'd be dead. Like I heard him,
but I didn't really comprehend it. And then like, if
I've told that story to people in the last seven months,
every person from law enforcement to politics to anyone who
(11:39):
understands anything, they all said the same thing. He's right,
He beat that no one would pull a gun multiple
cops and not get shot. And Meek can't obviously talk
about the case because the case is still unfortunately going on,
which is crazy in itself, right, But I mean you're
talking about a guy who was wrongfully convicted when he
was eighteen years old of a crime that he didn't commit.
(12:00):
It's been sent back to jail multiple times, never committed
a new crime, and he's the perfect example someone who's
been stuck in a completely broken criminal justice system for
crimeing and commit and it's now thirteen years later and
it's still going on, and that shows how broken the
criminal justice system is. It's incredible. You know, we have
two point two million people in prison in America and
(12:23):
including jail, other four and a half million people in
probation and parole. Yeah, I mean the latest figure I
heard was four point eight, right, And and when once
we accept those figures, you also have to accept the
fact that we now have, between jail, prison, probation, and parole,
we have more black people were mostly men, under criminal
justice supervision in America than all the slaves at the
(12:45):
height of slavery in America in the eighteen fifties or
sixties whatever that was. What are we doing? Well, It's
like Michael Alexanders is the new Jim Crow. What words
can't explain, is Meek is still on probation for something
that we've already said he didn't do, and it's been
going on for thirteen years from the original wrongful conviction,
(13:06):
but he can't like, you can't live that way, Like
I say, I joke with him, I feel like I'm
on probation because I'm worried about just something going wrong
with him. If he decides to leave a state day
early because something changed with the schedule, or he gets
you know, someone says, hey, I'm gonna pay you to
go to this concert. I want to go, and I
have the proper days of permission, the judge will try
to violate him. I mean, it's the system is chasing
(13:26):
him and trying to violate and and that's not what
probation is supposed to be about, rehabilitating somebody, not trying
to catch them and send that back to prison. And
something that someone told me recently, and you know, I've
now become too familiar with this, but seventy people that
go back to jail once they've been in jail in
prison are going back for technical probation violations. Like to me,
virtually none of those people should be you know you
(13:48):
had a technical probation violation. Right, he didn't commit a crime.
You were late for your probation officers, so you you know,
didn't pay a certain amount of money. You you know,
you traveled out of the state. You know he went
to his son in New Jersey because he lives in Pennsylvania.
And you can be violated and sent back to jail.
This is lunacy. This is absolute lunacy. And I want,
I'm really glad you brought that up, Michael, because I
don't want to get your take on this week because
(14:09):
in a lot of the reforms that are underway right now,
there's this hidden caveat or this hidden nightmare i'll call it,
of enhanced probation and other ways of the government keeping
people under control. So to me, a true crime reform
bill should eliminate those problems. And you obviously can speak
(14:30):
firsthand about just how restrictive that is. And Michael has
said very eloquently, when you have seventy people going back
to jail or prison because they have some technical violation,
that's insane. Right. Can you talk about that, because I'm
very concerned that they're sneaking these devils into the details
in these new crime bills that are going to allow
them to maintain this control. There's no other way to
(14:53):
look at it over millions of people's lives. And there's
a profit center in there for a lot of people too. Uh.
It's more then it's saying to me, I take it
as deep as like he said, I could go see
my son in New Jersey and actually be locked in
a cage and be locked in change check who from
like angle defeat for the crime of going from Pennsylvania
to New Jersey. That's what I'm saying, and being facetious
(15:16):
for the crime and quotes. I'll tell you this right now,
Judge Brinkley is dying to do that too. She's trying
to right now today, I promise you she's sitting in
her house obsessed about how she can figure out how
to put them back in jail for nothing. And he
can't talk about that, but I can't. I'm telling you
straight up, that's what's going on. It's it's really bizarre.
(15:37):
I mean, as a country, why would we want I mean,
these are our tax dollars, right and it and it
hurts the average taxpayer, even if you're somebody who's not
particularly concerned about criminal justice reform, or you think a
lot of people or you maybe you think you're tough
on crime or whatever. It might be. The money that's
being spent to lock people like you meet up right
(16:00):
and to keep you under supervision, and it's bloated and
and draconian system is pure insanity. I mean that money
could be spent. I mean I know that at one time,
and at one time, I don't even know if it's
still true. But a few years ago I checked and California,
which a lot of people think it was in a
progressive state, was spending more money locking people up than
(16:22):
they were educating people. And we fact checked that. But
it's absolutely staggering. And the crazy thing is these are Americans.
There are fellow people, you know, I say the politicians
when I talk to him, Like, you know, if another
country treated our people the way we treat our people,
we'd invade this stuff. We wouldn't even do to our pets,
you know what I'm saying, Like you wouldn't lock your
pet in the medal cell. For sometimes we get locked in.
(16:46):
And I say we because I've been through this experience
so many times, and like, sometimes we get locked in
a room for twenty three hours a day for a month,
two weeks, some people actually even years. You know what
I'm saying. It's like they say, when you come home,
it's a violation to be around felons. And how is
it a violation to be around felons when you just
(17:06):
had me locked up amongst thousands of felons? Like what
rule is this? I'm glad you brought it up too,
because that's another thing that creates this visious the way
you think about it. In the environment you grew up,
what percentage of people that live on your block have
had a felony? Right, So what you're saying is essentially
anyone can put you back in prison because there's a
(17:29):
rule that says you can't be around felons, But everyone
you grew up with has a felony. If somebody really
made that an issue, I would probably go to jail
any day. Because if I go to the studio with
a rapper and we make a song, I don't know
his record, but you don't know. Would you have to
have a like a database that at all times most
people can't afford that, I mean, and you're not going
to do it in the fact is I'm just quoting
(17:50):
a statistic here. One in four black children born in
nineteen had an imprisoned father by the time he or
she turned fourteen, right and then, and the numbers just
get worse and worse. I mean, thirty of black man
without college educations today we'll have been to prison by
their men thirties and spent up to a year in prison.
I mean that's without college educations. And the numbers go
to sixty when you look at blackmails without high school education,
(18:13):
sixty of blackmails out high school education was spent a
year in prison or jail before their thirtieth birthday. What
are we doing? And the fact is it's actually impossible
to succeed, which is why I'm always amazed when somebody
does come from the background that you came from and
make it, because with that cycle, how do you do it?
They've created a mind field that you can't walk through. Right,
(18:35):
once you get arrested, You're gonna get re arrested no
matter what you do. Pretty much, and like like me
and Mike, we just been the hour My just teaching
me about financial stuff and like texts and things that
like when we're growing up from like age thirteen to
twenty years old. We probably invest ninety five percent of
(18:58):
our thinking time and how to SE five and these
type of conditions because it's like almost impossible to survive.
So like you gotta put like your all into how
this even my mind framed now, I still like, even
though I travel the world, is still installed in my mind.
It's still like something that is like I might come
into a certain situation in a certain area and I
(19:18):
go into survival moll and and I have the double back,
and like this is not even that type of environment
where I don't live this type of life anymore, but
it's always installed inside of my head. You know what
I'm saying that coming from environments like that, like you
said sixty, where I come from, it feel like it's ninety.
Like do that count death probably go up to probably
(19:41):
young black men being murdered, uh going to prison probably
sixty plus another thirty make I've heard you talk about this.
You know, how many people do you know that you
were close with, you had a real relationship with it
have been murdered. That's that's you know, how many I know?
I'm in zero? You know how many I know they've
been close? Zero? So you're talking about, yeah, different environments.
(20:05):
So yeah, that's crazy that we have two shepherd systems
of justice in America, one for people with money and
one for people without, and one for people who are
of color and one for people who are not. And
when and when you hit the reverse jack part of
being a person of color without being born into a
wealthy family, which is a huge majority. And you don't
even have to come from a wealthy family to like
not be around somebody that was murder. It's really like territorial,
(20:29):
Like I got one of my songs what I'm talking about,
like like we've being put in groups in certain areas,
even with public house and public house, and it's really
across Philadelphia. So if you grow grow up less fortunate,
they're sticking people in certain areas if you pay attention
to it, Like it's North Philadelphia, but not the whole
North Philadelphia is a certain part in South Philadelphia. It's
a rich part of South Philadelphia where like houses costs
(20:52):
a million dollars and then you got some houses that
cost forty They only move in this cin certain areas.
And I always say this, like if you take a drone,
the main line of Philadelphia is like City Line Avenue
where my apartments used to be. At City Line Avenue,
you take a drone and then you make the drone
go high in the sky, and if the drone had
a zoom and kazoom on this side of the left
(21:13):
and right, you will see it's quiet as peace here
and his chaos going here. And you take a kid
from over here and let him spending three summers in
this area, he will be less. He won't be the
way the chaos says. He would turn to be more
lean like these people in this area. And I witnessed
that with my family. I used to have a nephew.
(21:33):
He lived in the projects. He used to cuss, He's
seen a lot of things. He used to act up
in school, and you know, he moved to a suburban
area and his whole life changed within two years. It
was just that simple. For a long time, I've been pondering,
(21:56):
thinking about, obsessed with the idea of with the grim
statistics and scenario that we're painting here, and you're exactly
I want to ask this question, how many people as
talented as you are either got shot or got locked
up in prison and society as a result it's being
deprived of those talents and all the revenue and all
(22:19):
the culture that would have come from that. How many
jay zs are there that didn't make it out and
ended up in prison thousands, you know what I'm saying.
