On this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with my brother Sheldon Johnson, who was wrongfully convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison for a crime he didn t commit. He was released from prison 8 months ago and is now serving a sentence that would have put him behind bars for 25 years if he was convicted of the same crime a year earlier. In this episode, we talk about Sheldon's story, why he should have been sentenced differently, and why the system failed him. We also talk about why the criminal justice system is broken and why we need to fix it. And we get to hear Sheldon's perspective on the sentence he received, and how he s been able to take advantage of his new life. This is a must-listen episode, and I hope you enjoy it and share it with your friends, family, and loved ones. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. -Joe Rogan and the podcast. Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day, all day, by night, with all day long by night all day by night by night. Please remember to subscribe to the show on your favorite streaming platform so you can stay up to date with the latest episodes of the show and stay tuned for the latest news and updates on the latest in the show! . - Thank you for listening! -Your support is so appreciated, we really appreciate it! and we really do appreciate your support. Cheers, Timeless, Cheers! -Amy and Sheldon Johnson Thank You, Sheldon and Thank you, Thank You for listening to the podcast! Timestamps: -Derek Hamilton and Thank You For Being Awesome Podcast, -Podcast: by Mr. Dubin and I'm Sober & Thank You Sober? - -Josie and I'll See You, My Brother Sheldon -Bye, & I'll Talk About That's a Good Day Podcast - Bye, Myself, My Sister: - Thank You - My Brother: , -Shawna & I'm With You, Mr. ~ - Ollie - And I'll Be Back Soon, -- Thank You! - , My Brother, :) - Cheers - Mr. Sheldon Johnson & My Brother --
00:00:47.000A real interesting conversation to learn his background, learn about his upbringing, learn about the crime that he committed, and hear the sentence he got,
00:01:05.000I don't want to shade it and inject my opinion.
00:01:09.000I have a strong one, but it's pretty astounding how he was treated by the system.
00:01:18.000I think that there's a real interesting twist that happens at his sentencing.
00:01:24.000And I know I've said this before, and it probably sounds repetitive, but another miracle sitting to my right, just like a I'm going to throw your life away.
00:01:52.000And on a second offense, his first offense being a gun possession charge.
00:01:59.000So I will say this, that he receives a sentence that far eclipses a sentence that would be commonly doled out for murder or manslaughter.
00:02:33.000But one of the things that always struck me about Sheldon was I didn't know him.
00:02:41.000And I got a call from these two remarkable attorneys at an organization called the Center for Appellate Litigation, Barbara Zolot and Allison Haupt, who had been working on this case for a long time.
00:02:55.000And they called me and Derek Hamilton and said, you know, we know you're working on some stuff with the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.
00:03:03.000We have this case that has sort of hit a snag.
00:03:07.000I want you to take a look at it and see if you could help us.
00:03:13.000And I called Barbara back and said, I think that there's a mistake here because it says that he was sentenced to 50 years.
00:03:24.000I could not believe what I was reading.
00:03:26.000And then I read about what Sheldon had accomplished while in prison.
00:03:31.000And then his earliest date of release was, I think, 20...
00:03:35.0002049. And he had already served 25 years.
00:03:40.000So I was just blown away by the level of accomplishment and the mental wherewithal that he possessed to accomplish what he did while incarcerated.
00:03:57.000And then the path he's taken in the eight months since he's been out.
00:04:03.000We talk about on these episodes, how do you make change happen?
00:04:10.000So I thought it would be just fascinating to go through, like I said, his life, how he got to where he was, what his thoughts are and our thoughts are on the sentence he received, why that happens too often to people of color.
00:04:28.000And I know there's one thing I want to say, and then I'm going to shut up and really let Sheldon talk and you talk.
00:04:46.000If you don't talk about how it impacts the system, even for people that have been found guilty, it's like having a conversation about President Biden and ignoring the very obvious apparent cognitive deficiencies he has.
00:05:06.000It would be like talking about Donald Trump and not recognizing that he seems like an unhinged lunatic.
00:05:15.000It would be like talking about Kamala Harris and ignoring that she didn't do much to advance criminal justice reform.
00:05:39.000So that's why I thought that this is an important conversation to have.
00:05:44.000And getting to know Sheldon, just thought he has a remarkable story to tell and a perspective on On his circumstances, the system, and he's someone that's taken responsibility for what he did and I think is a living example of what can happen if we think long and hard about if someone's life is worth just throwing away and putting behind bars so that they can rot in a dank cell because he would have been 70 years old when
00:06:14.000he got out way past his life expectancy.
00:06:18.000You know, one of the things that's happened through all of our conversations that we've had on the show Is it highlights how insanely broken the criminal justice system is and How little oversight there is and how few people are looking at these individual cases and that you can have one judge who does what they did to you and No one's looking.
00:06:44.000No one pays attention and until someone like you goes in and starts combing over this and then Coming up with a strategy to actually apply real justice or at least get someone out.
00:07:00.000I mean, the only way to apply real justice is to have a fucking time machine, right?
00:07:07.000I mean, it's so broken and it seems so overwhelmed and the root cause of it is never addressed.
00:07:16.000The root cause of, I mean, I've said it ad nauseum, but I'll say it again.
00:07:22.000Where the fuck did we come up with a hundred and whatever billion dollars to send to Ukraine, and we don't have any money to try to do something about these insanely impoverished, crime-ridden,
00:08:46.000This is a problem that's been going on for decades and decades, back through Jim Crow, back all the way to slavery, the same communities, and we don't do anything?
00:10:05.000I got a letter from a sheriff in Oregon last week, and he sent me a badge and said, I want to show you how committed I am to trying to make change happen.
00:11:29.000Just the speed of it and just the whole idea of just...
00:11:33.000You know, I had this analogy in my head when I was up in the clouds and I'm looking down and I said to myself, I said, I just came from the bowels of hell.
00:11:44.000Spending 25 years in prison and now I'm in the sky above the clouds in the heavens headed to a destination to talk about change and to talk about all of the things that brought me to this place today.
00:12:02.000And, you know, the conditions in which I grew up and, you know, how social conditions play a role in the decisions that we make.
00:12:10.000Or the lack of achievements or opportunities, like Joe just said a couple of minutes ago, you know, those opportunities are very important.
00:12:17.000And being able to start that line where everybody is not necessarily equitable, but, you know, everybody has that same opportunity.
00:13:17.000So growing up, kids would say, oh, you're a mulatto, you're a half-breed, and oh, you're adopted.
00:13:24.000And for a long time, I kind of suffered as a child with an identity crisis, not really knowing where I fell at on either side, what my identity was, who I was supposed to be.
00:13:34.000And my father, I'm also a product of intergenerational incarceration.
00:13:39.000My father was incarcerated when I was young at an early age.
00:14:43.000I feel like, in hindsight, I didn't really have an opportunity to be a child.
00:14:48.000I had to grow up and be a man early in my life in order to be able to protect my mother.
00:14:53.000And a lot of people didn't even know that I could hear.
00:14:57.000So there were times where I would be standing there with my mother and people would just be making all type of random comments and just disrespectful, you know, just hateful stuff.
