In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, I sit down with my brother, Bruce Rogan, who served 30 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit. We talk about his release from prison, his new life, and what it's like being wrongfully accused of a crime you don't even remember committing. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please share it with a friend or family member who needs to hear it. If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron and/or share it on whatever social media platform you use to consume content. Thanks to my brother for coming out of prison and sharing his story with the world, and I hope this episode inspires you to keep fighting for justice for all of us who have been wrongfully convicted for crimes you didn't even commit. Thank you, Bruce! Joe Rogans Experience is a production of Native Creative Podcasts. Subscribe, Like, and Share to stay up to date with all things Native Creative! -Joe Rogan Podcasts, by day, by night, all day. All day long. -JOE ROGAN PODCAST by day and all day by night - by night by night. Check it out! -All day long! -By night! by night all day! -The J.R. Experience by day -By Night, All Day All Day by Night, by Day, by Night by Night! By Night, By Day, By Night! by Night? All Day? -All Day by Day -By Day, All Night, all Day? by Night?! , All Day?! - By Night? by Day? By Night?!? by Day! , by Night?? ? What's a day? , By Day? All Day?? , all Day! by Day ? by Morning? By Day (By Night? By Day???) by Night ? -A Day? ? ? All Day, & All Day ? ? , ! | By Night ? , by Day??? & Evening? ? , , What's A Day? | By Day ? | Evening ? | Evening? | Evening?? | All Day ! , Late Night? , And Then? | Late Night, & Late Night ?
00:00:51.000Like, the fact that you could be wrongfully accused, spend 30 years of your young life in a cage, and then come out and just be this wonderful, fun guy, having a good time, everyone's laughing, having conversations.
00:01:12.000Look, I'm standing next to him last night, you know, worried most of the night because...
00:01:21.000We had got on a plane and that was his first time flying in over 30 years.
00:01:29.000There was a lot of stimulation and I could tell you that I'm still in shock.
00:01:38.000Even sitting here now that we're sitting next to each other because I spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing, which is, you know, not a great place.
00:03:38.000Well, I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide.
00:03:43.000I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all.
00:03:48.000Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime.
00:03:50.000I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to change her niece's costume.
00:03:58.000And she also had a taste for chocolate cake.
00:04:02.000So, just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume, and then disappearing for the next 29 years of your life.
00:04:15.000And being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct.
00:04:24.000And it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later that he finally gets arrested and gets convicted.
00:04:31.000Former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa, he gets convicted for the very same misconduct that I've been telling him about, that he's been doing for decades.
00:04:42.000So he would just find someone, pin it on them?
00:04:46.000Yeah, he would concoct the story, a theory, as he did in my situation.
00:04:50.000And he did this just to convict someone?
00:04:59.000Anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or in drug dealing, it's easier to get someone that has a history of being involved in the streets to put a case on them than it is there's someone that doesn't.
00:05:13.000So, you know, once they find out that you have a record, it's easy to say, all right, well, he did this homicide.
00:05:18.000What kind of a record did you have at the time?
00:05:37.000And he ended up not only getting convicted but went to federal prison for it.
00:05:43.000You know, I should give some context here because to the extent that Bruce is going to be guarded about certain details of his case, I want to explain why.
00:06:07.000I was the ambassador of the Innocence Project.
00:06:10.000And I think that there was a real need for work being done on cases that didn't just involve DNA. So we deal with cases that involve all manner of what we think is junk forensic science that we've talked about.
00:06:24.000Ballistics, arson, bite marks, and so on.
00:06:28.000But we also want there to be an aspect that dealt with clemency for people that we think got over-sentenced and deserved a second chance.
00:06:37.000So Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law.
00:06:44.000And I got a call from a guy named Steve Zeidman that runs a clemency center at CUNY Law.
00:06:51.000And Steve said, you know, congratulations on the new senator.
00:07:03.000And he said, I'm going to send you some information about him.
00:07:07.000So he emails me this list of accomplishments.
00:07:13.000It was more than most human beings can accomplish in seven lifetimes.
00:07:19.000From the degrees that he achieved to starting a gun buyback program from inside to starting something called Voices From Within.
00:07:31.000These community, these galvanizing sort of community outreach programs.
00:07:37.000And, you know, I went to go visit him with the mindset that I was going to support his clemency application and getting clemency in New York ain't easy from the governor.
00:07:53.000And, you know, clemency is supposed to be all about rehabilitation and transformation, and historically, especially in New York, you have to express contrition and explain to the parole board if you are granted clemency and it is a commutation of your sentence,
00:08:14.000that is a shortening of your sentence, you have to explain to the parole board Here's what I have done to transform myself and accept responsibility.
00:08:28.000So keeping that in mind, I went to visit Bruce for the first time.
00:08:46.000It was at a time where I didn't have the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice, and I sort of was doing one-off cases, sometimes with the Innocence Project, sometimes by myself.
00:08:55.000And I was really struck by his presence, by how articulate he was.
00:09:02.000One of the most well-read human beings.
00:09:07.000How he finished the Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning, and we had this amazing conversation about meditation and yoga, and we turned a half-hour visit into three hours to the point where they told me I had to, you know, go.
00:09:21.000So I went back and I looked for the letter, because I keep all the letters that I get, and I find this beautifully written Super articulate letter and I'll never forget how he signed it because it stuck with me.
00:09:37.000It said, oceans of gratitude, Bruce Bryant.
00:09:54.000And I realized that this guy wasn't just innocent.
00:10:00.000But I think what struck me was that The innocence claim was so strong that it didn't make – it was hard for me to get behind a clemency petition without him being able to say I'm innocent when he got before the parole board.
00:10:21.000So he – His case is being reinvestigated right now by what's called the Conviction Integrity Unit in Queens, which is a sensational arm of the District Attorney's Office.
00:10:44.000And that is, you know, to hopefully exonerate Bruce completely.
00:10:51.000But, you know, and there's a great guy that runs the unit and they're involved in an intense reinvestigation of the case.