I know it's guys in there and locked the way
as talented as me, you know what I'm saying. And
they're probably there for felonies on felonies. And when you say,
like when people label you as a felon, like, how
it's that my friend or a felon? He was fifteen
(22:40):
for something he didn't do. Now, actually when he do
make a mistake, Uh, when he do go hang on
the corner, when he when we come up on the
corner around drug does everybody sells drugs? Your first step
is to pick up a drug. So when you get
your second felony. Uh, you might be actually good at basketball.
You might have been in eleventh grade and actually one
(23:00):
of the best players on the team. And here it
comes you in a bad neighborhood. You get arrested for
something else and we don't have all your money. You
might take a deal and the deal was put this
funoni on your record. Now you've got three felonies on
your record, and you're not. They might call you a
career criminal. You're not a career criminal. This was in
the wrong mix. Basically, Now you might get fifteen years
(23:24):
for something small. You see how he told you that
the guy got fifteen Well you had to life sentence
for stilling. Now your your record, your jacket is up.
You get fifteen years. So now you trapped inside a
prison wall. You will never get a real shot at life.
And you might be good as Ben Simmons or Joe
and BIEB and you know all that went down the dream,
but for as rapids, the hundreds of it was probably
(23:46):
at least fifty guys that was actually good where I
was at when I was locked up at where if
they was on the street, we would spend time in
the studio and build the other and make music together. Fifty,
I would say, in that one prison that I know of. Recently,
hip hop recently passed can roll pop as the most
popular genre worldwide, right, and it all comes from almost
all of it comes from America. Right, So when we're
(24:08):
exporting that, we're bringing tax revenue into this country. When
guys like you are making records selling millions of records,
selling concert tickets, you're paying taxes. All that stuff goes
back into the system. Everybody is being hurt by that,
and society is being deprived of geniuses. As as you said,
basketball is another story. Right, But and and when you
talk about a scenario like that, you have a kid
(24:29):
as good as whoever you want to talk about, Simmons
or whatever. Uh, they get arrested like that, the college
scholarships going out the window. They can't play college ball now,
the whole thing. And let's say that guy was gonna
make a hundred billion dollars, not unrealistic. We have the
one of the seventi six is here, right, you're right.
We look forward to writing many checks for a hundred
million dollars because that we have that many great players.
And let me ask you that those players pay taxes
(24:49):
on those checks. Of course they do, right, huge amounts
of money coming back into the city, coming back into
the state, coming back into the country. Because those people
were the few lucky ones that managed to escape from this,
you know, sort of trapped the society has built. But
by even more than money. If you look at the
math and you say there's six point seven or six
point nine million people today in America trapped in the
(25:10):
criminal justice system. The question is what's appropriate. Like if
we just all said, if you got anyone together and said,
what do you think someone should be in prison for?
What should someone being on probation for? If you said, hey,
that person got caught smoking weed? Should any there's people
be in prison? If if if someone stole a hundred
dollars is a fifteen year old kitchen, they'd be stuck
in prison. And the amount of story Like I think
(25:33):
if you looked at the math and just said, let's
just take this top down the six point nine million
people the criminal justice system, I think you could say
if we just all said what should people be in
the system for? And not being the system, you just
took a bunch of rational people, the numbers probably half
and so to me, what's such a travesty is you've
got millions of people stuck in the criminal justice system
(25:55):
that don't belong there, and by the way, you're ruining
their lives, their families, lives, their friends lives. By the way,
there's a lot of people that belong in prison. We
want to live in a safe world, we want to
have you know, violent offenders, people that murder, people are rapists,
you know, on robbers. There's a lot of people that
belong in prison, and I want those people in prison.
But the problem is there's millions of people that shouldn't
(26:16):
be in the criminal justice system that are. And that's
the problem that needs to be addressed. And that's what
I know. Meek is really excited to help make an
impact on. I'm excited to help make an impact on
I think this is an enormous problem that's costing tens
of billions of dollars and it's ruining millions of people's lives.
So yeah, and Michael, picking up on what you were saying,
(26:37):
thirty five years ago, we had three hundred thousand people
in prison in America. Right now it's two point two million.
And I'm sure the numbers on probation and parole were
proportionately about, you know, seven times last like this one
is too And then you look at the country like Japan, right, well,
we locked and you look at Western Europe, we locked
people up at five to nine times, depending which country
you choose. The rate of the rest of the countries
(26:58):
in Western Europe below US is five times as many
per capita, right, and then when you look at we
have more people in prison just for drugs in America
that everyone in prison of all of Western Europe for everything,
and Western Europe is much more than many more people
in mestern Uar of in Northern America. And then you
get to Japan. In Japan they have approximately seventy thousand
people in prison. We probably have seventy thousand people in
(27:19):
prison and in the mid size state. Yeah, maybe even
a smaller state than this one, right, because I mean,
do the math. So they we lock people up at
fourteen times the rate per capita that Japan does. And
for anybody listening, going, yeah, but that's why we have
a lower crime rate than they do. No, you don't.
Our crimemates are the same, and there's no evidence that supports.
In fact, I think every social scientist that has studied
(27:42):
this would agree that this system is the worst system
in terms of crime and perpetuating the cycle because of
the fact that when people go to jail or prison,
as we talked about, growing up in the situation they are,
they come out there unemployable to understand. And that's something
I talked about on the show a lot, like people
that are out there that are employers take a shot
(28:02):
with somebody who was system affected, because those people will
work harder and better. You know, there's a bakery in
New York I just found out about. I saw Ted
talk about this that hires anybody who walks in system affected.
They don't even ask, and there's hugely successful. They make
all the brownies for Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Right
they sell a zillion imagine brownies. I want to a
(28:22):
lot of them right now because we have a little
weight lost pecking on. We can get this brown delivered
to him right now. If you're looking a little slimmer
the last time, Yeah no, but it's you know, that's
something that we really need to as a society start
to be much more progressive on and more empathetic. I mean,
(28:43):
I don't want to sound like some like touchy feely
person here, and I'm with you, Michael. I believe that
that's an easier problem to solve because I've actually been thinking, Look,
we employee eight thousand people between my companies, and you know,
I think if you got a bunch of business leaders
to focus on taking big companies saying what areas in
the company could start to take people right out of
prison to help rehabilitate them. I think they are actually
(29:05):
easy ways to make real progress against Like I'm actually
optimistic with a little bit of focus and energy that
real impact can be made. There a lot of those cases.
You have better employees, as you just indicated as well.
So if we we have you know, thousands of people
that manufacture a power working for film and centers, working
call centers, my point is there's you know, big opportunities
to hire people. And I think that again, if you
(29:26):
look at how many people work in America and then
how many people are coming out of prisoner jail each year.
If there's two point two million people in prison and jail,
maybe I don't know, five thousand people come out of year.
I don't think it takes a lot to get a
set of big companies to focus on helping solve this
problem well, and especially with long time offenders. Like a
long time offenders, like people who serve over teen years,
(29:46):
they spend most of the jail time working. In fact,
the reason working for the prison that their mind, they
have experience, their mind is structured, uh to just work
all day and uh memor rival was telling us he
had a program where hired like a lot of ex offenders,
and he asked me, like, how many of them messed up?
Was you in that conversation? He asked me, said, how
many you thing messed up? Out of two? Probably, like
(30:09):
I said, because I knew the number would be high,
because I know of long time offenders, people that come
home going a lot of time now they don't really
want to mess up again. He told me none out
of two. I was only two of I think this
was years ago. Robert Kraft had a real focus on
taking people that had come out of prison and hiring them.
(30:29):
And the point to your point was, there is best employees.
There's best employees. And it's interesting too. I mean, call
it luck, call it whatever you want, but I've got
I've been very fortunate, blessed whatever to be able to
help advocate successfully for clemency for dozens of people deserving
people over the years, not just people who are innocent,
but people who were primarily who are sentenced the mandatory senses,
(30:51):
crazy mandatory sensors like Lenny Singleton who you referenced earlier,
um or or Travion Blount who was sentenced to at
fifteen years old, sense to six life terms for a
robbery in which no one was hurt. Um fifteen years old,
six life terms. It made international news, like what what
in the world even is that? Like, that's it's got
to be. That should be, that should be a crown
(31:13):
to send some minds today like why and and to me,
that's the that should be the easy things to get
everyone aligned on and fix. And by the way, talk
about the state. The meek us from that I'm from
in Pennsylvania were one of three states in America that
has no cap on probation. So states have caps of
(31:35):
probation summer, three years, two years, four years. We have
no cap in Pennsylvania. So someone like me who was
separate that he was wrongfully convicted thirteen years ago appointed
a gun that didn't point a gun that cop by
the way, where multiple police officers have come for and
said it was a lie. So we have affidavits from
(31:55):
a police officer came for and said no, I was
one of the two resting officers and though he didn't
point the one. Okay, Now after that, you've still got
a system that's just completely broken. And in Pennsylvania he
gets sentenced to probation and then he does a concert
in a different state without the proper authorization and the
attack on another five years of probation, and now he's
(32:16):
got he's still a six years of probation left. He's
been operations right, so so he's got no chance to
actually succeed in that situation. I can tell you if
you put me, the Jewish kid from suburban Philadelphia on probation,
I couldn't make a year with what he needs to
go through. There's not possible. And the time funk up
(32:38):
years of my life from eighteen to thirty one. You know,
of all the people that I've been involved with and
helped get out of prison, none of them have re
offended or offended for the first time. If they were innocent,
it's probably a better way of saying it. And again
none but some will. And that's okay because because you
know what, at the end of the day, we need
to make the world a better place. And if we
get millions of people out of the criminal justice system,
(33:01):
and if you make mistakes, that's okay because there's a
lot of people that aren't in the criminal justice system
that will also make mistakes. This is never gonna be
perfect and that's someone says, hey, we should keep that
six point seven or six point nine million people stuck
in the criminal justice system. The few millions that shouldn't
be there because someone may make a mistake. Nothing's perfect
like we need we need to get it right overall.