00:15:07.000And I would sit there as a kid just kind of like looking up like, like, dude, I can like hear you.
00:15:14.000So, you know, I think my life took a significant turn when I was in the fifth grade.
00:15:22.000I was always pretty smart, but, you know, as being smart and growing up in these neighborhoods, you know, the school systems are not really equipped to handle the number of children that's coming through.
00:15:34.000So you have one teacher and like 30 kids.
00:15:37.000And me just being who I was, I was always pretty smart.
00:15:40.000And when I was finished with my work, I would kind of just clown around.
00:15:45.000In the fifth grade, my math teacher, and what he would do was he, when you acted out in the classroom, he would call you to the front of the classroom.
00:17:15.000In a straitjacket, being escorted to a hospital, and they stick me with a needle.
00:17:19.000And so for months, from Mount Sinai, I went to Metropolitan, and I attempted to escape from Metropolitan, and they sent me to a more secure area.
00:20:39.000So last night, we were talking about this, and we were talking about, like, What do we want to accomplish today?
00:20:48.000And last night when we were talking, he's like, well, you know the CIA brought crack into...
00:20:57.000I said, you might want to stay away from that, but here we are.
00:20:59.000The fuck out of staying away from that, man.
00:21:01.000My friend Michael Rupert, rest in peace, he was the guy who stood in front of the city council on television and exposed it.
00:21:09.000He was a former Los Angeles narcotics officer.
00:21:12.000And he said, I personally witnessed the CIA selling drugs in the inner cities of Los Angeles.
00:21:21.000And that was the Freeway Ricky Ross situation where they were using that money to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
00:21:29.000It's really not as crazy because last night, Sheldon's telling me about it, and I spent a long night into the early morning hours reading some of what you told me to read.
00:21:43.000It's really not in dispute that it happened.
00:21:51.000What blew me away about it was that Not only was it known how addictive it was, it was also known how easy it was to reproduce the process.
00:22:35.000You had mothers and really grandmothers who had to take care of the children because the mothers were in the streets smoking crack and the fathers were either in the streets using drugs, selling drugs, or in prison with astronomical sentences and removed from the family structure in totality.
00:23:10.000And it's just, I mean, the list just goes on and on when we talk about social conditions and we talk about the long-term effects of These conditions and how it produces behavior.
00:23:21.000Like Ivan Pavlov, one of my favorite psychologists, he talks about stimulus and a response, right?
00:23:28.000So you introduce the stimulus and then you have a response, which equals to the condition that we see.
00:23:37.000And you're also talking about what we were talking about earlier.
00:23:40.000You're still dealing with these communities that are still suffering from segregation, Jim Crow, and then they throw crack in it, like just gasoline on a fire.
00:23:50.000It's crazy because we've had this conversation in the abstract We've had this conversation, you know, about this very subject, and then the more I got to know Sheldon and his story, I said, well, here was someone that not only lived it, and I want to make clear one thing that...
00:24:09.000What has always struck me about Sheldon is his vulnerability but also his honesty.
00:24:16.000He's like, he'll be the first to tell you out of the gate, I did it.
00:25:02.000Explain to me how you have gotten to know somebody that has been brought up in different conditions than you were.
00:25:12.000How long have you sat and listened to them?
00:25:15.000How long have you considered how that might have impacted them and compared it to the conditions you grew up in?
00:25:22.000How many people like him have you gotten to know?
00:25:24.000So again, I'm trying to walk a fine line between sounding preachy And just saying, let's just consider the circumstances in which he was born.
00:25:36.000We're both 48. I don't want to get into, you know, my family, you know, struggled financially but had different opportunities.
00:25:49.000My dad was a knock-around Brooklyn guy that did what he could do to, you know, provide for his family and wasn't always great at it, but he was a wonderful man.
00:25:58.000But I can't ignore that I had different opportunities than Sheldon did.
00:26:03.000So when he gets out and then he arrives back on the street, you know, I don't think anyone's going to argue with the fact that you're impacted and molded from 10 to 13 and forward, 13 to 18,
00:26:18.000by who are the people you're around, what are the conditions you're born in.
00:26:22.000And I never even went back to school after that.
00:26:25.000So I'm talking about after the fifth grade, I went back to school maybe for a week when I was 17 to Washington Irving High School.
00:26:33.000I went to school for a week and I just dropped back out.
00:26:35.000I just saw no purpose in going to school.
00:26:39.000And I really didn't go back to school and really educate myself until I went to prison.
00:26:45.000Today I'm pursuing a Master's in Human Services.
00:26:48.000Before we get to your Master's, why don't you explain until you get back at 13?
00:26:53.000So I get back into my community at 13 and I'm just kind of...
00:26:56.000Not only am I trying to wean myself from all of the narcotics that have been pumped into me for these last three years.
00:27:08.000I'm talking about I gained so much weight.
00:28:10.000You had the kids going down into White Plains, breaking into cars, stealing, getting high, going across the campus, having sex with the girls.
00:28:43.000I mean, I've always known how to survive superficially, but from...
00:28:47.000I just feel like at that point I was put into a place where instead of getting real therapy or real help, I was just kind of put into a place, and I was malleable.
00:29:00.000I was young, I was impressionable, and this is what I was seeing.
00:29:24.000In my community, when you went to prison and you came back...
00:29:28.000And you didn't tell on nobody and you were able to hold it down, you know, and word got back to the streets that you didn't get robbed or, you know, you didn't get pumped.
00:29:51.000But back then, like, weed was a thing.
00:29:54.000Like, if they saw you smoking weed, that gave them justification to get out, stop you, Take you down to the precinct, run you for warrants and all kind of other stuff.
00:30:01.000You sat in the bullpens for three, four days before you even got out.
00:30:08.000I said, I'm 16. Because I wanted to go to Rikers Island so that I could come back and be around the older guys and tell them, hey, listen, I went and I still got my sneakers, you know, and the girls and everybody just treated you different.
00:30:57.000And I would just stand there and eventually I just slowly moved up the ranks and I became this person that I feel like I was never meant to be.
00:31:05.000But because of the conditions and because of where I was at and because of what I saw, what I was exposed to, made me into someone else.
00:31:14.000It turned me into this person that I was never meant to be.
00:31:20.000When you're in this melting pot of just insanity, you lose sense of what's permissible and what's not and what's impermissible.
00:31:33.000I'm committing crimes and it just doesn't even matter no more.
00:31:37.000I was never the guy, you know, to hurt any old people.
00:31:40.000My era, you know, when you see old people come through, you help them with their bags, and we have respect for our elders.
00:31:45.000That was something that was always taught to us.
00:31:48.000Now these kids, it's just, that's a whole other story.
00:31:52.000But yeah, I'm just, and I'm committing, and I'm getting arrested for little stupid crimes, driving without a license, standing on a corner, little small petty drug cases, and And I'm just kind of just moving through my life with no purpose.
00:32:33.000I can, you know, set up her cable the way she can watch HBO. All of these little small things that I wasn't able to do that she couldn't really do for herself after she paid the rent.