00:11:01.000But Bruce got clemency a couple of months ago by Governor Hochul in December and he got to stand before the parole board and it was a scary moment for me as one of his lawyers.
00:11:14.000That when they asked him, did you commit this crime, for him to say, no, I didn't.
00:11:21.000And to be granted clemency and to be then granted parole on an innocence claim is extraordinarily rare.
00:11:30.000So I think it spoke to both how powerful his innocence claims are and his accomplishments.
00:11:38.000One of them is Derek Hamilton that went before the parole board and said, I'm not going to...
00:11:43.000You know, admit to something I didn't do just to get out of here.
00:11:47.000So I just wanted to give you that context because details of the case, specific details of the case are going to be difficult to discuss.
00:11:57.000And I think what's amazing about Bruce is what he has been able to accomplish from inside.
00:12:07.000In the face of his innocence is mind-blowing.
00:12:12.000You know, a lot of times when we're on the show, we get inquiries about how people can help and how do people overcome this?
00:12:23.000And I think why people are attracted to these stories of the wrongfully incarcerated is I had to search myself.
00:12:29.000It's because I like being around this kind of strength.
00:12:32.000I don't know how, you know, people like him summon the strength to get through it.
00:12:40.000And, you know, in talking to Bruce the last couple of weeks, what he endured in prison is something we haven't really talked about on the show too much.
00:12:49.000Like, in granularity about what it's like in these institutions.
00:12:54.000And I was hoping we could talk about, among other things, some of that today, because he was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to...
00:13:05.000I was in Clinton, Great Meadows, Sing Sing, all maximum securities.
00:13:10.000All maximum security prisons way upstate in some towns that are essentially...
00:13:19.000You know, a lot of racism is pervasive in those towns.
00:13:24.000And the prison is the only economic development in that town.
00:13:29.000So you got brother, cousins, aunts, and uncles working in the same prison.
00:13:33.000So you get into an incident with one officer, you got a problem with the entire system.
00:13:38.000And that's just how it is when you go deeper upstate.
00:15:04.000You can become bitter, or you can become better.
00:15:08.000I chose the latter, because one of the things I did early in my incarceration was make a conscious decision to not serve time, but to have time serve me.
00:15:20.000I made up my mind that if you were going to have me incarcerated for a crime I did not commit, then I was going to take this time and use that cell as if it was an office.
00:15:31.000I was going to use that school building as if it was a university.
00:15:36.000And every chance I had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection and do the things that I needed to do to protect my soul, I was going to do it.
00:15:49.000You know, and I made it my business to do so, and I started delving into material that I probably would never have read, you know, being a free man.
00:15:59.000I started reading, you know, everything from, you know, philosophy books to, you know, very few novels, but I tend to learn from the experiences of others.
00:16:09.000So autobiographies became my thing, you know, from Quincy Jones to Miles Davis and And just continuously studying, right?
00:16:19.000And then studying the system and what drives the system and why it has become what it is.
00:16:25.000You know, from education to the whole system of why educational system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's going to be caught up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade, right?
00:16:39.000Based on your reading level, they can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop.
00:16:47.000These are things that most people don't know, right?
00:16:50.000Like 50% of the incarcerated people in New York State, or probably in the country, are living with dyslexia.
00:16:57.000So they're unable to learn the basics of education, like reading.
00:17:03.000And these guys go home and they commit crimes over and over again because they were never corrected.
00:17:08.000And these same systems that were built on the premise of rehabilitation, People are draconian in that they do nothing but steal a person's humanity and allow them to become or looked at as nothing more than a number.
00:17:25.000You've got to wake up 6 o'clock in the morning and sometimes when they're coming around they're asking you your name.
00:17:30.000They're not asking your name, they're asking you your numbers.
00:18:43.000Early on in my incarceration, there was a group of guys called the Resurrection Study Group.
00:18:51.000And it was founded by a guy named Eddie Ellis, who has since passed on.
00:18:56.000And what the Resurrection Study Group did was they developed this program called the Nontraditional Approach to Social and Criminal Justice.
00:19:05.000And it helped them understand why the vast majority of incarcerated people in New York State came from, at that time, they came from seven basic neighborhoods, right?
00:19:16.000And these were neighborhoods that were all impoverished, that were all plagued with what we call crime generative factors, from, you know, substance abuse to dilapidated housing.
00:20:35.000Some guys sentenced 70 years for armed robbery.
00:20:40.000All of these things come under the 1994 crime bill.
00:20:44.000So when you begin to see it as a system that was designed to do certain things, it's a wake-up call for you.
00:20:50.000And you begin to say, hold on, man, I fell for the trap.
00:20:55.000It's time for me to begin taking a different route and begin educating myself more.
00:21:01.000And so the Resurrection Study Group, these guys steered me in that direction.
00:21:06.000It steered me in that direction and I began to learn from another gentleman that was a part of it by the name of Dr. Gary Mendez, who also died.
00:21:13.000And he had a program called the National Trust for the development of African-American men.
00:21:19.000And what it did was help us restore those values that we strayed away from.
00:21:25.000So this is what got me on the right path early in my incarceration.
00:21:31.000How difficult was that to stay on that path?
00:21:34.000Because it seems like, obviously, you did find a way to be very disciplined and stick to it.
00:21:42.000And you give off this energy of a person who's been on a long voyage in that regard.
00:21:49.000But how difficult was it as a young man?
00:22:17.000It's almost like a battle because the guys in my age group, they were not doing what I was doing.
00:22:23.000They were in the yard either gang-banging, selling drugs, getting high.
00:22:28.000You know, very few of them were in the law library.
00:22:32.000But I come to realize also that when you're wrongfully convicted, you fight a little different than a guy that's actually accepted his fate for what he's done.
00:22:42.000I think that your fight and your pursuit of your liberty, but also your pursuit to rise above your circumstance, becomes a little different, you know?
00:22:53.000Where I was didn't have to define who I was or who I can become.
00:22:58.000And once I began writing and putting these things on the cell walls, you know, like affirmations or quotes that I would develop, not that I, you know, would take from anyone, but ones that I would develop myself, right?