(33:22):
And that's the same approach I take in business. We
want to make good overall decisions. We don't go for perfection.
We went for perfection. We never get anything done, of
course not. And I said, I've been lucky in that sense.
And of the people, uh of the Inncence Project, the
people that we've gotten out of a tiny percentage of
them have ever been in any sort of trouble again,
people age we're talking about real trouble, probably zero. But
(33:43):
then I got back in real trouble. A couple of
other very important topics I wanna talk touch on with you,
Meek and Michael um. One is prisons themselves and how
barbaric our prison system is when it's supposed to be
(34:06):
called the correctional institution and we know that that is
the farthest thing from the truth in most cases. And
the other is how important it is for people to
get out and vote, because I don't think we can
have this conversation without talking about that, and some people.
I've heard somebody say, we don't need criminal justice before,
we need a criminal justice revolution. So which one do
(34:27):
you want to take on first of those? So we
could talk voting in UH. This coming from my coach
on where we come from. This goes far us back
when I say, like the other side of America where
people don't even believe like that world tends to us.
And I used to think that, but that was deeply false.
And one of my jobs is trying to teach people
the ropes of how voting go because it's even with
(34:50):
a judge trying to lock me up for what going
over a bridge. Basically, we voted for her UH district
attorneys where they enforced mandatory minimums and they enforced locking
people up for smoking marijuana and things like that. We
vote for them. We have to be the ones that vote.
And in our culture, the black community, a lot of
(35:11):
us don't vote. So it's like community, Yeah, you know,
I I don't really know. I knew that in our
community we don't vote at all. I don't even know
anybody in my age at the age of eighteen, we
ever got up as a group and everybody wanted to vote.
It was like never a thing we didn't believe in it.
So my new thing is to teach the younger people
from our culture that come up, well all younger people
(35:31):
that come up, that voting is important because you know,
we have to live under these laws that these people
are creating, and if we don't vote, we don't have
a voice at all. It's like you don't even count.
And a lot of times you look at TV. They
had a campaign that said vote or die. I always
see any but I never really knew what it meant.
It was that that problem is like eighteen years old.
When they did that campaign, I never really understood it.
(35:53):
But nowadays I understood. It's like you either a vote,
are you get housed under regime which will eventually league
kill you if not by Jael not by keeping you
in a ruthless environment, it will turn out bad for you, basically.
And I just believe that if we vote, if we
make our president don't like justice reform. Justice reform right
(36:14):
now is the number one topic in America. Probably if
we make this topic big enough politically, a lot of
people would have to lean towards being leaning on these
topics in but I want you as leaning, I'd say appropriate, Yeah,
I'd say I'd say punishment that fits the crime, because
by the way, I'm not leaning. I want to appropriate punishment.
And that was right. That was that was definitely right.
(36:36):
And you know, I've been on the board of Families
Against Mandatory Minimums, which a great organization, for over twenty
five years now, and our motto is let the punishment
fit the crime. Yeah. I mean, nobody's advocating for chaos.
Nobody wants a society that is like, you know, I
want to feel I want to feel safe everybody. I
want my daughter to be safe. I want your family
sat kids to be safe. Situations though that the crimes
(36:59):
are boots so high up, it's like, what is lenient?
But I'll make something really simple. I would saying, how
many people are in prison and jail today, we're on
probation because they have a drug problem. Probably it's more
than a million. Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm not talking about
selling drugs anyone who smoked weed. How could you possibly
we just become illegal everywhere? How could you possibly put
(37:20):
someone in the criminal trust system for doing something that's
becoming legal? Absolutely? No sense. Someone had a problem with perkison,
why do you send him to jail? Sending the rehab
makes no sense. So to me, that's where the punishment
needs to fit the crime. I would take everybody who
has a drug problem, would get them help, so get
stop the drug problem. But it's like it's deep as this.
Like if I sell drugs and the cops come to
(37:40):
my house and I'm not there, my mom get found
guilty for these drugs in my house. People moms are
getting thirty years in prison and federal prison for stuff
like that. Like your mom got thirty years in prison.
That's a life sentence. That's death. Yeah, that's defin. Don't
want to extend you to prison. Even though she might
preach to you every day that you're selling drugs, you're
getting out of my house and she knows it's wrong,
(38:01):
but you her son. If you're in a car with
someone who's got drugs and you get pulled over and
they find the drugs, it belongs to everybody unless somebody
takes responsibility for it, and nobody ever does. Nobody ever goes,
oh yeah, those are mine, right, So this is how
crazy the system is, where you could just be next
to someone who's doing something wrong. And then I'm not
even talking about full in instance, I'm just talking about like, say,
(38:23):
if you come from where I come from, like your
mom on a crack, she's a strung out fan. You're
thirteen years old, you got a seven year old sister,
and you're coming in the house. It's just baking soda
and butter and infrigerating. When you go out and look
out the windows, people in the corner selling weed, marijuana,
craig cocaine, and they're running in fast cash, and your
little sister don't got nothing to eat. The first thing
(38:45):
you're gonna do is go outside and pick up like
this is like normal, Like Mike, if you was in
a situation, I bet a million dollars on it that
you would go outside and pick out of a drug.
If Kylie was in the house, you fourteen, my heart
everybody to work for me to do I'm saying I'm
talking about you know, I'm talking about it if you
don't have any of this going on, and you're poor,
(39:05):
like you don't have any family in the house, and
you come see Kylie and it is but by that
that's also where and that person have no punishment. No,
but may be set to jail for thirty years, especially
ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And that's why I said
to me, but even if you bring it down to
ten years, ten years will ruin your life. So like
what they got is leaning is not even leaning, Like
(39:26):
it's the rates of bootsteps so high, like what they
call like I watch media and social send him to prison.
Like even when people be like, he should have went
to prison, broke probation, even if I did break probation.
If I did commit a crime ten years ago and
I broke probation, people are like, send them back to prison.
I'm like, do you know what prison is? And like
(39:46):
when I say shackled up in a cage, I mean
like shack of real chains. When you take a baby
step is cutting your legs and like the same thing
you see in the slavery movie. It's the same thing.
And I'm like, do people really understand what they're saying,
like send him to prison, Like Mike Cain to myself,
Mike was like, he was like, it's not bad as
it could be. I'm gonna hit I'm like, oh, but
that's because I'm an optimistic person and I always want
(40:07):
to look at things positively. And it's ten degrees. I
don't have a tallest seat. The water that I'm coming
out of my sink is the same water connected to
the tallt is filthy, like it's like it's ten mices
in my cell and night running around you like is
you can't even imagine it? And I'm like, I'm here.
I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't kill anybody. I didn't.
(40:29):
By the way, the thing that bothers me so much,
the amount of people I've told about your story and
everyone it's now proven that you were wrongfully convicted because
we have a cop who was one of the two
arresting officers who signed Appa David saying no, you didn't
point the gun, which what you were charged for. Yeah,
and your probation violations where you popped a wheelie on
a motorcycle, you broke up a fight in an airport.
(40:51):
Yet there are people say put them back in jail
for ten years, which is it shows how backwards so
many people are in this country as well. Just when
you speak in jail that is like it's just like
a place of hotel where you go to sit that
now it's some ship that will waring your whole train
of thought, Like you went here, like the matchs sleeping
on is probably four inches thick, and then after that
(41:12):
is metal and cement, like you got this guy's eighty
years old sleeping on mattress and stuff. Like they didn't
kill anybody. They may have been on im probation, and
they felling the after felling in you eight years. Oh
you you're poor. You've been in the system so long.
It's hard to explain. You have to see it and
be there. Like even what they do with juveniles, they
got juveniles locked in cages. These are submit cages that
(41:36):
they had these kids and and most of these kids
didn't kill anybody something. I was so proud of you.
But it's a scary story. So the day that I
brought Robert Craft to visit make in prison, we were
sitting there and we were just kind of talking. I
was really just kind of listening to Robert Meek talking.
Robert looked at me and he said, you know, I
(41:56):
don't understand how how you're handling this. So how are
you so hot? He said, Like, last time I was
with you, we were on a plane flying to an
All Star game and you were on the top of
the world. Now you're in an orange jumpsuit, locked in prison.
You've got a smile from me. You're gonna ear to
ear and make. He's generally pretty quick with his answer.
(42:16):
You thought about it for about thirty seconds, and he
looked at Robert. He said, you know, it's been my
entire adult life. I was wrongfully convicted for a crime
in and commit I've been sent back to prison multiple times,
never committed a new crime. But this is the first
time people actually fighting for me, and that makes me
so happy. So for me, I was mortified at the situation,
(42:37):
but completely proud of how well he was handling that
horrific situation. This is the best situation I've ever been
in far as dealing with the system, with having like
real credible people stand behind me, because, like Mike said,
I'm telling him, like, yo, if y'all had guns in here,
you're not even police officers. If I came in here, oh,
you'll have firearms. And I came in here point of
gun nine times out of tim where would I be that?