00:32:49.000It made me feel like a man, when in all actuality, you know, many of the values and the morals that I adopted growing up were just so warped and so misplaced.
00:33:09.000He had a car full of drugs and a car full of guns.
00:33:12.000And because I gave him my word, I felt like I couldn't back out of the situation.
00:33:17.000Nothing bad happened, but it's just the idea of sometimes growing up and adopting these values and these morals And you begin to take them on as part of your characteristics.
00:33:30.000And you end up making really, really bad decisions that can cost you for the rest of your life.
00:34:46.000And despite how many times I said that I was never going to be who my father was, my actions were actually setting me up to be exactly who my father was and remove me from my son's life.
00:35:01.000I caught the gun charge that triggered the felony that allowed them to be able to sentence me the way that they did in 1994. I also caught another case.
00:35:14.000At that time, I was what you call giving out consignment on drugs.
00:35:20.000Two people in particular I gave consignment to and I ended up getting arrested for a case.
00:35:27.000And when I sent someone to go pick up the money from them, they kind of just was like, you know, whatever, I'm not paying them.
00:35:36.000So when I came home, one guy in particular, I ran into him with his girlfriend.
00:35:42.000Did you get that case got dismissed, right?
00:38:33.000You know, reading in between the lines and outside the margins without really going into all of the details, I robbed him because he owed me $7,000.
00:39:55.000This is where the cut comes from on my face.
00:39:57.000I have a bunch of stab marks from just being in those environments and being on Rikers Island and just...
00:40:06.000Warring with other rival gangs, mostly Latin Kings and Inietas.
00:40:14.000My final offer before trial was 23 years, which kind of blew me away because my lawyer kept telling me that my maximum sentence was 25 years if I went to trial.
00:40:25.000So on my mind, it just didn't make no sense to me.
00:40:29.000Why would I forfeit my rights to an appeal if there's only a two-year difference?
00:40:34.000I told the judge I would take 15 years right now.
00:40:39.000I acknowledged that I had made some mistakes and I had done some things that were wrong.
00:40:44.000And I said, I'll take 15 years right now.
00:40:48.000He refused to accept my plea offer and I went to trial and I ended up getting 50 years.
00:41:34.000He said he went into all of these reasons why he was sentencing me the way that he was sentencing me.
00:41:43.000There was never no post, there was never no...
00:41:48.000They're supposed to do a report prior to your sentencing, and it's called a post-supervision interview.
00:41:56.000Pre-sentencing investigation is called the PSI, pre-sentencing investigation.
00:42:01.000There was never no pre-sentencing investigation.
00:42:03.000There was never no mitigating evidence presented on my behalf to, you know, highlight why I may have made some of the decisions that I made.
00:42:12.000And he just called me a menace to society, and he just gave me 50 years.
00:42:17.000And I remember when I first got to Downstate, which is a processing facility, and they give you what they call a time computation sheet.
00:42:26.000And on the time computation sheet, it gives you all of the numbers, like the beginning of your bid, how much jail time you have.
00:42:33.000And I just remember 2049. That's all I kept looking at.
00:45:06.000And it has cabbage and carrots in it, and they give you like a quarter of a cabbage, and they give you a cup of milk.
00:45:12.000When they can't take any more of your privileges, this is what they would give you.
00:45:15.000Six days out the week, on the seventh day, you would get a hot meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then they would go back for 21 days.
00:47:45.000Let's say I'm in Greenhaven and a guy's in Attica and they want to do something to him because they feel like he's not sharing his proceeds of drugs that he's bringing into the facility.
00:49:01.000I got my GED. From there, I got involved in correspondence courses.
00:49:06.000I started interacting with guys who were teaching ART, aggression replacement training, and I started to begin to understand how these concepts work, what positive visualization is.
00:52:17.000Not just the correspondence courses, but all of these various counseling programs, outreach programs, his connections to the outside world, which he'll talk about, is that the impossibly sick,
00:53:00.000That's what I am really trying to sort of put energy towards now.
00:53:08.000When you asked him earlier, wasn't there counseling in the group home?
00:53:15.000And you know, If you see what this counseling is like, obviously I can't cast aspersions on every counselor in a group home across America, but...
00:53:28.000You know, I've had people on, you know, the podcast with me, and I'm listening to their anger management classes, right?
00:53:36.000I won't mention who it is, but I'm listening to, like, the anger management class that they take.
00:54:02.000You hear not just the anger and the frustration, but the guy's inability to control the situation, to control the technology, let alone giving out, you know, Real advice.
00:54:17.000Real advice and constructive feedback on how different people are.
00:54:21.000He's checking a box, this guy, to do a job.
00:54:59.000You know, at the Perlmutter Center, where I'm the executive director, the Perlmutter Senator for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law School, we get a massive amount of mail.
00:55:11.000And we get a lot of people calling us to help out on cases.
00:55:14.000I want to help as many people as we can, but people that I think can succeed, or that we can help succeed when they get out.
00:55:22.000And, you know, on paper, you can see pretty quickly what somebody has done with their time.
00:55:31.000You know, I've sat with people in institutions all over the country where I said, what programs are you in?
00:55:39.000And I feel like an idiot asking, because I'd be a fucking puddle on the floor.
00:55:44.000I asked him many times, how often did you cry?
00:55:52.000How did you extract yourself from the gang?
00:55:55.000How did you sleep at night with the noise?
00:56:00.000Sheldon told me about this thing called a human harpoon that people make out of magazines and a sharpened toothbrush.
00:56:11.000The mindfuck on this, they stiffen the pages of a magazine with toothpaste, soap, water, let it dry, let it dry, so that they could basically work it into a rod.
00:56:26.000You keep on working the paper between your hands, and then you attach with soap, newspaper, A sharpened toothbrush handle at the end of it.
00:58:07.000On one side I had the guys who I used to run with saying, what the fuck is he doing?
00:58:15.000And then I had the guys who were actually doing good just watching me to see if I was going to Crumble or fail or, you know, you had a handful of guys that come in to me and say, yo, I applaud you, you know, I got you, man.
00:58:30.000If you need some help, I can help you do this or I can help you do that.
00:58:33.000But, you know, I just felt like everybody in the world was watching, including my family.
00:58:41.000Up until the point to where I graduated from Cornell, my cousin told me, she said, you know, when you called me and invited me to the graduation, she said, I didn't believe it.
00:58:52.000I didn't believe nothing you had told me prior for the last 10 years or anything that you said you did until I saw you at that graduation.
01:00:58.000I discovered that I had a knack for complicated things, case law, and I was helping guys, and I was actually helping guys get out of prison.
01:03:10.000There's a difference between being qualified and certified, right?
01:03:13.000You could read a hundred books about drug abuse, but how...
01:03:19.000How qualified are you to really tell somebody who's sick on heroin and they're ready to do anything that they can for a bag of dope of what you went through?
01:08:11.000And if it wasn't for, in all honesty, I'm adamant about to this day, if it wasn't for Josh and Allison Hoppe actually going to, and Derek as well, Derek Hamilton, speaking to the district attorney, like we were at a plateau where they just didn't,
01:09:09.000They deserve to help really be rehabilitated.