00:23:13.000After reading and studying, and then you have these epiphanies.
00:23:16.000I used to sleep with a pen in the paper.
00:23:18.000That's what the guys from Resurrection Study Group taught me.
00:23:40.000And the next day I would wake up and I would stick them on the wall.
00:23:44.000And I would begin to internalize these principles and these morals that I began to develop that reconnected me to, you know, my own humanity.
00:23:53.000Because prison strips you of so much of that, man.
00:23:57.000What was it like on day one of your release?
00:24:18.000To see my mother, to see my loved ones, my siblings, still breathing, still alive, because I lost my father in 2017. So to see love is what I saw.
00:25:46.000And, you know, he was responsible for making sure that there are a lot of programs in Sing Sing for the people that want them.
00:25:55.000And they typically release people out of Sing Sing, which is in Ossining, New York.
00:26:00.000It's about an hour and a half north of the city on the Hudson.
00:26:04.000And they usually just take them from a prison van to a bus stop and just drop them off.
00:26:10.000I was outside the prison gate, and so was Bruce's family and friends and other loved ones that had come from around the country.
00:26:22.000And I called the super about a half hour before he was released because we had got word from another guard that was standing outside, oh, they're not going to release him here.
00:27:06.000With a net, with his worldly possessions, and he was walking his sister Justina, who is,
00:27:22.000oddly enough, a court officer in the very courthouse where he was convicted.
00:27:29.000They were walking to each other, and the walk started to turn into a fast walk, and then they both, at the same time, just ran to each other and embraced.
00:31:21.000And once you leave, someone else will take your place.
00:31:24.000And that's the attitude of the prison industrial complex as a whole, you know?
00:31:37.000What's terrifying is there's been no talk to mitigate all the problems that lead to the prison industrial complex.
00:31:46.000No one's talking about getting rid of it.
00:31:48.000No one's talking about getting rid of private prisons.
00:31:51.000No one's talking about trying to figure out a way to, other than just policing, to do something about these communities that keep Decade after decade being a place where no one has hope.
00:32:05.000And every politician says, it's either get tough on crime or light on crime, right?
00:32:21.000These are conditions that people come out of that drive them, unless you're a nut, right?
00:32:26.000Unless you have some serious mental health issues, and you're just like this, you know, you're obsessed with children, little boys, like we talked about last night in the comedy club, or you're a pedophile or something, and you need some serious mental health work.
00:32:41.000No one is talking about dealing with the crime-generative factors that exist in poor communities across the country.
00:32:49.000When you look at in New York City, the Bronx is the poorest community, poorest borough in New York City.
00:33:15.000You know, it's a cycle because people are living in not just poverty, they're living in concentrated poverty, generational poverty.
00:33:23.000So my family grew up, one family grew up in the projects, their children wind up growing up in the projects, right?
00:33:29.000Unless someone comes and breaks that cycle.
00:33:32.000Unless there's serious intervention to break the cycle of incarceration or intergenerational incarceration, it continues to be perpetuated.
00:33:42.000And the problem seems to be that every politician is just concerned with getting elected.
00:33:46.000So they want to say whatever the people want to hear.
00:33:49.000And if the people want to hear get tough on crime, it's that.
00:33:52.000But you don't hear we need to eliminate all the areas of our country that are creating these issues.
00:34:24.000There's always something that they come up with where they need trillions of dollars for this and billions of dollars for that, green energy and this and that.
00:34:32.000There's no better use of resources than making better human beings, giving human beings opportunity.
00:34:38.000And maybe it's time to stop relying on the government for it because politicians, it's almost like when I think of a politician now, in the context of helping solve these problems, it's almost like, you know, wouldn't it be nice for me to be able to fly?
00:34:56.000Yeah, that'd be nice, but it's not going to happen.
00:34:58.000You know, so what we're trying to do with the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is to get the word out to even the private sector.
00:35:09.000If we can create self-driving cars and artificial intelligence and send people into space, this is a solvable problem.
00:35:18.000I mean, one of the things that has been I mean, I don't know why I needed this as, like, some epiphany because I've been doing this work for close to 20 years.
00:35:33.000But lately, I have been struck by the cases that we're working on in a way that I haven't before.
00:35:50.000The true, it's the best way to articulate this, how fucked up this country is in terms of racial disparity and the mistreatment of minorities in this country, go visit a prison.
00:36:07.000Sing Sing has a program where we'll talk about it, where they take people from the community in and say, here's what is going on here.
00:36:14.000I have routinely sat across a table like this in a small room in the legal visiting room at Sing Sing.
00:36:23.000Let's just take Sing Sing for example.
00:36:25.000We recently, one of our new clients was sentenced to 70 years 70 years for a first offense in which the extent of the victim's injuries were four stitches.
00:36:47.000This man, Sheldon Johnson, served 26 years.
00:36:53.000And I took a look at this case and I said, how is this possible?
00:37:01.000A few weeks later, I'm visiting with a man who's serving 25 to life for the alleged robbery of $200 in which the alleged victim Has a condition where one eye is shut and the other eye had multiple surgeries that were never disclosed to the defense.
00:37:47.000But the point I'm trying to make is that it is extraordinarily rare for me to be hearing these stories and the person sitting across the table from me is a white person.
00:37:58.000It's always a black man or a Latin man.
00:38:03.000And it begs the question, well, you know, what do we think?
00:38:09.000African-Americans are more have a higher propensity to commit crime.
00:38:16.000It's exactly what Bruce is talking about.
00:38:18.000And what I hope to do is to continue to get the word out because we so often have people writing us, calling us, sending us emails, DMs on Instagram.
00:39:42.000And I think we're probably a brink of conflict all over the world and there's all sorts of problems they're constantly dealing with.
00:39:49.000And they don't want to hear jack shit about what you want to do for communities.
00:39:53.000They want to know how much money can we get for these military industrial complex corporations that have been sponsoring your campaign.