(43:00):
Of course against the cops are trained to neutralize people
who calls threat towards their lives, like this is like normal,
Like you get away with this, this is what you
should do. You're trained to do this, not me one
on one with a cop like and you know, one
on want anybody could get scared and want to run away. No,
(43:20):
this is a group of cops doing a full blown
read and me being accused of pointing the gun at
all of them. And so me one more question before
I do that. I want to remind people who are
listening vote, vote and vote and voting your local races
and your d as racist and your judges racist. Your
vote counts. We have racist that actually ended up tied.
(43:42):
I mean your vote counts. And judge don't have to
be white against the black to be racist. It could
be white on white racism. It could be black on
black racism. And make sure you vote for the right people.
When when you're vote for judges, nobody really knows because
you just see a judge on the d you can
make good decisions and people knew when they vote it
(44:02):
for the d A in Pennsylvania that he was a
more thoughtful person on the criminal justice system and been
lots of new das that have had much more modern approaches.
That approach hasn't been locked everybody up and put all
black American prison. It's been let's have an accurate punishment
for a crime. And that's who you should be voting for.
And I'm gonna say one more thing before I turned
the last question over to you, which is, everybody who's
(44:24):
out there, at some point you're gonna get asked to
serve on a jury and nobody likes it. We get
those things in the mail, We're like, oh my god,
I got a time for this. Whatever is a big pay.
You gotta go because when you go, there might be
a meek Mill in front of you. There might be
somebody else who's making and Eric Ritta get fund of
your case that all three of us are involved with,
(44:45):
and we're gonna get him out come hell or high water.
So get up, get out and go vote, and go
serve on the jury because I ask you save could
be your own. And now, rather than ask a final question,
I'm just gonna do what I at the end of
the show, which is I always say it's my favorite
part of the show, and I think it's probably the
audiences favorite part of the show too, which is when
(45:05):
I stop talking and just turned the Mica over to
you for final last words, and Michael, I'm gonna let
you go first and then Meeke and back clean up
and close out the show. So, Michael, what would you
want to tell people? How could they get involved? What
can they do? What's what's the solution? Well, I think
we're in a great position because I actually think this
(45:27):
is a big problem that needs to be addressed. I
think it's gonna be I think it would just take
common sense to this juicy problem. We're gonna make the
world a better place. And I'm actually for a guy
who had absolutely zero point zero exposure to the criminal
justice system until I met Meek, and then still really
didn't understand it until November six of last year. I'm
(45:48):
really optimistic because I believe that this is a completely
broken system that with a lot of focus and energy,
we can make the country a much better place than
to me, that's exciting. So you know what I would say,
everybody is make a difference. I didn't make any difference
until seven months ago. And I'm actually you know, I've
got three great businesses that I run, and I've got
a great daughter and great family and friends. Yet I'm
(46:08):
as energized about this as anything because I see how
broken it is and I see how much fixing it needs.
Mieke last words and before you even go, I want
to thank you and Michael. Thank you for not just
for being on the show, but for lending your voice
and your energy and your your money and your time
to this movement. Thank you for your focus. What you're
(46:29):
doing is incredible. You've been at this for twenty five years.
Week's been sucking the system for thirteen years, and I've
been at this for seven months. So thank you. Well,
I'm older than yours, I've had more time none but yeah,
it's it's an obsession and I'm not going to stop
until we fix it together. So but anyway, so thank
you both again for being here and sharing your your
thoughts and your and your energy, your collective wisdom. Sonick,
(46:51):
what are your last words for the audiences out there?
My last words to the audience just now, I'm dedicated. Uh,
this is a live mission. Actually suffer from the criminal
justice system for over ten years, and you know, uh,
I actually walked the walk on the other side of
the wall with some innocent men who I know are
basically suffering and families are suffering, so you know, I
(47:15):
felt the pain first hand, and you know, I'm gonna
continue to do what I need to do to help
make change and not fix the system, but break the
system completely and rebuild it again. Because the way we
lived and the things we've been through with the system,
it doesn't even take crime or or take being a
villain to go to jail, you know what I'm saying.
And you know it's it's thousands of millions of people
(47:37):
trapped inside on the other side of the wall, that
actually need help. And you know, I think this is
the right season to make changing, putting all my efforts
into it, and hopefully, you know, we make change within
the next few years and a free a lot of
people from the prison system. Don't forget to give us
(47:59):
a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(48:21):
is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one
On January twenty third, two thousand seven, in order to
obtain a search warrant, a narcotics officer claimed to have
seen Meek mill selling crack out of his home. The
following day, Meek was stopped on his way to a
corner store and they found a gun. He was badly beaten,
arrested for illegal possession of a firearm, and later charged
(00:21):
with assaulting arresting officers who claimed that he had pointed
the gun at them. In two thousand eight, due to
the cost, Meek waved a jury trial, was tried for
drug and weapons charges and sentenced to two years prison
plus eight years probation, which kicked off his storied clash
with Judge Genie Sprinkley. Over the decade that followed, parole
(00:43):
tight restrictions and his contentious relationship with Brinkley made more
punishment almost than inevitability. In November of two thousand seventeen,
she sentenced him to at least two more years in
prison for alleged violations, including popping a wheelie without a helmet.
This gained plenty of outrage and public support, largely due
(01:06):
to a police department whistleblower who exposed Meek's two thousand
and seven arresting officer as a liar and a thief.
His two thousand eight conviction was overturned. He was granted
a new trial under a new judge, bringing his two
thousand seven criminal case and probation to a long overdue
close in August of two thousand nineteen. However, his litigation
(01:30):
was still ongoing at the time of this episode. It's
original release, Meek Mills Notoriety shines a light on the
regularity legalized harassment by authorities and the recidivism that results.
A docuseries chronicling his legal saga called Free Meek, is
now streaming on Prime Video, and Meek's friend Michael Rubin,
(01:50):
one of the owners of Philadelphia seventy six, is joined
us for a discussion that unfortunately is as relevant today
as it was back then. This is Wrong Contion with
Jason Flam. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm.
(02:18):
That's me and today we have an extraordinary show and
you're about to find out why today's guest is the
one and only Meek mill Um and Michael Rubin is
with him and Meek. You need no introduction, but welcome
to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me Man. I
appreciate you for bring me on the show. I appreciate
all the work you're doing, and we're gonna get into
(02:39):
that right away. But with him is Michael Rubin m
who is the owner of this Philadelphia seventy sixers and
has an amazing background as an entrepreneur and businessman, but
who has become a tremendous advocate for criminal justice reform
and is about to really shake things up. So Michael,
(03:00):
I'm thrilled to have you in the movement, and I'm
glad you're here on the Showy, thanks for everything you're doing.
I'm glad to be here. So Meek, one of the
reasons I wanted to have you on the show is
because your original case was in fact a wrongful conviction,
and that's something a lot of people don't understand. And
there's a lot more they don't understand about the circumstances
(03:23):
in which you were arrested and how this nightmare saga,
which is now in his second decade in the criminal
justice system, has unfolded. And it's important to tell this
story because it shines a light on so many aspects
(03:44):
of what's wrong with the criminal justice system. And we're
here in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, not Philadelphia, Mississippi. But even still,
the system here has been so backwards for so long,
and you were born right into the thick of it.
I mean, let's talk about that. Because US seven. So
the number of people in cars for the United States
stayed relatively constant from nineteen hundred till about nineteen seventy,
(04:08):
and then it went crazy. It doubled and tripled and quadrupled,
and Philadelphia was a hotspot, and you were born into
a situation in which black men were being incarcerated at
rates that were unprecedented actually in the history of the world.
There's a book that really touches on everything that you
(04:28):
went through, called On the Run by Alice Goffman, Princeton, PhD.
Sociologists who went and lived on sixth Streets in Philadelphia.
She said, in the first eighteen months that I spent
in the the neighborhood, at least once a day, I watched
the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, searched them,
run their name for warrants, asked them to come in
for questioning or making arrest. In that same eighteen month period,
I watched the police breakdown doors, search houses and question,
(04:50):
arrest or chase people through houses fifty two times. Nine
times police her helicopters circle overhead and beam search lights
on the local streets. I noticed blocks taped off in
traffic be directed this police search for evidence fourteen times
during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I
watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat
young men with their nightsticks. That's what the situation was like.
(05:14):
It's what it still is like, and that's what has
to change. Can you talk about that about how you
grew up and how this you know, it was almost
almost a faded complete you know. I come from Philadelphia,
actually the North North Philadelphia which now is like called
the Temple area, and uh, you know, we grew up
in an environments where like drug infestive environments where a
(05:36):
lot of violence, a lot of drugs, a lot of
things taking place. So it's like you could be standing
in the wrong place and lose your life, or you
could be standing in the wrong place and get charged
with a crime you didn't do. That was just like normal. Actually,
I've been hanging with my friend p mind probably fifteen
years and I remember back he went to jail when
he was probably about fifteen years old. He just turned
(05:57):
thirty one, and like, yeah, the first time I went
to prison, he said, a white guy just pulled up
in the back of a car and just pointing at
me on the car and said, I arrobbed him for
seven dollars, but he had three and eighty dollars in
his pocket, and he went to jail for that. He
ended up doing I think like two years and that
in the juvenile facility. But that wasn't the worst part.