01:09:13.000And then Sheldon comes over and starts working at the Queen's Defenders, which is like the appointed counsel for people that can't afford an attorney.
01:09:32.000So to watch them out there advocating and trying to change hearts and minds about the community, you have to be on the ground doing it and getting in front of people.
01:10:51.000All it takes is one person listening to this episode that tells someone, that knows someone, and then progress is starting to happen and we can just do it on the ground.
01:11:03.000But the reason why I mentioned Scared Straight is because, sure, I could go in there and talk to these kids.
01:11:09.000They're not going to fucking listen to me.
01:11:40.000Sometimes I feel like, you know, the message might be better coming from Jay Prince than it is for me because he's more qualified.
01:11:50.000Try to wrap my head around what Shakur went through as a kid and growing up in Newark and the circumstance But you know, I think that there is a disconnect and I have to be big enough to recognize that And say yeah, you know, maybe I'm not the right person, but you know Telling me he's not gonna inspire and they're doing it.
01:12:09.000They're getting judges to change their mind They're getting prosecutors to think twice.
01:12:14.000We just got one guy he um He shot at his brother without going into the details of his case.
01:12:23.000He has attempted murder charge and we now have him in our program.
01:12:28.000They originally were talking about giving him 15 years.
01:12:31.000He's been in our program for a couple of months.
01:15:10.000Real help comes from someone, as you said, who's qualified to do it.
01:15:14.000It comes from the same place that you came from and that you can identify because being able to identify is a critical component, like you said.
01:15:23.000Is this someone who can identify, empathize with what I'm going through, where I'm at right now in my life?
01:15:33.000Like a lot of the young kids, they're involved in the gangs.
01:15:38.000And we have this reculturalization program, right?
01:15:43.000Where we're trying to teach them, because in many of our communities, the gangs have become a part of the culture.
01:15:50.000Like, you have parents who are gang members, you got the kids who are in communities and it's just saturated with gang culture.
01:16:27.000Take them into classrooms to meet with the professors.
01:16:31.000We have a financial literacy course where Chase Bank actually works with us, and we teach them how to establish credit, how to open up a checking account, how to open up a savings account.
01:16:41.000And at the end of that particular five-week program, we actually take them to the bank and we give them $25 so that they can open up their own bank account, so that they can understand the difference between The money that you obtain from the streets and the money that you get working legitimately is two different kinds of money.
01:16:59.000You can't appreciate the money that you get from the streets.
01:17:02.000But that money that you've been working all week for, eight hours a day, 40 hours a week at the end of the weekend, you can see that direct deposit when it goes into your account.
01:17:11.000You can take that card and you can actually utilize it to withdraw your money out the bank.
01:17:21.000You know, how can some of these kids feel like they have a voice in their communities when they're not making no decisions in their communities?
01:18:12.000Yeah, we're trying to take the charge out of their battery.
01:18:17.000We're trying to pull the plug out of the wall because, you know, these aren't controversial statistics, and I'm not going to start spewing them, but we incarcerate at a rate that dwarfs any other Western country,
01:19:03.000The way I got from being a little less intimidated by the mountain to climb was taking a step back really after the last episode and saying, well, what have we done and how have we changed things?
01:19:18.000Listen, I wasn't born a civil rights lawyer that was working on innocence cases.
01:19:24.000I have a trial strategy company called DRC. We do focus groups, mock trials on big cases, right?
01:19:32.000Try to unfold the thinking of jurors in a jurisdiction where the case is going to be tried.
01:19:38.000And we make demonstrative aids and we are alleged experts in jury selection.
01:21:05.000And I said, if we took these kids and created a fellowship program where we pay their last year of college...
01:21:12.000And five of them do it every summer and work on wrongful conviction cases at my consulting firm at DRC and also are a resource to my students who are taking an internship for the Perlmutter Center and are working on wrongful conviction cases and have them start a social media campaign.
01:21:35.000They spearheaded the free Bruce Bryant social media campaign.
01:21:39.000And watching this program These kids, if they're given the opportunity, three of them now work for me full-time.
01:21:50.000One of them is the mail intake coordinator at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.
01:21:54.000So she is receiving mail from inmates and helping screen which cases we might want to investigate.
01:22:12.000She made a presentation to me the other day.
01:22:15.000I was fucking blown away that this girl was passionate about marketing, not advertising, marketing.
01:22:24.000And she works at my consulting firm and she made a presentation to me You know, that had a level of detail and ideas about how we can become, you know, increase our awareness.
01:22:38.000And I was just thinking to myself, you know, all right, so this is the change that we're making happen.
01:25:01.000We're a society that likes to sit back and complain.
01:25:05.000We want to react instead of responding.
01:25:08.000Like one of my favorite things to do is I have severe anxiety about dying and But for whatever reason, maybe this balances me out at an airport when a flight gets canceled.
01:25:27.000Not hopefully, but I get a better view of it if it's my flight.
01:25:32.000To watch people stand up and get frustrated, berate, raise their voice at the fucking ticket attendant.
01:25:48.000It's a remarkable exercise and it's a social experiment, I think, that if people really were able to hover over the room and watch themselves, they'd be like, why am I yelling at the ticket attendant?
01:26:00.000There's only two real possibilities of why this plane is not going to fly on time.
01:26:06.000There's either a mechanical problem or weather.
01:26:09.000Do you want to fly in either of those situations?
01:26:13.000You know, and to watch people just like, you know, complain and they get, I don't know what they're getting out of it, but I just find myself trying to A, have an awareness about myself not to do that,
01:26:29.000and rather than get intimidated by the problem, try to just keep putting one foot in front of another.
01:26:36.000And then when the flight gets canceled, maybe I could read something interesting and catch up.
01:26:42.000It's inconvenient or come up with an idea.
01:26:44.000I mean, trust me, I'm an average guy of average intelligence that just I think I have like more tenacity.
01:26:55.000So I don't if I can help make some of this stuff happen, other people can make it happen.
01:27:01.000And Sheldon asked me, should I go to law school?
01:27:26.000Most lawyers don't, which is common sense and street smarts.
01:27:31.000And they marry that with what they learned in school.
01:27:35.000And they're able to sort of, that perfect stew, I think is what leads to a successful advocate, counselor, attorney, whatever you are.
01:27:46.000And oftentimes there's so much of an emphasis placed on your grades and what score did you get and How much of that really ends up fucking mattering at the end of the day?
01:28:16.000Just decide one discreet thing you want to do to try to help make a change happen.
01:28:22.000And then, you know, again, just try to get some forward momentum and you'd be surprised at the buy-in that you get.
01:28:30.000I think that that's why this platform is so important because it allows people to start sharing ideas, reaching out to us, and we're taking them up on it.
01:28:41.000I've told you before, we've been contacted by You know, a major law firm, Greenberg Traurig, and, you know, a really awesome attorney that's working on the case of Pierre Rushing, this guy Jordan Grotzinger, who's just thought he was a corporate attorney,
01:28:58.000had nothing to do with this kind of work.
01:29:45.000I think that it's too much of a giant to slay unless we start pulling the electrodes, not the Neuralink electrodes, pulling the electrodes out of the sockets and taking energy out of it.