00:40:01.000That have been helping get things across on whether it's social media or mainstream media, whatever narratives you want pushed, whatever the pharmaceutical drug companies want pushed, all of this is very clear.
00:40:12.000This is not conspiracy theory anymore.
00:40:14.000Now that we know Like, with the release of the Twitter files from Twitter, with the FBI, we know they're involved in narratives.
00:40:22.000We know they're involved in doing these things.
00:40:24.000We know they're involved in putting agent provocateurs into all these organizations, like that Governor Whitmer lady who got the kidnapping plot to get her 14 people, 12 of them, were FBI informants.
00:40:51.000It's just like the system of these impoverished communities is deeply ingrained and generational.
00:40:57.000I think the culture of the deep state is also deeply ingrained and generational.
00:41:02.000The culture of the relationship that they have to money.
00:41:05.000To whether it's money from the bankers, money from the pharmaceutical drug companies, the military industrial complex.
00:41:10.000There's sensational amounts of money that can be had.
00:41:13.000And we're seeing it in motion right now in what, you know, many people are framing as a just conflict in Ukraine.
00:41:20.000But there's also an insane amount of money involved in this.
00:41:23.000And you have to be very careful of whatever the fuck the narrative is that's being discussed when there's an insane amount of money involved.
00:41:37.000If the United States, and if you can get businesses involved, and businesses can actually generate revenue from rehabilitating communities, if Halliburton can figure out how to rebuild Iraq after they blew it up, which is one of the craziest things of all time.
00:41:53.000You've got a guy who's the CEO of Halliburton and just happened to be the vice president of the United States.
00:41:57.000And then they get no-bid contracts to rebuild shit.
00:42:09.000But that's how, that's why we're continuing to do this show.
00:42:13.000I cannot tell you, I say it every time I'm on here, you'll get tired of it maybe, and maybe it sounds like, you know, ass kissing, and I will kiss whatever ass there is to kiss.
00:42:25.000This show has become such an important platform for us, because, watch this, ready?
00:43:47.000And, you know, he learns about this case and gets the pro bono department at his law firm to take it up.
00:43:59.000He now has declarations from the only witness, this guy Robert Greene, who has totally recanted and said he made it all up.
00:44:09.000He has another declaration from, you know, another witness saying that Pierre Rushing, actually the other guy that was convicted of this crime, said Pierre Rushing had nothing to do with it.
00:44:23.000So the question becomes now, what can you...
00:44:25.000So look, it's a testament to the power of this show and this platform that this guy is hopefully on the precipice of getting out or saving a life.
00:44:35.000But the question becomes, well, what can you do as a listener?
00:44:41.000You can write to the Alameda District Attorney Pamela Price at 1225 Fallon Street in Oakland, California, 94612. And I know you can just rewind it if you missed the address.
00:44:59.000Write D.A. Pamela Smart and ask her to please release Pierre Rushing.
00:45:06.000There's a petition called a petition of habeas corpus, which I think translates in Latin to the holding of the body.
00:45:29.000And, you know, I know that the case is on her radar.
00:45:33.000I think that she is—read about the case, Pierre Rushing, just how it sounds.
00:45:41.000And the more we let district attorneys, politicians know that the public is paying attention— I can tell you from my experience of being on this show that the DAs listen.
00:46:00.000I've had them reference appearances on this show, acting like, how could you say that about...
00:46:08.000Douglas County, Kansas, you know, but then, you know, they get a thousand letters and they realize that politically it's not going to look very good to keep an innocent.
00:46:20.000You know, these wheels of justice grind slowly.
00:46:22.000And for a man like Bruce, who is sitting in there and having to, you know, witness violence on a day to day basis, unthinkable violence.
00:46:32.000Conditions where he sleeps in a room when he's put in what they call the box or the hole and has rodents crawling across his chest as he sleeps.
00:46:51.000Pierre Rushing is in similar circumstances.
00:46:54.000You can make a difference to write a letter, read about the case.
00:46:58.000The habeas petitions are out there to read them.
00:47:01.000And, you know, I think that we just need...
00:47:03.000All I can do, all I can think of, we could have grandiose ideas.
00:47:06.000It would be amazing if a big corporation didn't decide to donate a lot of money because they felt guilty about what happened to George Floyd.
00:47:17.000And then all of a sudden it became the summer of, like...
00:49:01.000And then I get a, you know, you get a little taste of what that's like to help, you know, stand next to him last night and watch him watch a comedy show.
00:49:10.000And then we were walking down the street and just hear him inhale a breath of fresh air.
00:49:16.000Or this morning, before we came here, he saw the pool at the hotel and teared up.
00:49:43.000And I thought to myself, this must be the first time he swam in over 30 years.
00:49:51.000And, you know, it was just to be able to watch that and to be even a small part of it, it's just like makes you feel like getting up the next day and with a smile on your face with the will to want to do it again and help someone else.
00:50:05.000I want to touch on something that Joe said.
00:50:08.000I think investing, what people don't realize is the huge talent pool that exists behind prison walls.
00:50:17.000These guys can, they can help drive the economy outside of just being incarcerated.
00:50:23.000You spend $80 billion a year on incarceration across the country.
00:50:29.000These guys, you got artists, you got guys that Guys would make anything in here, man, out of just anything.
00:50:38.000I've seen guys make statues like this from paper towels and soap.
00:50:44.000So the talent pool is broad if we're willing to invest in people.
00:50:48.000If we invest in the social infrastructure and tap into that cultural capital that exists behind prison walls and just start beginning to invest in people instead of things and prisons, we've got to learn to just really say,
00:51:11.000Prison corrections has never corrected anyone.
00:51:13.000It's the person that engages in introspection and says, I want to make a change.
00:51:19.000But even when you look at the investments that they make in law enforcement, if law enforcement were the answer to crime, we'd be the safest place on the planet Earth.
00:51:31.000America would be the safest place on the planet Earth because we've got more cops than anywhere else.
00:51:51.000When you invest in people and you provide them with opportunities, To create better lives for themselves and to allow a hand up so they can pick their families up out of poverty.