(06:18):
The worst part was he got a felony on this
record for arm robbery. And you know, if you know him,
he's not like, uh, it's not robbery, he's not robbery.
And his system, Uh, he made mistakes in his life.
But me being around him, I never knew that. But
I witnessed that so many times. I wouldn't have standing
on the corner and the cop pull up with for
a Mexican guy in the back, and I don't know
(06:40):
to Sometimes we say in the our world, in the
sarcastic way of being funny, we always be like, uh,
white people look the same to us. Some of my
wife friends were like oh black people were saying to us.
But sometimes that is the case with people and they
just pull up and they point people out, and you
stand there on the cops pull up and just be like,
(07:00):
I hope this guy don't point me out. And that's
just one of the scenarios out of a million scenarios,
being caught in the middle of poverty, uh, drug infesting
neighborhood with people are getting robbed left and right where
you know, cops locking people have left and right just
to get stripes on that record. You know what I'm saying.
And we grew up in that and you know, at
eight years old, I was caught up in that system.
(07:22):
And even though I've been on the path ever since
of doing spectacle in my life from where I come from,
that same system is still haunting me and haunking me down,
even at the age of thirty one and having a
record deal and being able to handle business and work,
and still haunted me to pull me back to the
same system where I just left eleven years ago. And
(07:45):
you just brought up a very important point, which is
that we know from decades of research now that cross
racial identifications are extremely unreliable identications in general are unreliable
because when people witness a crime, especially violent crime, they're
d don'tly goes crazy and the perception gets screwy and
the brain doesn't function properly, so it almost becomes like guessing,
(08:06):
but it gets even worse. And there's a movement now
in various places to try to put in a system
where a jury has to be instructed in a case
in which across racial identification is an important factor that
these things are as unreliable as they are because they
need to know, but in most cases they don't know.
They just think of an identification is the most powerful
(08:27):
thing in the core roam too. I pointed you and
goes that to him. You know, it's hard for a
jury to see past that. Yeah, it's like it's a neighborhood.
We all wearing white teas of the summer two thousand
and three, everybody white T shirts is the popular thing
to wear denim shirts. And you got a guy, he
might be Asian. He pull up on the corner. We
all seven of us got braids, and four of us
(08:47):
got a little cuts, but we all look the same.
The ones that got braised to him, that's just you
allow to repick to get caught up in the system,
like whoever you point out, that's you, and you better
hope you don't hand no felonies on your record already
because you might go to jail for a long time.
And sociologically speaking, and this goes back again to the
seventies and eighties. Right at the same time that they
(09:07):
were rolling back welfare and other programs for the urban poor,
they were ramping up the policing and they were Now
you created the perfect storm because what was happening was
you had these these systems coming for tracking arrest You
had so many more cops in fact, and I think
in Philadelphia six more police decade over decade than they
(09:28):
were before, and they had to make arrests. So whereas
before they were largely ignoring what was going on in
the community, now there were heightened penalties for not just
for violent crimes, but also for all kinds of different
drug crimes, for vagrancy, for trespassing, for anything. And they
were in a position where they were arresting people left
and right and creating this permanent underclass. And Michael, you know,
(09:51):
obviously you grew up here too, right, but your situation
must have been very different, very different world. I grew
up maybe twenty minutes from Make, but Make used all
the said to me, and we used to have this
argument for years. He'd said to mean, Michael, there is
two Americans. And I'd be like, like, dude, shut up,
there's like there's there's one America. Like stop, you know,
like you're doing great, Like you know, I didn't understand,
Like what are you telling about these two worlds? We
(10:12):
live in one great country. And and you know, he
would argue about all the time. And I remember the
day that that Meek got sentenced November six, two thousand
and seventeen, he called me from the Philadelphia job before
they transferred to a different jail and said, he said,
you see, I told you this is what happens to
the black people, right, And I just like that, you
know what I said, You're right, I was wrong, and
there is two worlds. And you know, for me, November six,
(10:34):
two thousand seventeen was really a life change in a moment,
because I would never have been able to understand. I
really believe, and I don't think anybody would be able
to believe how crazy a circumstance he was living in
because it didn't seem possible until you sat in the courtroom.
And even people that have come to later court hearings
of Judge Brinkley have said, I've heard everything about this,
(10:56):
but I didn't believe it until I actually saw it,
and it's so crazy. So for sure, I grew up
in a completely different environment. But Meek always told me
from the diametom. Remember we were at a NBA All
Star game, and you know, within a few minutes, you know,
Meek realized I was involved with the Philadephia seventy six ers,
and I was telling me a little bit about his background.
(11:16):
He told me he was charged for pointing a gun
at multiple cops. And he said to me, like, you know,
I didn't do that. If I pointed, you know, a
gun of multiple cops, I'd be dead. Like I heard him,
but I didn't really comprehend it. And then like, if
I've told that story to people in the last seven months,
every person from law enforcement to politics to anyone who
(11:39):
understands anything, they all said the same thing. He's right,
He beat that no one would pull a gun multiple
cops and not get shot. And Meek can't obviously talk
about the case because the case is still unfortunately going on,
which is crazy in itself, right, But I mean you're
talking about a guy who was wrongfully convicted when he
was eighteen years old of a crime that he didn't commit.
(12:00):
It's been sent back to jail multiple times, never committed
a new crime, and he's the perfect example someone who's
been stuck in a completely broken criminal justice system for
crimeing and commit and it's now thirteen years later and
it's still going on, and that shows how broken the
criminal justice system is. It's incredible. You know, we have
two point two million people in prison in America and
(12:23):
including jail, other four and a half million people in
probation and parole. Yeah, I mean the latest figure I
heard was four point eight, right, And and when once
we accept those figures, you also have to accept the
fact that we now have, between jail, prison, probation, and parole,
we have more black people were mostly men, under criminal
justice supervision in America than all the slaves at the
(12:45):
height of slavery in America in the eighteen fifties or
sixties whatever that was. What are we doing? Well, It's
like Michael Alexanders is the new Jim Crow. What words
can't explain, is Meek is still on probation for something
that we've already said he didn't do, and it's been
going on for thirteen years from the original wrongful conviction,
(13:06):
but he can't like, you can't live that way, Like
I say, I joke with him, I feel like I'm
on probation because I'm worried about just something going wrong
with him. If he decides to leave a state day
early because something changed with the schedule, or he gets
you know, someone says, hey, I'm gonna pay you to
go to this concert. I want to go, and I
have the proper days of permission, the judge will try
to violate him. I mean, it's the system is chasing
(13:26):
him and trying to violate and and that's not what
probation is supposed to be about, rehabilitating somebody, not trying
to catch them and send that back to prison. And
something that someone told me recently, and you know, I've
now become too familiar with this, but seventy people that
go back to jail once they've been in jail in
prison are going back for technical probation violations. Like to me,
virtually none of those people should be you know you
(13:48):
had a technical probation violation. Right, he didn't commit a crime.
You were late for your probation officers, so you you know,
didn't pay a certain amount of money. You you know,
you traveled out of the state. You know he went
to his son in New Jersey because he lives in Pennsylvania.
And you can be violated and sent back to jail.
This is lunacy. This is absolute lunacy. And I want,
I'm really glad you brought that up, Michael, because I
don't want to get your take on this week because
(14:09):
in a lot of the reforms that are underway right now,
there's this hidden caveat or this hidden nightmare i'll call it,
of enhanced probation and other ways of the government keeping
people under control. So to me, a true crime reform
bill should eliminate those problems. And you obviously can speak
(14:30):
firsthand about just how restrictive that is. And Michael has
said very eloquently, when you have seventy people going back
to jail or prison because they have some technical violation,
that's insane. Right. Can you talk about that, because I'm
very concerned that they're sneaking these devils into the details
in these new crime bills that are going to allow
them to maintain this control. There's no other way to
(14:53):
look at it over millions of people's lives. And there's
a profit center in there for a lot of people too. Uh.
It's more then it's saying to me, I take it
as deep as like he said, I could go see
my son in New Jersey and actually be locked in
a cage and be locked in change check who from
like angle defeat for the crime of going from Pennsylvania
to New Jersey. That's what I'm saying, and being facetious
(15:16):
for the crime and quotes. I'll tell you this right now,
Judge Brinkley is dying to do that too. She's trying
to right now today, I promise you she's sitting in
her house obsessed about how she can figure out how
to put them back in jail for nothing. And he
can't talk about that, but I can't. I'm telling you
straight up, that's what's going on. It's it's really bizarre.
(15:37):
I mean, as a country, why would we want I mean,
these are our tax dollars, right and it and it
hurts the average taxpayer, even if you're somebody who's not
particularly concerned about criminal justice reform, or you think a
lot of people or you maybe you think you're tough
on crime or whatever. It might be. The money that's
being spent to lock people like you meet up right
(16:00):
and to keep you under supervision, and it's bloated and
and draconian system is pure insanity. I mean that money
could be spent. I mean I know that at one time,
and at one time, I don't even know if it's
still true. But a few years ago I checked and California,
which a lot of people think it was in a
progressive state, was spending more money locking people up than
(16:22):
they were educating people. And we fact checked that. But
it's absolutely staggering. And the crazy thing is these are Americans.