01:30:03.000As much as we can until they're like, well, we don't have any fucking people.
01:30:07.000Or you begin sabotaging pieces of the machine, right?
01:30:10.000Because, you know, a lot of these corporations are what you call well-oiled machines, right?
01:30:19.000When you open up a watch, you see so many intricate pieces, right?
01:30:22.000And sometimes if you break the right piece in the watch, the whole watch ceases to keep time.
01:30:33.000And it's just, you know, it's just a poor excuse for, it's like putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound, you know, for the government to allow these corporations to privatize and say, okay, okay, it's not our problem anymore.
01:30:54.000Now you have these corporations who they really don't care about, you know, rights and humanity and cruel and unusual punishment and due process.
01:31:05.000They don't care about none of this stuff.
01:31:06.000Well, to allow it to exist in the first place, you have to ignore that people will be incentivized like every other industry, like the pharmaceutical industry, like the military industrial complex, like everything else.
01:31:19.000Once they start Acting as a corporation, which all corporations, it is in their best interest to try to maximize the amount of profit they make always.
01:31:30.000If they have shareholders, it's their responsibility to those shareholders to maximize profits with each quarter.
01:31:36.000Now, when that happens with human beings in prisons, you can bet your fucking sweet ass they're gonna lock as many people up as they can.
01:34:11.000So the goods prisoners produced wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flake cereals, ballpark hot dogs, to gold medal flour, Coca-Cola, and Rice Land rice.
01:34:23.000They're on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi, and Whole Foods.
01:34:31.000Some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
01:34:50.000Right after the Emancipation Proclamation, post antebellum, you know, they created these laws to convict The freed slaves so that they can continue to force them into free labor, right?
01:35:05.000And it just continues today, like 13 cent hours, 17 cent hours, 19 cent hours.
01:35:10.000During the pandemic, Great Meadows Correctional Facility had these guys working 24 hours a day making hand sanitizers and masks.
01:35:22.000That place is the scariest fucking place.
01:36:12.000I think it was part of Apt Pupil or one of his books of short stories.
01:36:16.000And you remember in the Shawshank Redemption where they had this precise thing where it was they came up with this idea, you know, the warden came up with an idea for a work program where they were profiting.
01:36:30.000He was basing that on something that was happening in the Northeast back then.
01:36:34.000So, you know, the notion that this is still happening shouldn't be that shocking.
01:36:41.000It's just like, what is our news cycle pay attention to?
01:36:46.000And how do you make sure that this kind of stuff doesn't keep happening?
01:36:51.000My idea is you need people on the ground that are working on policy and reform.
01:37:00.000So at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo, we have a policy advisor.
01:37:07.000Her name is Sarah Chu, who knows forensics.
01:37:11.000She's a scientist and, like, one of the more respected—in my mind, the most respected reform advocate about how we stop using junk science, like bite marks and— Blood spatter.
01:37:25.000Well, blood spatter, ballistics, even fingerprints to some extent.
01:37:29.000The conversation we were having earlier.
01:37:30.000Yeah, and lobbying to make sure that laws get changed.
01:37:35.000And, you know, it's like at the end of the day, the scariest part about all of this is that the politicians that we poke fun at, I poke fun at, everybody has a field day...
01:38:21.000They're working boots on the ground and trying to change and educate, really.
01:38:26.000I mean, how much does your local representative or a state senator Really know about how dangerous it could be to draw conclusions about the directionality of how blood hits drywall versus how it hits lucite.
01:38:46.000How bite marks leave an indentation on someone's skin.
01:38:53.000You could, I could, a qualified, certified actually, Strike qualified, a certified odontologist, total horseshit, could take one of these skulls and make the same case.
01:39:12.000That the bite marks left on someone's leg came from this set of teeth, Sheldon's teeth, your teeth, or my teeth, and convince four juries four times 100% of the time...
01:39:29.000So when bite marks became subject of a report that everybody should read...
01:39:38.000The National Academy of Sciences did a report in 2009 that should have changed our criminal justice system.
01:39:45.000It had the most qualified, certified scientists from all over the world study all of these disciplines of forensic All of these disciplines of forensic science and come to the conclusions that none of them,
01:40:03.000none of them were supported by a scientifically credible body of evidence.
01:40:15.000The scientific method that you learn in grade school, you could apply it to any of them and they would all fail the test.
01:40:21.000Which are the standards for admissions at trial?
01:40:24.000And it talks about the standards for emissions and trial, the Daubert standard, the Frye standard.
01:40:29.000It's just, is it credible in the scientific community?
01:40:31.000And they come to a resounding no on everything except for DNA. And DNA is still fraught right now because there are all these new technologies.
01:41:10.000There's a case of a guy named Emmanuel Fair in Seattle where he was implicated in a murder because he was at a party on Halloween when this girl got murdered.
01:41:18.000He ended up getting, you know, sitting in prison for, I think, seven or eight years before he finally got acquitted.
01:41:26.000So this report should have turned forensic science on its head and no one gives a fuck.
01:41:35.000Well, bite mark evidence is still admissible in all 50 states.
01:41:41.000So, I mean, you know, look, we could sit, I could sit and bang my head against the wall about it, or I could, you know, just keep on speaking up when you're in front of a judge.
01:41:51.000How often, Sheldon, do you hear from an attorney, well, I don't want to piss off the judge?
01:42:43.000Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
01:42:45.000And you constantly keep hitting on the fact that, you know, why do you wait for a problem to end up at your doorstep before you decide to do something about it?
01:42:57.000You know, you have, like he said, you have people at all of these different organizations.
01:43:52.000You know, I took a picture of a guy, a homeless guy, on a train station a couple of days ago, and I posted it on my Instagram page.
01:44:00.000And it just blows me away how And I'm just going to be straight out.
01:44:07.000I have an issue with the whole immigration thing because I feel like, like he said, like Joe said earlier, you have $70 million that you can give to a whole other country, yet you're not addressing the issues right here at home right now.
01:44:23.000I work for the Department of Homeless Shelters.
01:44:30.000Like, and then you have citizens, you have veterans that come back from wars and can't even get the same services that people from other countries come here and get immediately.
01:44:39.000They get housing vouchers, they get education vouchers, everything.
01:44:43.000Like, you know, make America great again.
01:44:46.000If you're gonna make America great again, focus on the people, the citizens, the people who put you in office.
01:45:10.000It's about how your brain works and why we believe what we believe and the two systems of our brain.
01:45:20.000And one is the quick judgment and the other is the slow it down and critically think about it.
01:45:27.000And there are all these puzzles in it where he makes the point by saying, like, consider the following.
01:45:35.000And the studies that have been done on someone just repeating the same words over and over again, and how that translates into people feeling that it's A, credible, and B, that the person uttering the words has some credibility,
01:46:52.000Sheldon will be the first to tell you, like, I did some fucked up things.
01:46:56.000But when you watch what he's doing, you know, why can't we make people in these communities...
01:47:09.000Why can't we make them great again by giving them a better chance?