00:52:04.000I mean, conservation will go down exponentially if people begin to feel like they were important to feel valued because someone's invested in them.
00:52:12.000This is where it gets dangerous because the prison industrial complex is a business and the business protects itself.
00:52:19.000There's been prison guard unions that have lobbied to keep marijuana illegal in states because they want work, which is one of the most evil things you could ever consider, that you're using human beings as batteries so you can generate money, keeping them in a cement box,
00:52:36.000essentially using them as batteries to generate money.
00:52:40.000It's fascinating that you brought that up.
00:52:43.000I read about that recently, and I thought that I misread it.
00:52:48.000I did not understand the connection at first.
00:52:53.000It kind of went over my head that a union would fight to keep marijuana illegal until I started to say, well, wait a second.
00:53:03.000You're just missing the obvious conclusion here.
00:55:52.000And we've put it out there many times now, and I feel very blessed to be your friend, and I feel very fortunate that you've come on here and trusted this platform with all these stories, because it changed the way I thought of our system,
00:57:04.000This is not going to be a thing that you're going to fix because you have grown people that have been indoctrinated in these horrific ways and these people have to somehow or another have hope to change, which is a big thing for people.
00:57:31.000Have you been involved in gang banging and drug dealing because you had no other options and you had no other role models and you had no other examples anywhere around you of people that had hope and you felt like well the rest of the world is different and what we got here sucks And that's just the way it is,
00:57:56.000And this tribe should be expended to the whole fucking world.
00:58:01.000But at the very least, we have to be an example here in America.
00:58:04.000We have a possibility, because of these kind of conversations, because of this narrative, we have a possibility to change, particularly the way young people look at it.
00:58:13.000This idea that people that live four blocks away are different than people who live right next door is nuts.
00:59:14.000No, and look, I told Bruce last night, you know, it's an odd thing to get recognized for, but, you know, a bartender said to me, hey, aren't you that guy that helps get people out of jail?
00:59:30.000And I was like, man, that felt so good, right?
00:59:34.000I don't know if he saw me on 2020, most definitely it was probably on this podcast, or, you know, like I was pulling into the Aria in Vegas.
00:59:46.000And, you know, the valet guy goes, hey, aren't you, I've seen you before.
00:59:52.000You help innocent people get out of jail.
00:59:56.000And I always take a minute to stop and say, you know, do you want me to help, you know, point you in the right direction of how you can help?
01:00:04.000I've had so many people take me up on it.
01:00:17.000And that's why I'm so in your debt because we, Joe and I had this idea, Bruce, you don't know this, a couple of years ago where, you know, he, you know, committed to doing this once a quarter.
01:01:04.000Derek Hamilton, known the country over as probably the brightest legal mind in the prison system, said, one day I'm going to get out of here and I'm going to help the people inside.
01:01:17.000And not only has he done it, He's like a meteor.
01:01:22.000You know, he's like a streaking comet of a human being.
01:02:18.000And I think that for Bruce, you know, when I heard about some of the programs that he created from on the inside, can you tell Joe about and the listeners about the gun buyback program and Voices from Within?
01:02:32.000Yeah, Voices from Within, I'll start there.
01:02:35.000There's a group of men that founded it prior to me coming into Sing Sing.
01:02:39.000Lawrence Broadley, John Adrian Velasquez, they started this program.
01:02:44.000And it was a progressive program that was designed to, they wanted to redefine what it means to pay a debt to society.
01:02:55.000So they began doing this progressive work inside and created this event called Choices, which is choosing healthy options and confronting every situation.
01:03:45.000He did 37. What we did was we began, you know, finding these poor impoverished communities and whether they've been upstate or in the inner cities and decided that what we're going to do is we're going to do book drives.
01:03:58.000We're going to raise money in prison through these prison organizations to buy backpacks and school supplies for children of incarcerated parents.
01:04:11.000We raised tons of money to contribute to a gun buyback, hopefully through a church in Albany with a Reverend by the name of Charles Muller who had a program.
01:04:22.000Albany was being ravished by violence and his program had run out of money.
01:04:27.000And so I reached out to him, and we collaborated in Sullivan, you know, Correctional Facility, and decided that we're going to pull our resources and see how we can come together.
01:04:37.000We also had him bring in some young guys so that we can talk to about youth violence.
01:04:46.000The Youth Assistance Program, YAP. That they have both in Sing Sing and in a few other prisons in New York State.
01:04:52.000I was on the YAP team in Sing Sing where they bring in 30 at-risk youth.
01:04:59.000In my group, I had some young kids that were from El Salvador who were dealing with MS-13s.
01:05:09.000I had one young guy and one young girl tell me that They had to leave El Salvador because where they lived, you know, their friends were all in gangs.
01:05:19.000And what they did was they would play soccer with the heads of the rival gangs.
01:05:30.000I had never heard anything like that until this.
01:05:32.000And these kids were like 18, 19. And I literally leave the country because their family was like, if they stay there, they have to be in a gang.
01:05:43.000I mean, these kids said that their friends would literally play soccer with the heads, the decapitated heads of rival gangs.
01:05:51.000So these are some of the kids that we've been able to reach and talk to through the YAT program.
01:05:57.000It's never enough because sometimes they bring in kids that'll never be at risk.
01:06:05.000High-end society that have no business coming in there, they're going to be successful, right?
01:06:09.000So, you know, sometimes we have a little issue with that, but the other program is Children of Promise, NYC. I've been working with them for the past decade.
01:06:25.000I think that, for me, if you want my personal opinion, I think that They bring them in to show them what they can do and what they can control, right?
01:06:34.000You can possibly one day be in control of a prison or a corporation because you bring in these kids from our society that They're literally never going to come.
01:06:47.000They're never going to see the inside of a jail cell.
01:06:49.000So they're bringing them in so they get the inner workings of prison, so they can enter into the prison industrial complex?
01:08:28.000Nine times out of ten, when you go for that misbehavior report, you're found guilty, and you're penalized for not engaging in slave wages, slave labor.