There are fellow people, you know, I say the politicians
when I talk to him, Like, you know, if another
country treated our people the way we treat our people,
we'd invade this stuff. We wouldn't even do to our pets,
you know what I'm saying, Like you wouldn't lock your
pet in the medal cell. For sometimes we get locked in.
(16:46):
And I say we because I've been through this experience
so many times, and like, sometimes we get locked in
a room for twenty three hours a day for a month,
two weeks, some people actually even years. You know what
I'm saying. It's like they say, when you come home,
it's a violation to be around felons. And how is
it a violation to be around felons when you just
(17:06):
had me locked up amongst thousands of felons? Like what
rule is this? I'm glad you brought it up too,
because that's another thing that creates this visious the way
you think about it. In the environment you grew up,
what percentage of people that live on your block have
had a felony? Right, So what you're saying is essentially
anyone can put you back in prison because there's a
(17:29):
rule that says you can't be around felons, But everyone
you grew up with has a felony. If somebody really
made that an issue, I would probably go to jail
any day. Because if I go to the studio with
a rapper and we make a song, I don't know
his record, but you don't know. Would you have to
have a like a database that at all times most
people can't afford that, I mean, and you're not going
to do it in the fact is I'm just quoting
(17:50):
a statistic here. One in four black children born in
nineteen had an imprisoned father by the time he or
she turned fourteen, right and then, and the numbers just
get worse and worse. I mean, thirty of black man
without college educations today we'll have been to prison by
their men thirties and spent up to a year in prison.
I mean that's without college educations. And the numbers go
to sixty when you look at blackmails without high school education,
(18:13):
sixty of blackmails out high school education was spent a
year in prison or jail before their thirtieth birthday. What
are we doing? And the fact is it's actually impossible
to succeed, which is why I'm always amazed when somebody
does come from the background that you came from and
make it, because with that cycle, how do you do it?
They've created a mind field that you can't walk through. Right,
(18:35):
once you get arrested, You're gonna get re arrested no
matter what you do. Pretty much, and like like me
and Mike, we just been the hour My just teaching
me about financial stuff and like texts and things that
like when we're growing up from like age thirteen to
twenty years old. We probably invest ninety five percent of
(18:58):
our thinking time and how to SE five and these
type of conditions because it's like almost impossible to survive.
So like you gotta put like your all into how
this even my mind framed now, I still like, even
though I travel the world, is still installed in my mind.
It's still like something that is like I might come
into a certain situation in a certain area and I
(19:18):
go into survival moll and and I have the double back,
and like this is not even that type of environment
where I don't live this type of life anymore, but
it's always installed inside of my head. You know what
I'm saying that coming from environments like that, like you
said sixty, where I come from, it feel like it's ninety.
Like do that count death probably go up to probably
(19:41):
young black men being murdered, uh going to prison probably
sixty plus another thirty make I've heard you talk about this.
You know, how many people do you know that you
were close with, you had a real relationship with it
have been murdered. That's that's you know, how many I know?
I'm in zero? You know how many I know they've
been close? Zero? So you're talking about, yeah, different environments.
(20:05):
So yeah, that's crazy that we have two shepherd systems
of justice in America, one for people with money and
one for people without, and one for people who are
of color and one for people who are not. And
when and when you hit the reverse jack part of
being a person of color without being born into a
wealthy family, which is a huge majority. And you don't
even have to come from a wealthy family to like
not be around somebody that was murder. It's really like territorial,
(20:29):
Like I got one of my songs what I'm talking about,
like like we've being put in groups in certain areas,
even with public house and public house, and it's really
across Philadelphia. So if you grow grow up less fortunate,
they're sticking people in certain areas if you pay attention
to it, Like it's North Philadelphia, but not the whole
North Philadelphia is a certain part in South Philadelphia. It's
a rich part of South Philadelphia where like houses costs
(20:52):
a million dollars and then you got some houses that
cost forty They only move in this cin certain areas.
And I always say this, like if you take a drone,
the main line of Philadelphia is like City Line Avenue
where my apartments used to be. At City Line Avenue,
you take a drone and then you make the drone
go high in the sky, and if the drone had
a zoom and kazoom on this side of the left
(21:13):
and right, you will see it's quiet as peace here
and his chaos going here. And you take a kid
from over here and let him spending three summers in
this area, he will be less. He won't be the
way the chaos says. He would turn to be more
lean like these people in this area. And I witnessed
that with my family. I used to have a nephew.
(21:33):
He lived in the projects. He used to cuss, He's
seen a lot of things. He used to act up
in school, and you know, he moved to a suburban
area and his whole life changed within two years. It
was just that simple. For a long time, I've been pondering,
(21:56):
thinking about, obsessed with the idea of with the grim
statistics and scenario that we're painting here, and you're exactly
I want to ask this question, how many people as
talented as you are either got shot or got locked
up in prison and society as a result it's being
deprived of those talents and all the revenue and all
(22:19):
the culture that would have come from that. How many
jay zs are there that didn't make it out and
ended up in prison thousands, you know what I'm saying.
I know it's guys in there and locked the way
as talented as me, you know what I'm saying. And
they're probably there for felonies on felonies. And when you say,
like when people label you as a felon, like, how
it's that my friend or a felon? He was fifteen
(22:40):
for something he didn't do. Now, actually when he do
make a mistake, Uh, when he do go hang on
the corner, when he when we come up on the
corner around drug does everybody sells drugs? Your first step
is to pick up a drug. So when you get
your second felony. Uh, you might be actually good at basketball.
You might have been in eleventh grade and actually one
(23:00):
of the best players on the team. And here it
comes you in a bad neighborhood. You get arrested for
something else and we don't have all your money. You
might take a deal and the deal was put this
funoni on your record. Now you've got three felonies on
your record, and you're not. They might call you a
career criminal. You're not a career criminal. This was in
the wrong mix. Basically, Now you might get fifteen years
(23:24):
for something small. You see how he told you that
the guy got fifteen Well you had to life sentence
for stilling. Now your your record, your jacket is up.
You get fifteen years. So now you trapped inside a
prison wall. You will never get a real shot at life.
And you might be good as Ben Simmons or Joe
and BIEB and you know all that went down the dream,
but for as rapids, the hundreds of it was probably
(23:46):
at least fifty guys that was actually good where I
was at when I was locked up at where if
they was on the street, we would spend time in
the studio and build the other and make music together. Fifty,
I would say, in that one prison that I know of. Recently,
hip hop recently passed can roll pop as the most
popular genre worldwide, right, and it all comes from almost
all of it comes from America. Right, So when we're
(24:08):
exporting that, we're bringing tax revenue into this country. When
guys like you are making records selling millions of records,
selling concert tickets, you're paying taxes. All that stuff goes
back into the system. Everybody is being hurt by that,
and society is being deprived of geniuses. As as you said,
basketball is another story. Right, But and and when you
talk about a scenario like that, you have a kid
(24:29):
as good as whoever you want to talk about, Simmons
or whatever. Uh, they get arrested like that, the college
scholarships going out the window. They can't play college ball now,
the whole thing. And let's say that guy was gonna
make a hundred billion dollars, not unrealistic. We have the
one of the seventi six is here, right, you're right.
We look forward to writing many checks for a hundred
million dollars because that we have that many great players.
And let me ask you that those players pay taxes
(24:49):
on those checks. Of course they do, right, huge amounts
of money coming back into the city, coming back into
the state, coming back into the country. Because those people
were the few lucky ones that managed to escape from this,
you know, sort of trapped the society has built. But
by even more than money. If you look at the
math and you say there's six point seven or six
point nine million people today in America trapped in the
(25:10):
criminal justice system. The question is what's appropriate. Like if
we just all said, if you got anyone together and said,
what do you think someone should be in prison for?
What should someone being on probation for? If you said, hey,
that person got caught smoking weed? Should any there's people
be in prison? If if if someone stole a hundred
dollars is a fifteen year old kitchen, they'd be stuck
in prison. And the amount of story Like I think
(25:33):
if you looked at the math and just said, let's
just take this top down the six point nine million
people the criminal justice system, I think you could say
if we just all said what should people be in
the system for? And not being the system, you just
took a bunch of rational people, the numbers probably half
and so to me, what's such a travesty is you've
got millions of people stuck in the criminal justice system
(25:55):
that don't belong there, and by the way, you're ruining
their lives, their families, lives, their friends lives. By the way,
there's a lot of people that belong in prison. We
want to live in a safe world, we want to
have you know, violent offenders, people that murder, people are rapists,
you know, on robbers. There's a lot of people that
belong in prison, and I want those people in prison.
But the problem is there's millions of people that shouldn't
(26:16):
be in the criminal justice system that are. And that's
the problem that needs to be addressed. And that's what
I know. Meek is really excited to help make an
impact on. I'm excited to help make an impact on
I think this is an enormous problem that's costing tens
of billions of dollars and it's ruining millions of people's lives.
So yeah, and Michael, picking up on what you were saying,
(26:37):
thirty five years ago, we had three hundred thousand people
in prison in America. Right now it's two point two million.
And I'm sure the numbers on probation and parole were
proportionately about, you know, seven times last like this one
is too And then you look at the country like Japan, right, well,
we locked and you look at Western Europe, we locked
people up at five to nine times, depending which country
you choose. The rate of the rest of the countries
(26:58):
in Western Europe below US is five times as many
per capita, right, and then when you look at we
have more people in prison just for drugs in America
that everyone in prison of all of Western Europe for everything,
and Western Europe is much more than many more people
in mestern Uar of in Northern America. And then you
get to Japan. In Japan they have approximately seventy thousand
people in prison. We probably have seventy thousand people in
(27:19):
prison and in the mid size state. Yeah, maybe even
a smaller state than this one, right, because I mean,
do the math. So they we lock people up at
fourteen times the rate per capita that Japan does. And
for anybody listening, going, yeah, but that's why we have
a lower crime rate than they do. No, you don't.