01:47:14.000Like you said at the outset of the episode, let them hit the starting line.
01:47:21.000Well, you know, what you were saying earlier about building a sandcastle, one grain of sand at a time, I think, from my perspective, the feedback that I get, it's these conversations we've had, we've had quite a few of them now, they have changed a lot of people's ideas on how the prison system is structured,
01:47:43.000what the problems with it are, how many people are wrongfully incarcerated.
01:47:48.000How incredible some of these people are, wasted potential, locked away forever, something never did, and they didn't break.
01:47:55.000Instead, they got stronger and wiser and more intelligent and more educated and came out better.
01:48:17.000And then we hear about these horrific incidences or people getting pushed onto the train tracks because you have a guy who has a mental illness.
01:48:25.000Instead of getting the services that he needs, you put him in prison.
01:48:28.000You sedated him for three, four years, five years.
01:49:03.000I mean, most of the time, you're right.
01:49:05.000The cycle of from the street to prison back to the street to prison, most of the time— Recidivism.
01:49:12.000Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying it in plain English.
01:49:15.000Most of the time, it's churning out monsters, because what else would you expect, right?
01:49:23.000I mean, there's a great book called In the Belly of the Beast about a guy that went to prison, and he describes what it did to him psychologically, what it did to him, to every cell in his body.
01:49:40.000And then he goes out and he murders someone.
01:49:45.000And he writes this book just explaining, I want you to understand what this did to me.
01:50:00.000Yeah, these are talk about grains of sand on a beach.
01:50:06.000If you look at the population of people that keep getting churned out of correctional institutions, most of them are not getting corrected.
01:50:16.000Why do I like to spend my time with these guys?
01:50:19.000Because I hope some of their strength rubs off on me somehow.
01:50:35.000I put in for the SNAP, the food stamps, the benefits, the little bit of benefits that I had, right, or that I could possibly acquire to help me navigate and kind of transition back and reintegrate back into society.
01:50:49.000And I had a conversation with a lady on the phone, and she told me She said, you don't qualify for emergency services.
01:51:22.000But I'm saying all of that to say that there's these institutions in place that need to change.
01:51:31.000And for the people who are listening to this and you're directly involved in these institutions, there has to be a conscientious response to what classifies as an emergency.
01:51:58.000How much would that have incentivized me to go out and commit a robbery or steal a piece of pizza like a guy out in California where they have the three strikes laws and they end up giving this guy 20 years for stealing a slice of pizza because he's starving?
01:52:37.000And I had a little J-Pay debit card because I had a couple of dollars in my account that they gave me with a little bit of extra money on it.
01:52:46.000They have some programs that you're supposed to be entitled to prior to release, but it's a joke because the programs don't teach you any real skills.
01:52:59.000One of the most significant hurdles I had upon my reintegration was technology.
01:53:07.000I've never had a cell phone in my life.
01:53:11.000I sent out my first email in 2019 from a tablet that they gave me in Auburn Correctional Facility.
01:53:19.000I don't know what a PDF... I went online and they said I had to...
01:53:25.000Convert my application into a PDF before I could submit it.
01:55:30.000That's where I went when I first got released.
01:55:32.000But, you know, going back, had it not been for these formerly incarcerated individuals, I don't know where I would have been.
01:55:41.000Had I had to depend on my elected representatives, my elected assembly and senators, I would probably be trying to steal a loaf of bread at the grocery store.
01:56:30.000Was so inspired by what he saw at Sing Sing with formerly incarcerated individuals that got out and started programs.
01:56:45.000J.J. Velasquez's Voices from Within started this organization when he was incarcerated where they bring people in the community into the prison.
01:56:56.000Just to talk to inmates and to establish that there's some humanity there.
01:57:03.000Capra, the warden of Sing Sing Prison, they call him the superintendent in New York.
01:58:22.000So when Bruce gets out, he needed clothes.
01:58:25.000He said, we'll bring you some clothes.
01:58:26.000He said, no, Hudson Link has this great little spot.
01:58:28.000So while he was still the warden, he came.
01:58:33.000Walt Bruce was picking out things to congratulate him and wish him well.
01:58:38.000And so, yeah, I mean, not only did I talk to him, he told me when I retire, I'm going to come work with these guys.
01:58:45.000So, yeah, when I saw him at this event called the United Justice Coalition, he's at a booth working for J.J. on the Frederick Douglass project.
01:59:15.000He was telling me how, you know, just being on the outside with these guys that I saw in, you know, not only in prison uniforms, but in a construct that I was the head of.
01:59:28.000And now they're the ones inspiring me.
01:59:30.000We need more Mike Cappers in the world.
01:59:32.000Speaking of Michael Capper, right, so prior to my release, me and Bruce, Bruce Bryant, were working.
01:59:43.000One of them was a civic engagement in New York where we actually teach incarcerated individuals on their rights to vote, how they vote, how do you go to a booth, how do you register to vote, et cetera, et cetera.
01:59:55.000And Michael Capra was pivotal in allowing us to be able to create these programs and have a platform in the school building.
02:00:04.000One of them in particular that we are trying to work on now is dyslexia, right?
02:00:15.000According to the Department of Correctional Education, 47% of the incarcerated population all across the United States have some type of dyslexia or reading disability, right?
02:00:28.000That's almost half of the individuals that are in the Department of Corrections that have some type of reading disability, right?
02:00:37.000So when you look at, and that's the tip of the iceberg, right, so when you look at the bottom of the iceberg, right, and you go and you delve even deeper into that, right, what are the key factors that played in this person actually, you know, what's the correlation between incarceration and illiteracy,
02:00:56.000And there are currently no programs in any Department of Corrections throughout the United States that's actually screening men For dyslexia or to determine who can read and who can't read.
02:01:14.000However, a study of Texas prison inmates by the University of Texas Medical Branch estimated that approximately 80% of prisoners in a sample group struggled with their literacy skills and that half were likely to be dyslexic.
02:01:31.000So when we talk about recidivism and we talk about preparing someone to be reintegrated back into society, the Department of Corrections has failed.
02:01:45.000How can you say you're going to rehabilitate somebody?
02:01:48.000Reading, for me, right, I believe that reading is a fundamental right.
02:01:51.000My grandmother used to read to me when I was a kid.
02:01:53.000I would lay in her lap and she would read to me.
02:01:55.000And it wasn't even about what she read to me, but it was the connection that she and I had together and just being there with her.
02:02:04.000The idea of what it means to read, right?
02:02:06.000But when we talk about going back to the PDF thing, right?
02:02:11.000A guy comes home and he's supposed to go online and fill out an application, but he can't even read.
02:02:19.000How is he supposed to follow basic instructions during transportation and trying to get onto the train and navigate through all of the basic instructions?
02:02:30.000There are necessities in life and he can't even read.
02:02:35.000There's an even more startling picture to that, right?
02:03:52.000And in the process of filing that motion, that's when I met Allison Hart and Barbara Zoloff at the Center for Appellate Litigation.
02:04:01.000And they have what they call is the YEARS program, Youth Emergent Assisted Resentencing Program.