01:10:19.000When Stephen King wrote Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, which became the movie Shawshank Redemption, and there was a part of the movie where they talked about the work program and how some genius figured out that there was cheap labor to be had in prisons.
01:10:38.000He didn't base that off of some fictional whim when he was up at night chopping away on that typewriter.
01:10:47.000This has been going on for decades and decades.
01:10:50.000I think that it should shock people and it should be a rallying cry.
01:11:00.000If you've never been in a prison before and You know, it's just sort of occupies a space in your mind as it's just a bad place that I don't want to be in ever.
01:11:12.000And I wouldn't want my family member to be in.
01:11:18.000But you can also take notice of the fact that, you know, somewhere between four and seven percent, some estimates of the people in there are innocent.
01:11:29.000And some of the other people that are in there just made a mistake.
01:11:33.000And you don't throw away a life because they made a mistake.
01:11:38.000And to see some of these sentences, you know, 50 years, 70 years, and it's not just in California where there was a three strikes rule.
01:11:50.000To see sentences getting doled out that are de facto life sentences to children.
01:11:56.000Michael Dawson, Sheldon Johnson was, I think, 17. Or had just turned 18. And the guy gets sentenced to 70 years on a first defense.
01:12:29.000So that is them FaceTiming me as Sheldon walked out of the gate.
01:12:35.000And J.J. Velazquez is the other gentleman on the other side of Sheldon.
01:12:42.000J.J. Velazquez is, you know, it took one guy who believed in J.J., this investigative reporter named Dan Slepian, who believed in J.J., amongst many other people that believed in J.J. J.J. now goes into Sing Sing regularly and runs a program there called the Frederick Douglass Project.
01:13:06.000And he does it with the professor from Georgetown, Mark Howard.
01:13:12.000And he goes in there and he brings people in from the community to try to show them the humanity that is behind prison walls.
01:13:22.000There was over a hundred years of over-incarceration and wrongful incarceration in that, a century in that picture.
01:13:32.000It'd be nice to invite Joe to go in one day.
01:13:37.000Going with J.J. We tell J.J., man, we extended the offer to Joe Rogan and his team to come in to Sing Sing one day with the Frederick Douglass project.
01:13:47.000Come in and meet some guys and see what it's like.
01:14:52.000It's crazy no matter any way you look at it.
01:14:57.000The thing that gives me some hope in situations like this is the current district attorney in Queens is a woman by the name of Melinda Katz.
01:15:07.000And she did something pretty extraordinary in this case, which you have to recognize it when it happens.
01:15:14.000When the Governor is considering someone for clemency, they check with the District Attorney's Office where they were convicted.
01:15:23.000And the Queens County District Attorney's Office, who is also reinvestigating Bruce's case, his Conviction Integrity Unit, as I mentioned earlier, is reinvestigating his case.
01:15:35.000Did not oppose Bruce's grant of clemency.
01:15:40.000Extremely rare in a murder case where an 11-year-old boy was murdered for them to not oppose.
01:15:49.000So that's, you know, I think that she deserves recognition for that.
01:15:54.000Her office deserves recognition for that.
01:15:56.000And what we can hope is that we keep on making believers out of them by presenting cases like Bruce's.
01:16:05.000You know, people like to make broad generalizations, whether it's police officers, prosecutors, I hate it when people do that, about anything.
01:16:17.000There's good and bad in all professions, and I just think that, you know, when you see people trying to make change happen, even if it doesn't go sometimes at the pace you want it to happen at, as long as it's moving in the right direction, It deserves to be recognized and applauded.
01:16:34.000So I just wanted to make sure because it's easy to like see this guy who was a former Queens prosecutor and then, you know, make a dangerous leap that therefore all prosecutors in Queens are bad, which is not the case.
01:18:53.000And, you know, you see it in, you know, all facets of life.
01:18:57.000People get a little bit of fame, they get a little bit of notoriety, or they get the ability to have influence over someone else.
01:19:04.000I'll give you an example, as it relates to Bruce, for people that think that this doesn't happen.
01:19:10.000As soon as Bruce was granted clemency, All over the papers, you know, when a governor grants clemency, it's news.
01:19:19.000There's people that oppose it because they get, you know, the 60,000-foot news headline view of it and don't know shit about the facts of the case.
01:19:28.000How could she have done that, you know, letting a killer out when they have no idea about this guy Scarborough or about any of the facts of his case?
01:19:37.000And the people that read those papers are often corrections officers, too.
01:19:42.000And just to show you the final stretch of discipline, I think, for Bruce is, you know, there's good corrections officers that I'd go in and visit Bruce and knew what we were doing and knew what the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice is about.
01:20:02.000And knew that Derek Hamilton used to be in prison and turned, you know, his life into basically a mission to help others that have been wrongfully incarcerated or just that need a second chance.
01:20:12.000And there are others, like the COs that find out he got granted clemency and don't want to see him go home.
01:20:20.000And all of a sudden, he starts getting fucked with by one corrections officer that is baiting him.
01:20:28.000On a constant basis, calling him the worst names you could possibly think of, trying to get Bruce to do something so that it would somehow keep him in jail.
01:20:41.000And it was happening so often that one time, you know, there was a lot of people involved in the effort to get Bruce out.
01:20:50.000On clemency and legal aid and a great attorney named Elizabeth Felber working on his exoneration cases, my co-counsel, but there were also students of mine, right?
01:21:01.000Part of our legal justice center is that we have a clinical program where Derek and I teach these students.
01:21:09.000They have a seminar where they come in for two hours a week that we teach in the law school and We teach them about all disciplines of forensic science, how it goes wrong, what to do if you spot it,
01:21:26.000whether you're a prosecutor or a defense attorney, how to, if you're a prosecutor, rely on it in a way that does it justice in the name of science, right?
01:21:37.000There are certain conclusions you can draw about blood spatter.
01:21:40.000You just can't make ridiculous conclusions like saying what instrument And from what angle and the manner in which it was swung, right?
01:24:45.000Where over 200 incarcerated people at Sing Sing were brutalized.