Our crimemates are the same, and there's no evidence that supports.
In fact, I think every social scientist that has studied
(27:42):
this would agree that this system is the worst system
in terms of crime and perpetuating the cycle because of
the fact that when people go to jail or prison,
as we talked about, growing up in the situation they are,
they come out there unemployable to understand. And that's something
I talked about on the show a lot, like people
that are out there that are employers take a shot
(28:02):
with somebody who was system affected, because those people will
work harder and better. You know, there's a bakery in
New York I just found out about. I saw Ted
talk about this that hires anybody who walks in system affected.
They don't even ask, and there's hugely successful. They make
all the brownies for Ben and Jerry's ice cream. Right
they sell a zillion imagine brownies. I want to a
(28:22):
lot of them right now because we have a little
weight lost pecking on. We can get this brown delivered
to him right now. If you're looking a little slimmer
the last time, Yeah no, but it's you know, that's
something that we really need to as a society start
to be much more progressive on and more empathetic. I mean,
(28:43):
I don't want to sound like some like touchy feely
person here, and I'm with you, Michael. I believe that
that's an easier problem to solve because I've actually been thinking, Look,
we employee eight thousand people between my companies, and you know,
I think if you got a bunch of business leaders
to focus on taking big companies saying what areas in
the company could start to take people right out of
prison to help rehabilitate them. I think they are actually
(29:05):
easy ways to make real progress against Like I'm actually
optimistic with a little bit of focus and energy that
real impact can be made. There a lot of those cases.
You have better employees, as you just indicated as well.
So if we we have you know, thousands of people
that manufacture a power working for film and centers, working
call centers, my point is there's you know, big opportunities
to hire people. And I think that again, if you
(29:26):
look at how many people work in America and then
how many people are coming out of prisoner jail each year.
If there's two point two million people in prison and jail,
maybe I don't know, five thousand people come out of year.
I don't think it takes a lot to get a
set of big companies to focus on helping solve this
problem well, and especially with long time offenders. Like a
long time offenders, like people who serve over teen years,
(29:46):
they spend most of the jail time working. In fact,
the reason working for the prison that their mind, they
have experience, their mind is structured, uh to just work
all day and uh memor rival was telling us he
had a program where hired like a lot of ex offenders,
and he asked me, like, how many of them messed up?
Was you in that conversation? He asked me, said, how
many you thing messed up? Out of two? Probably, like
(30:09):
I said, because I knew the number would be high,
because I know of long time offenders, people that come
home going a lot of time now they don't really
want to mess up again. He told me none out
of two. I was only two of I think this
was years ago. Robert Kraft had a real focus on
taking people that had come out of prison and hiring them.
(30:29):
And the point to your point was, there is best employees.
There's best employees. And it's interesting too. I mean, call
it luck, call it whatever you want, but I've got
I've been very fortunate, blessed whatever to be able to
help advocate successfully for clemency for dozens of people deserving
people over the years, not just people who are innocent,
but people who were primarily who are sentenced the mandatory senses,
(30:51):
crazy mandatory sensors like Lenny Singleton who you referenced earlier,
um or or Travion Blount who was sentenced to at
fifteen years old, sense to six life terms for a
robbery in which no one was hurt. Um fifteen years old,
six life terms. It made international news, like what what
in the world even is that? Like, that's it's got
to be. That should be, that should be a crown
(31:13):
to send some minds today like why and and to me,
that's the that should be the easy things to get
everyone aligned on and fix. And by the way, talk
about the state. The meek us from that I'm from
in Pennsylvania were one of three states in America that
has no cap on probation. So states have caps of
(31:35):
probation summer, three years, two years, four years. We have
no cap in Pennsylvania. So someone like me who was
separate that he was wrongfully convicted thirteen years ago appointed
a gun that didn't point a gun that cop by
the way, where multiple police officers have come for and
said it was a lie. So we have affidavits from
(31:55):
a police officer came for and said no, I was
one of the two resting officers and though he didn't
point the one. Okay, Now after that, you've still got
a system that's just completely broken. And in Pennsylvania he
gets sentenced to probation and then he does a concert
in a different state without the proper authorization and the
attack on another five years of probation, and now he's
(32:16):
got he's still a six years of probation left. He's
been operations right, so so he's got no chance to
actually succeed in that situation. I can tell you if
you put me, the Jewish kid from suburban Philadelphia on probation,
I couldn't make a year with what he needs to
go through. There's not possible. And the time funk up
(32:38):
years of my life from eighteen to thirty one. You know,
of all the people that I've been involved with and
helped get out of prison, none of them have re
offended or offended for the first time. If they were innocent,
it's probably a better way of saying it. And again
none but some will. And that's okay because because you
know what, at the end of the day, we need
to make the world a better place. And if we
get millions of people out of the criminal justice system,
(33:01):
and if you make mistakes, that's okay because there's a
lot of people that aren't in the criminal justice system
that will also make mistakes. This is never gonna be
perfect and that's someone says, hey, we should keep that
six point seven or six point nine million people stuck
in the criminal justice system. The few millions that shouldn't
be there because someone may make a mistake. Nothing's perfect
like we need we need to get it right overall.
(33:22):
And that's the same approach I take in business. We
want to make good overall decisions. We don't go for perfection.
We went for perfection. We never get anything done, of
course not. And I said, I've been lucky in that sense.
And of the people, uh of the Inncence Project, the
people that we've gotten out of a tiny percentage of
them have ever been in any sort of trouble again,
people age we're talking about real trouble, probably zero. But
(33:43):
then I got back in real trouble. A couple of
other very important topics I wanna talk touch on with you,
Meek and Michael um. One is prisons themselves and how
barbaric our prison system is when it's supposed to be
(34:06):
called the correctional institution and we know that that is
the farthest thing from the truth in most cases. And
the other is how important it is for people to
get out and vote, because I don't think we can
have this conversation without talking about that, and some people.
I've heard somebody say, we don't need criminal justice before,
we need a criminal justice revolution. So which one do
(34:27):
you want to take on first of those? So we
could talk voting in UH. This coming from my coach
on where we come from. This goes far us back
when I say, like the other side of America where
people don't even believe like that world tends to us.
And I used to think that, but that was deeply false.
And one of my jobs is trying to teach people
the ropes of how voting go because it's even with
(34:50):
a judge trying to lock me up for what going
over a bridge. Basically, we voted for her UH district
attorneys where they enforced mandatory minimums and they enforced locking
people up for smoking marijuana and things like that. We
vote for them. We have to be the ones that vote.
And in our culture, the black community, a lot of
(35:11):
us don't vote. So it's like community, Yeah, you know,
I I don't really know. I knew that in our
community we don't vote at all. I don't even know
anybody in my age at the age of eighteen, we
ever got up as a group and everybody wanted to vote.
It was like never a thing we didn't believe in it.
So my new thing is to teach the younger people
from our culture that come up, well all younger people
(35:31):
that come up, that voting is important because you know,
we have to live under these laws that these people
are creating, and if we don't vote, we don't have
a voice at all. It's like you don't even count.
And a lot of times you look at TV. They
had a campaign that said vote or die. I always
see any but I never really knew what it meant.
It was that that problem is like eighteen years old.
When they did that campaign, I never really understood it.
(35:53):
But nowadays I understood. It's like you either a vote,
are you get housed under regime which will eventually league
kill you if not by Jael not by keeping you
in a ruthless environment, it will turn out bad for you, basically.
And I just believe that if we vote, if we
make our president don't like justice reform. Justice reform right
(36:14):
now is the number one topic in America. Probably if
we make this topic big enough politically, a lot of
people would have to lean towards being leaning on these
topics in but I want you as leaning, I'd say appropriate, Yeah,
I'd say I'd say punishment that fits the crime, because
by the way, I'm not leaning. I want to appropriate punishment.
And that was right. That was that was definitely right.
(36:36):
And you know, I've been on the board of Families
Against Mandatory Minimums, which a great organization, for over twenty
five years now, and our motto is let the punishment
fit the crime. Yeah. I mean, nobody's advocating for chaos.
Nobody wants a society that is like, you know, I
want to feel I want to feel safe everybody. I
want my daughter to be safe. I want your family
sat kids to be safe. Situations though that the crimes
(36:59):
are boots so high up, it's like, what is lenient?
But I'll make something really simple. I would saying, how
many people are in prison and jail today, we're on
probation because they have a drug problem. Probably it's more
than a million. Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm not talking about
selling drugs anyone who smoked weed. How could you possibly
we just become illegal everywhere? How could you possibly put
(37:20):
someone in the criminal trust system for doing something that's
becoming legal? Absolutely? No sense. Someone had a problem with perkison,
why do you send him to jail? Sending the rehab
makes no sense. So to me, that's where the punishment
needs to fit the crime. I would take everybody who
has a drug problem, would get them help, so get
stop the drug problem. But it's like it's deep as this.
Like if I sell drugs and the cops come to
(37:40):
my house and I'm not there, my mom get found
guilty for these drugs in my house. People moms are
getting thirty years in prison and federal prison for stuff
like that. Like your mom got thirty years in prison.