02:04:08.000And what they do is they look for individuals who meet a certain age bracket when they were sentenced, a crime, and then the sentence that's attached, usually disparaging sentences.
02:04:23.000So the motion got denied, but in the process I connected with Allison and they reached out to me and they said, We think you qualify for the program.
02:04:34.000We think you're the poster child for this program based on your circumstances.
02:04:41.000And that began the process of my release.
02:04:46.000I think what played a significant role was what I had done while I was in prison because that's one of the major things that the district attorney's office had looked at.
02:04:57.000That's one of the major things that Josh and Allison and everybody had brought to the attention of these people.
02:05:03.000Say, okay, you know, you have a guy who Has these set of circumstances, but look at what he has done while he was incarcerated.
02:05:11.000Look what he has been able to accomplish.
02:05:13.000And he did all of this under the pretenses that he was never going to get out.
02:05:27.000I sent out a whole bunch of documents, and they put together what they call a mitigation packet.
02:05:33.000And a mitigation package just outlines everything, my circumstances, my sentence, my crime, accountability, and a whole bunch of other factors.
02:06:48.000So him and Derek got together, along with Allison, Hop, and Barbara Zoloff, and they went back to the district attorney's office in full force.
02:07:11.000And I think I want to make sure that the credit is given where it belongs, which is probably to Sheldon first for transforming his life, and to Barbara and Allison, because these are two amazing attorneys that saw potential and the injustice in what was done to Sheldon and who he had become,
02:07:35.000You know, and I'm on the phone with Bruce, and these prison calls, if they're not a legal call, these prison calls are like, sometimes they just end real abruptly.
02:07:44.000You know, it's like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, I gotta go by.
02:07:48.000You know, or, oh, they're giving me a hard time, they're doing a count now, I gotta go by.
02:07:55.000So, Bruce is, you know, about to get out.
02:07:59.000He's got his clemency is granted, he had, he had, um, Gone to the parole board with a claim of innocence, which is so rare, and got granted the parole pending the reinvestigation of his case.
02:08:17.000But he has clemency with no strings attached, other than being on probation until they make a final decision on his innocence.
02:08:31.000He's on the phone with me going, yo, yo, I got this guy, Sheldon Johnson, right here.
02:09:02.000No, you got something, you got your lines crossed somewhere.
02:09:06.000So I finally like paid attention to it.
02:09:12.000I had a million other cases going on and Bruce was our first client at the Perlmutter Center and we were like, you know, really lining things up for his release.
02:09:21.000And I speak to Sheldon's lawyer, and she said, you know, I'm actually friends with your cousin, and when she organized a baby shower for your first, for your daughter, who's my oldest, Lila, she said,
02:09:36.000I was at your house for your baby shower.
02:09:38.000I remember your wife, Jillian, real well.
02:09:41.000She's like, tells me, I remember your house.
02:09:44.000And I'm like, well, come on, you can't make this shit up.
02:10:36.000It was him being indicted, and then they were saying that it was too much police activity there, that they just kept pushing it back.
02:10:44.000So what happened was we were at the district attorney's office on a different case that we're working on, and we asked to speak to the district attorney of New York and let him know that we were now representing Sheldon along with the Center for Appellate Litigation and made a passionate plea on Sheldon's behalf and I don't want to go too much into the details,
02:11:08.000You know, kudos to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for actually paying attention and seeing that Sheldon was worthy of a second chance.
02:11:20.000And really, the sentence did not fit the crime.
02:11:26.000And the twist on Sheldon's story that...
02:11:29.000It's like a head-scratcher to me that I asked him about...
02:11:34.000Was the judge that sentenced him as a black man.
02:11:39.000And, you know, I said to Sheldon, did that ever strike you as, I mean, here's an African American judge that looks at this young black kid and should understand his circumstances and have a better understanding of it and not want to throw away his life.
02:12:03.000And I said, so what do you do with that fact?
02:12:07.000And Sheldon said, well, I'll let you respond to it because he said something to me that I didn't really – I mean this judge now sits as a federal judge in the Southern District of New York.
02:12:25.000It just seems so strange to me that that is who said, this guy's not worthy of redemption.
02:12:36.000One of the things that I expressed to Josh when we had this conversation was that Just in my experiences dealing with judges and prosecutors and correctional officers in particular who are black,
02:12:54.000They struggle with this idea that they feel that they have to be harder on their own people.
02:13:03.000For one, to make an example, and so that their colleagues don't think that they're being weak or showing favoritism because, oh, this guy is black, so you're showing him favoritism.
02:13:14.000But the idea of what Josh is saying, you would think that someone who's in this position as a judge, he's an arbitrator, right?
02:13:23.000He is supposed to be someone who is in a position of power and authority, should be able to look down And I mean, maybe he saw something.
02:13:36.000I don't know what his experiences was.
02:13:52.000We need these people to be able to look at things from an objective, right?
02:13:57.000Because as a person of color and in a position of power, a lot of times it's a subjective reality.
02:14:06.000It's a reality that's attached to personal feelings and experiences, and a person who's in that position should be in a position to be more objective, right?
02:15:18.000Because, like he just said, you know, they are a minority and they don't want to be ostracized by their co-workers or made to seem as if they're showing favoritism towards the prisoners.
02:15:30.000So they go out of their way to just be extra.
02:15:38.000What a white cop might say, this guy got a pot and an eye.
02:15:44.000So, you know, in prison, you know, we have like, you know, you have pots, guys cook, and you have an eye.
02:15:50.000It's usually like a coil that's detached from a hot pot, and you use it to make food.
02:15:57.000There's been times when, you know, you'll have a white cop that'll come in the cell, and it's contraband.
02:16:02.000You're not supposed to have it, but you'll have a white cop that'll come in the cell, and he'll see a pot, and he'll just be like, he's just using that to cook.
02:16:08.000Then you'll have a black cop that'll come and be like, no, he can't have that.
02:16:35.000And the idea of the person, the guy who was in the house...
02:16:38.000He was harder on his own people, his fellow slaves, than some of the overseers may have been or the slave masters.
02:16:47.000So it's this transferred psychological state where, you know, a person feels like they have to just go above and beyond, like Joe just said, to show that, oh, I'm not showing favoritism.
02:17:54.000How much of that could be saved if it's invested?
02:17:57.000I mean, it would be a fascinating study if one state would implement what we're talking about, like community outreach programs starting at a grassroots level.
02:18:09.000How much money would be saved by the state for investing that money?
02:18:12.000So, for example, right, on the 17th of this month, we went to, I told you, we went to the rally.
02:18:20.000So, the idea of the treatment, not jails, is to have a diversion court that deals with substance abuse and give the judges the discretion To send people who clearly have substance abuse issues into a program as opposed to incarceration,
02:19:29.000Then they have to worry about how will that impact my electability, right?
02:19:34.000Because are the corrections officers union, the police union, are they going to get behind me in the next election?
02:19:40.000I think when you take a step back from a governor, Like, we have a guy who is the DA of Brooklyn.
02:19:47.000His name is District Attorney Gonzalez.
02:19:50.000And, you know, we have an amazing relationship with him.