01:24:50.000It was so bad that day, they locked the prison down for about a week to bring in a special search team.
01:24:58.000So when we were called for visits, what they would do was they would have an officer come to your cell, get you, handcuff you, and bring you to the visiting room.
01:28:30.000The group of students who were acting as playing the role of correction officers became so abusive based on the false sense of power that they literally had to end the study.
01:29:43.000I've learned from being around people like you, and you've taught me a lot about what it means to really listen, and sort of impressing upon me how important martial arts is, and just watching you move.
01:29:58.000You don't feel like you have to peacock your accomplishments in front of us because you have a sense of...
01:31:05.000And they know they're in an experiment, and they're given that taste, and then they abuse it.
01:31:12.000And I see it at the airport with TSA agents.
01:31:15.000I see it, you know, if you make a kid a safety patrol in an elementary school, it just seems to be something that has to be guarded and approached a lot more...
01:33:37.000We've been taught that a bouncer has to be this way and this tough.
01:33:40.000And he has to have this attitude of us versus them.
01:33:43.000So I'm not sure if it's a natural inclination as much as I think we're socialized into believing that this is how we should be.
01:33:49.000There's that, but then there's also another element.
01:33:52.000The other element is the person that's in that position of power, particularly police officers, You're dealing with an input of negativity and people lying to you and people committing crimes that's never-ending.
01:34:07.000You want to talk about PTSD. I mean, guys go in combat and they come back with PTSD and we recognized it.
01:36:13.000And it took a lot of work for me and a lot of therapy and deep introspection and a particularly humbling experience for me to really take a long, hard look and say, who are you, Josh?
01:37:05.000My new project, project of sort of reinventing myself and how I think and sort of having this as close to an awakening as I could have, sort of won the day for me and said it's okay.
01:37:20.000I had Bruce come to my class at Cardozo Law School and teach four days after he got out.
01:37:30.000I wanted the students to see the fruits of their labor because some of them hadn't met him yet.
01:37:38.000He came to my class and the faculty was cheering when he came in.
01:37:46.000He came and sat in front of a group of lawyers.
01:37:49.000Jamie, I think I sent you a picture of this also.
01:37:52.000This is an extraordinary moment for me.
01:37:57.000I sat next to him and I was so overcome with emotion and I was like...
01:38:03.000I bit a hole in my bottom lip because I was trying to fight this feeling of guilt that I had for letting this man sit there for four years and I didn't write him back.
01:38:18.000And I had never addressed it with him and I... I apologized to him in front of the class and I just started weeping.
01:38:31.000And I felt so good that I allowed myself to be vulnerable in front of these students.
01:38:39.000And I gotta tell you, I felt a shift in the way they looked at me from that moment.
01:38:46.000I wanted them to know that it was okay to be vulnerable.
01:38:49.000And that just because I have a quote-unquote position of power that they need not look at me as being on some sort of pedestal.
01:38:59.000I started sitting sometimes in class so I could be at eye level with them because I read a lot about...
01:39:07.000You know, being a young father, how sometimes just getting on a knee and being at eye level with an adolescent changes the dynamic when you're trying to teach them or discipline them.
01:39:26.000I felt more like a man in that moment.
01:39:29.000More like a man a strong man in that moment that I have you know Many other times in my life when I thought I was being cool or really filling some Insecure void in me.
01:39:40.000Yeah, you know and and that's something that I've learned Dealing with guys like Derek Bruce a lot of other exonerees.
01:41:01.000It was your MTA car to get on the subway.
01:41:04.000Because before he was in, there was no MTA cars, there were tokens.
01:41:10.000It's hard to get your shit together and there's no guidebook.
01:41:13.000It's why one of the things, before I came home, one of the things that Josh said to me, he says, what's the one thing that I can do for you, that I can help you with?
01:41:28.000And I thought about it and I said, the most important thing is therapy.
01:41:35.000I need a therapist because, like you said, PTSD, right?
01:41:40.000The trauma that we experience from being kidnapped for 20-something years, the trauma that you experience from being behind prison walls and being dehumanized and being labeled a number for decades as opposed to being a human, right?
01:42:23.000I think Bruce is a highly evolved person, especially considering the circumstances.
01:42:31.000But your emotional intelligence is such that it shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did.
01:42:39.000But it's very rare for me, just in my own experience, for people that get exonerated or serve long prison sentences to recognize that they need that.
01:42:51.000I mean, for me, it's had such a profound impact on my life to have a person to speak to that understands how the human mind works and what human psychology is.
01:43:03.000I'm a strong believer in if you get the right therapist and you're willing to take that journey.
01:43:09.000You know, it can be, I feel like it's like going to the gym for your mind, like the feeling that you get after you go to the gym and you feel like that release of endorphins and whatever else gets released, which I'm sure Joe knows way better than I do.
01:43:24.000But, you know, I just feel that way for my mind and being able to trace back sort of like where my trauma comes from and We all have trauma as human beings.
01:44:14.000But the vast majority of them struggle really terribly with PTSD, social anxiety, general anxiety, difficulty sleeping, difficulty trusting.
01:45:11.000Not only do I not want to go there, because I find them to be sad places with girls that probably have a lot of trauma, but more importantly, he doesn't want to go there.
01:45:23.000You know, and he was explaining to me, it was interesting, he had dinner with someone that had gotten out recently, and he said, this guy reeked of the penitentiary.
01:45:35.000And I don't want to give off that vibe.
01:45:37.000I have a second chance to reinvent myself.
01:45:43.000And I just think it just speaks volumes about him.
01:45:45.000Not that he should be, like, applauded for not wanting to go to a strip club right when he gets out.
01:45:51.000Some people want to do that, and that's cool.
01:46:29.000Because once you begin to really reflect and you become aware of how you've been duped by the system and how the system was designed to continue to do that and to create this permanent underclass, because that's what it does, right?
01:46:54.000Many of them are still dealing with barriers towards getting a decent job.
01:46:59.000A lot of them can't go back to the housing projects because, you know, if you're convicted from projects, oftentimes they won't even allow you back there to live, to reside there.