That's a life sentence. That's death. Yeah, that's defin. Don't
want to extend you to prison. Even though she might
preach to you every day that you're selling drugs, you're
getting out of my house and she knows it's wrong,
(38:01):
but you her son. If you're in a car with
someone who's got drugs and you get pulled over and
they find the drugs, it belongs to everybody unless somebody
takes responsibility for it, and nobody ever does. Nobody ever goes,
oh yeah, those are mine, right, So this is how
crazy the system is, where you could just be next
to someone who's doing something wrong. And then I'm not
even talking about full in instance, I'm just talking about like, say,
(38:23):
if you come from where I come from, like your
mom on a crack, she's a strung out fan. You're
thirteen years old, you got a seven year old sister,
and you're coming in the house. It's just baking soda
and butter and infrigerating. When you go out and look
out the windows, people in the corner selling weed, marijuana,
craig cocaine, and they're running in fast cash, and your
little sister don't got nothing to eat. The first thing
(38:45):
you're gonna do is go outside and pick up like
this is like normal, Like Mike, if you was in
a situation, I bet a million dollars on it that
you would go outside and pick out of a drug.
If Kylie was in the house, you fourteen, my heart
everybody to work for me to do I'm saying I'm
talking about you know, I'm talking about it if you
don't have any of this going on, and you're poor,
(39:05):
like you don't have any family in the house, and
you come see Kylie and it is but by that
that's also where and that person have no punishment. No,
but may be set to jail for thirty years, especially
ridiculous thing I've ever heard. And that's why I said
to me, but even if you bring it down to
ten years, ten years will ruin your life. So like
what they got is leaning is not even leaning, Like
(39:26):
it's the rates of bootsteps so high, like what they
call like I watch media and social send him to prison.
Like even when people be like, he should have went
to prison, broke probation, even if I did break probation.
If I did commit a crime ten years ago and
I broke probation, people are like, send them back to prison.
I'm like, do you know what prison is? And like
(39:46):
when I say shackled up in a cage, I mean
like shack of real chains. When you take a baby
step is cutting your legs and like the same thing
you see in the slavery movie. It's the same thing.
And I'm like, do people really understand what they're saying,
like send him to prison, Like Mike Cain to myself,
Mike was like, he was like, it's not bad as
it could be. I'm gonna hit I'm like, oh, but
that's because I'm an optimistic person and I always want
(40:07):
to look at things positively. And it's ten degrees. I
don't have a tallest seat. The water that I'm coming
out of my sink is the same water connected to
the tallt is filthy, like it's like it's ten mices
in my cell and night running around you like is
you can't even imagine it? And I'm like, I'm here.
I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't kill anybody. I didn't.
(40:29):
By the way, the thing that bothers me so much,
the amount of people I've told about your story and
everyone it's now proven that you were wrongfully convicted because
we have a cop who was one of the two
arresting officers who signed Appa David saying no, you didn't
point the gun, which what you were charged for. Yeah,
and your probation violations where you popped a wheelie on
a motorcycle, you broke up a fight in an airport.
(40:51):
Yet there are people say put them back in jail
for ten years, which is it shows how backwards so
many people are in this country as well. Just when
you speak in jail that is like it's just like
a place of hotel where you go to sit that
now it's some ship that will waring your whole train
of thought, Like you went here, like the matchs sleeping
on is probably four inches thick, and then after that
(41:12):
is metal and cement, like you got this guy's eighty
years old sleeping on mattress and stuff. Like they didn't
kill anybody. They may have been on im probation, and
they felling the after felling in you eight years. Oh
you you're poor. You've been in the system so long.
It's hard to explain. You have to see it and
be there. Like even what they do with juveniles, they
got juveniles locked in cages. These are submit cages that
(41:36):
they had these kids and and most of these kids
didn't kill anybody something. I was so proud of you.
But it's a scary story. So the day that I
brought Robert Craft to visit make in prison, we were
sitting there and we were just kind of talking. I
was really just kind of listening to Robert Meek talking.
Robert looked at me and he said, you know, I
(41:56):
don't understand how how you're handling this. So how are
you so hot? He said, Like, last time I was
with you, we were on a plane flying to an
All Star game and you were on the top of
the world. Now you're in an orange jumpsuit, locked in prison.
You've got a smile from me. You're gonna ear to
ear and make. He's generally pretty quick with his answer.
(42:16):
You thought about it for about thirty seconds, and he
looked at Robert. He said, you know, it's been my
entire adult life. I was wrongfully convicted for a crime
in and commit I've been sent back to prison multiple times,
never committed a new crime. But this is the first
time people actually fighting for me, and that makes me
so happy. So for me, I was mortified at the situation,
(42:37):
but completely proud of how well he was handling that
horrific situation. This is the best situation I've ever been
in far as dealing with the system, with having like
real credible people stand behind me, because, like Mike said,
I'm telling him, like, yo, if y'all had guns in here,
you're not even police officers. If I came in here, oh,
you'll have firearms. And I came in here point of
gun nine times out of tim where would I be that?
(43:00):
Of course against the cops are trained to neutralize people
who calls threat towards their lives, like this is like normal,
Like you get away with this, this is what you
should do. You're trained to do this, not me one
on one with a cop like and you know, one
on want anybody could get scared and want to run away. No,
(43:20):
this is a group of cops doing a full blown
read and me being accused of pointing the gun at
all of them. And so me one more question before
I do that. I want to remind people who are
listening vote, vote and vote and voting your local races
and your d as racist and your judges racist. Your
vote counts. We have racist that actually ended up tied.
(43:42):
I mean your vote counts. And judge don't have to
be white against the black to be racist. It could
be white on white racism. It could be black on
black racism. And make sure you vote for the right people.
When when you're vote for judges, nobody really knows because
you just see a judge on the d you can
make good decisions and people knew when they vote it
(44:02):
for the d A in Pennsylvania that he was a
more thoughtful person on the criminal justice system and been
lots of new das that have had much more modern approaches.
That approach hasn't been locked everybody up and put all
black American prison. It's been let's have an accurate punishment
for a crime. And that's who you should be voting for.
And I'm gonna say one more thing before I turned
the last question over to you, which is, everybody who's
(44:24):
out there, at some point you're gonna get asked to
serve on a jury and nobody likes it. We get
those things in the mail, We're like, oh my god,
I got a time for this. Whatever is a big pay.
You gotta go because when you go, there might be
a meek Mill in front of you. There might be
somebody else who's making and Eric Ritta get fund of
your case that all three of us are involved with,
(44:45):
and we're gonna get him out come hell or high water.
So get up, get out and go vote, and go
serve on the jury because I ask you save could
be your own. And now, rather than ask a final question,
I'm just gonna do what I at the end of
the show, which is I always say it's my favorite
part of the show, and I think it's probably the
audiences favorite part of the show too, which is when
(45:05):
I stop talking and just turned the Mica over to
you for final last words, and Michael, I'm gonna let
you go first and then Meeke and back clean up
and close out the show. So, Michael, what would you
want to tell people? How could they get involved? What
can they do? What's what's the solution? Well, I think
we're in a great position because I actually think this
(45:27):
is a big problem that needs to be addressed. I
think it's gonna be I think it would just take
common sense to this juicy problem. We're gonna make the
world a better place. And I'm actually for a guy
who had absolutely zero point zero exposure to the criminal
justice system until I met Meek, and then still really
didn't understand it until November six of last year. I'm
(45:48):
really optimistic because I believe that this is a completely
broken system that with a lot of focus and energy,
we can make the country a much better place than
to me, that's exciting. So you know what I would say,
everybody is make a difference. I didn't make any difference
until seven months ago. And I'm actually you know, I've
got three great businesses that I run, and I've got
a great daughter and great family and friends. Yet I'm
(46:08):
as energized about this as anything because I see how
broken it is and I see how much fixing it needs.
Mieke last words and before you even go, I want
to thank you and Michael. Thank you for not just
for being on the show, but for lending your voice
and your energy and your your money and your time
to this movement. Thank you for your focus. What you're
(46:29):
doing is incredible. You've been at this for twenty five years.
Week's been sucking the system for thirteen years, and I've
been at this for seven months. So thank you. Well,
I'm older than yours, I've had more time none but yeah,
it's it's an obsession and I'm not going to stop
until we fix it together. So but anyway, so thank
you both again for being here and sharing your your
thoughts and your and your energy, your collective wisdom. Sonick,
(46:51):
what are your last words for the audiences out there?
My last words to the audience just now, I'm dedicated. Uh,
this is a live mission. Actually suffer from the criminal
justice system for over ten years, and you know, uh,
I actually walked the walk on the other side of
the wall with some innocent men who I know are
basically suffering and families are suffering, so you know, I
(47:15):
felt the pain first hand, and you know, I'm gonna
continue to do what I need to do to help
make change and not fix the system, but break the
system completely and rebuild it again. Because the way we
lived and the things we've been through with the system,
it doesn't even take crime or or take being a
villain to go to jail, you know what I'm saying.
And you know it's it's thousands of millions of people
(47:37):
trapped inside on the other side of the wall, that
actually need help. And you know, I think this is
the right season to make changing, putting all my efforts
into it, and hopefully, you know, we make change within
the next few years and a free a lot of
people from the prison system. Don't forget to give us
(47:59):
a fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps.
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project, and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(48:21):
is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and
association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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