02:19:55.000The Perlmutter Center, Derek Hamilton especially, where we're able to go to him and the people that work with him and say, look, we have a client right now that's in prison for, I think, 30 years on a 30-year sentence for a $6 robbery at a drug house.
02:20:12.000And the diversion programs, the drug diversion programs that are available now weren't available back then.
02:20:30.000You know, I think that the short answer is, yeah, it would take a governor to implement a program to be able to point funds in the right direction.
02:20:44.000You talked about, just one second, you talked about HBCUs.
02:20:48.000FAMU in Florida, the only land grant HBCU in the state, is the disparity in funding Of that school versus other schools in the state is not a matter of—it's a matter of fact.
02:21:10.000I was recently arguing on behalf of these students that just want to be— We're good to go.
02:22:29.000No, I'm saying that's where it started.
02:22:31.000And if you take a thread and pull it forward through time, the United States Office of Civil Rights in the 1970s, in the 1990s, Went to the state of Florida and said, you are not funding FAMU appropriately.
02:22:47.000And they entered into these consent decrees with them, where they had to do what's called destroy vestiges of du jour segregation.
02:22:57.000Because since Brown versus Board of Education, there was another Supreme Court decision called Fortis, which talked about how do you establish that a pattern or practice is traceable to segregation.
02:23:09.000And the state of Florida just has ignored it.
02:23:14.000So does Governor DeSantis have the ability to make sure that FAMU is funded appropriately?
02:23:21.000Or is Governor DeSantis going to worry more about Florida State University being somehow shortchanged in the national championship and earmark funds to...
02:23:38.000Challenge the college football folks to make sure...
02:23:50.000So the answer to your question is yes, but he's not going to do it for whatever political reasons he has.
02:23:58.000Why not fund the school so that there is some, you know, a level playing field?
02:24:05.000And it's a controversial subject amongst ignorant voters.
02:24:09.000It's a controversial subject amongst ignorant voters because all Governor DeSantis has to say is he took a page out of Trump's book because he knows it works, is all he has to say is woke, [...
02:24:27.000It means different things to different people.
02:24:29.000All I'm saying is look at the statistics, and you cannot come to any conclusion but that FAMU, the only HBCU that is a land-grant institution in Florida, meaning that they were granted land, is funded disproportionate to any other college in the state.
02:25:27.000When you are struggling to make sure that the microscopes work in your science labs, which one of my clients will tell you is the case, and you have dilapidated buildings, are you worrying about starting a fundraising organization and boosters?
02:25:44.000Well, couldn't they have gone and lobbied the legislator?
02:25:47.000Who was running the legislator in Florida?
02:25:51.000You know, and so when you start to run into arguments like that, the writing's sort of on the wall, and we have to now take it up with the, you know, the 11th Circuit in Atlanta and try to get that decision overturned.
02:26:04.000This was on a motion to dismiss where the standard is just, I have to take all of the facts that the plaintiffs are alleging as true and assume them to be true at this stage.
02:26:16.000So it's, you know, the point is the problem would not exist if the governor just said, you know what, I just got these statistics from the Department of Education.
02:26:27.000Let's just fund FAMU proportionate to how we fund every other school.
02:27:19.000These objectives are long-term and it takes time to quantify them.
02:27:24.000So when we speak about quantifying like these examples of what are the circumstances surrounding the lacking of funding, a lot of times these governors are more concerned about whether or not this is going to come out during election year and people are going to,
02:27:42.000you know, whether liberals Or conservatives are going to go against them and vote against them because they supported education of incarcerated individuals.
02:27:54.000I remember when I was going to Auburn and I was in the Cornell Prison Education Program.
02:28:00.000This was in 2014. You had correctional officers' families outside the facility protesting as the volunteers were coming into prison with With signs saying, does my kid have to get convicted in order to get a free education?
02:28:21.000And the idea was that we were receiving a free education because we were incarcerated, which is not the case.
02:28:28.000The idea is that education has been proven to prevent recidivism.
02:28:34.000Individuals who have been shown to acquire associate's degrees and bachelor's degrees are like 91, 92% less likely to return back to prison.
02:28:46.000So this is quantifiable evidence of how you take money...
02:28:53.000And you allocate it into one project so over the long run you can save money.
02:29:09.000I mean, I think the easy answer, though, to your question of why I don't focus my attention on governors is, like, am I leaving this in people like Bill Clinton's hands when he was the governor of Arkansas?
02:29:51.000Yeah, so I think that the time, energy, and resources are better spent.
02:29:57.000I think the private sector comes up with better solutions oftentimes at helping, like, watch how, what do they call it, the virtuous cycle?
02:30:09.000When I saw the work that Alison Haupt and Barbara Zoloft were doing at the Center for Appellate Litigation, I said, this is like, you know, God's work.
02:30:21.000This is like beautiful stuff they're doing.
02:30:25.000So rather than be like, you know, the civil rights community can be interesting.
02:30:31.000It brings out the best and the worst of people.
02:30:34.000A lot of these civil rights organizations, you know, again, you throw human beings into any endeavor together, they're going to fuck it up.
02:30:40.000They like to argue and get, like, um, I mean...
02:31:03.000We have to do these mitigation reports, and we have to hire people, like in Sheldon's case, to assess him, a clinical psychologist, a social worker, whatever it is.
02:31:13.000And we don't have the money to get the reports done.
02:32:08.000That listen to these cases and what they do are videos.
02:32:12.000He does these really great videos that are like a day in the life and to sort of humanize the clients so they're not just on paper or in pictures and they go and interview them and have them talk about what it would mean to be free and how they've changed themselves.
02:32:29.000So he needed a little bit of help to get these videos produced.
02:32:32.000So we've agreed to donate some funds there.
02:32:51.000To wrap this up, if someone's listening to this and they want to reach out, they want to help, they want to contribute, maybe somebody does want to, some Jeff Bezos type character does want to get involved and see if there is something that they could do in terms of like some sort of a community outreach center or something that can help.
02:33:38.000But in any event, you can reach out to me at joshua.dubin at yu.edu.
02:33:48.000That's my email for the Perlmutter Center.
02:33:54.000You know, we're on the precipice of a major announcement with one of the most prestigious law firms in the country in a couple of weeks that has agreed to not donate just financial resources but woman and manpower to help litigate these cases.
02:34:15.000That came as a result of the exposure that we're getting here.
02:34:31.000Doing this quarterly and telling these stories, I'm very thoughtful in who I bring on.
02:34:37.000I think this was one of the best ones yet.
02:34:42.000I just love the fact that Sheldon was able to tell his story, and this was a different version of, I think, an important element of the story that needs to be told.
02:35:12.000Thank you for the example that you set and all you've done to educate people and just to set an example with your own life that there's a way out of this.
02:35:22.000And you can also find us at queensdefenders.org.
02:35:37.000We're also on the precipice of an amazing announcement working with Columbia University, their Youth Justice Ambassador Program, and coordinating with professors and volunteers from Columbia to work with our Youth Emergent Leadership Program.
02:35:52.000And, you know, we can use all of the help that we can get.
02:35:56.000Well, I'm sure you're going to get some.