01:50:14.000But if you find something that you really love and you do it and you pursue it and you get better at things, you get better at being a person, you get better at all things.
01:50:23.000And there's a great value in that and it's difficult and it has to be difficult because if you don't struggle, you don't grow.
01:50:34.000No one teaches that there's a beneficial kind of struggle.
01:50:39.000You have to become disciplined, and you have to have a mindset of improvement, and you have to understand that you are very blessed to be a human being that's existing in this incredible time, 2023, and you live in America.
01:53:51.000And every time I see him, and he said to me sometimes, he didn't know what I did at that time.
01:53:57.000Every time I see him, I say, man, I'll never forget what you said to me.
01:54:00.000It really, like, changed my perspective on how important it is to teach our kids at a young age that difference is good and it means strength to be vulnerable and that power is not something to be abused.
01:54:18.000It is something to be treated, you know, with the intention to help other people.
01:55:27.000You know, it's not a fucking 100% path if you choose combat sports.
01:55:31.000But if you do choose combat sports and you become an Andre Ward, that's an exceptional human being.
01:55:35.000That's a guy who won world titles with one arm.
01:55:37.000Yeah, not only that, but, you know, was from the worst possible situation, in the worst circumstances, with, you know, parents that had real struggles, a biracial kid that, you know,
01:55:54.000Sometimes very confused about where he fit in.
01:56:01.000That's why I like to surround myself with people like him because he's a beautiful parent, he's a beautiful husband, and he does so many great things.
01:56:11.000Even his response when Canelo knocked out Kovalev and they offer him a big money fight with Canelo while he's still in his athletic prime, he says, I think I serve boxing better as a commentator.
01:56:22.000This is a guy, you know, they'll probably throw millions of dollars at him.
01:58:31.000Yeah, that's hit home for me, you know, lately more than anything is that having a few good quality people around you just makes you, it propels you forward.
01:58:43.000People that are happy for your success, that propels you forward, not looking to, you know, tear you down.
01:58:49.000Which brings us back to these communities that have been just immersed in violence and crime forever.
01:58:57.000You know, there was a guy we had on way back in the day who was a cop in Baltimore.
01:59:01.000And one of the things they found while he was on the job was a docket.
01:59:07.000It was a list of crimes that were committed in, like, 1976. It was all the same crimes in all the same areas.
01:59:15.000And this just like feeling of futility.
01:59:39.000And he talked about Baltimore specifically, about how it's the same point you made earlier, that the vast majority of the prison population in New York comes from the same seven neighborhoods, so we know what the problem is.
01:59:52.000Maybe the best thing to come out of today for me personally is the fact that in times where I feel like, is it enough?
02:00:24.000This photographer named Rick Wenner, who is a super well-regarded famous dude.
02:00:30.000He's taken these iconic portraits of Christopher Walken and a whole bunch of other celebrities.
02:00:37.000And my wife somehow was referred to him to take headshots of Derek and I for the opening of our center.
02:00:48.000And his style is that he gets to know you and talk to you as he's photographing you.
02:00:55.000And he was so moved by the work and just meeting, I think it was really meeting Derek, right?
02:01:03.000That, you know, he kept in touch with me and said, I have this great idea for a project that I want to do.
02:01:11.000As you get people out, when you find out you're going to get them out, I'd like to go interview them.
02:01:19.000In prison and then capture sort of the contrast between them being inside and then them getting out.
02:01:28.000So it seemed pretty ambitious to me because most prisons aren't letting some photographer in with a film crew to film people and he was super persistent and you could see that like how inspired he was to do it and his agent told me I've never seen him this dedicated to something.
02:01:52.000And you speak to the guy, and he's sort of infectious in his humility.
02:02:39.000Well, the wild orchard, it only thrives and grows in a particular environment, right?
02:02:44.000A dandelion can thrive in just about any environment.
02:02:48.000So sometimes there's snow outside and the snow will melt and you see a dandelion just coming through the grass or the crack in the concrete, right?
02:02:55.000So I decided that, you know, I had to be that dandelion.
02:02:58.000I was going to thrive despite where I was at.
02:06:49.000And for those of you that want to get involved in any way, I try to answer as many of your messages as I can.
02:06:56.000I have a lot more help now because we have the center.
02:07:00.000But whether it's writing to the district attorney of Alameda County, Pamela Price, reaching out to Bruce and making a donation on his GoFundMe page, even just dropping him a nice line.
02:07:14.000So many of the people that were there the day he got released, You know, it's almost like hanging around with you, where you never know if there's going to be someone interesting hanging around.
02:07:26.000We were talking to one of the comedians last night.
02:07:28.000He's like, you know, I'll be hanging out with someone and not know that they mapped the human genome.
02:07:37.000I'm going to bring some weird people to that green room.
02:07:39.000And it was the same thing, like, on the day of Bruce's release.
02:07:45.000I would see these people and say, how do you know Bruce?
02:07:47.000Oh, he reached out to me because he saw, he read an article about the work I do, or I reached out to him because I read an article about him.
02:07:58.000And, you know, what you come to find is that he is somebody that holds on to relationships and good people, and, you know, those good people continue to get him through.
02:08:12.000I I just can't thank you enough for giving us again this platform and I vowed that every time I come on I'm gonna have a new person to hopefully inspire people and You know keep telling these stories until the grains of sand on the beach start to keep on you know build and maybe We'll be on here talking about a new community center in Brownsville You know or a program that we start to help teach kids
02:09:06.000Anticipated in a million years of this podcast would be anything remotely close to what it is.
02:09:12.000And if I can take what that is, that platform, and use it to highlight things like what you're doing and what you've done, I mean, there's nothing more important.
02:09:53.000And it's going to take y'all to inspire the rest of us.
02:09:56.000And, you know, you got a team player here, man.
02:09:59.000I think what we're talking about when we talk about community, we're talking about having people in your life that inspire you and having people in your life that you admire.
02:10:09.000This is also a part of that community.
02:10:11.000This podcast, all these podcasts, they're a part of people's lives.