Josh Dubin and Sheldon Johnson—a formerly incarcerated advocate with a 25-year sentence for a minor robbery—expose racial sentencing disparities, like Johnson’s "menace to society" label despite no pre-sentencing review. His prison education (GED, Cornell’s program) and mentorship cut recidivism risks, yet systemic barriers persist: privatized prisons profit from incarceration, HBCUs like FAMU remain underfunded, and governors avoid reform due to political backlash. Johnson’s release after 25 years reveals how diversion programs save $2.21 per dollar spent on treatment, yet funding gaps and judge bias (e.g., a Black federal judge denying his appeal) block progress. Their clemency push, backed by Columbia and a major law firm, aims to humanize cases, proving education—with 91–92% lower recidivism for degrees—is the key to breaking cycles. [Automatically generated summary]
This is my friend, my client, my brother, Sheldon Johnson.
I figured we'd do something a little bit different.
Typically, the person sitting to my right is someone that was wrongfully convicted.
So I don't want to bury the headline.
Sheldon is guilty.
And I thought it would be...
A real interesting conversation to learn his background, learn about his upbringing, learn about the crime that he committed, and hear the sentence he got, which...
I don't want to shade it and inject my opinion.
I have a strong one, but it's pretty astounding how he was treated by the system.
I think that there's a real interesting twist that happens at his sentencing.
And I know I've said this before, and it probably sounds repetitive, but another miracle sitting to my right, just like a marvelous human being who was basically told by a judge, by an African-American judge, that you don't matter, by an African-American judge, that you don't matter, you don't count, and I'm going to throw your life away.
For a crime in which the victim received two stitches, and on a second offense, his first offense being a gun possession charge.
So I will say this, that he receives a sentence that far eclipses a sentence that would be commonly doled out for murder or manslaughter.
But one of the things that always struck me about Sheldon was I didn't know him.
And 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.
And 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.
We have this case that has sort of hit a snag.
I want you to take a look at it and see if you could help us.
And I called Barbara back and said, I think that there's a mistake here because it says that he was sentenced to 50 years.
I mean, that's no bullshit.
I could not believe what I was reading.
And then I read about what Sheldon had accomplished while in prison.
And then his earliest date of release was, I think, 20...
2049. And he had already served 25 years.
So I was just blown away by the level of accomplishment and the mental wherewithal that he possessed to accomplish what he did while incarcerated.
And then the path he's taken in the eight months since he's been out.
We talk about on these episodes, how do you make change happen?
He's living it and making it happen.
So 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.
And 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.
I get this a lot.
Why are you always bringing up race when you talk about the system?
And my response to that is...
If 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.
It would be like talking about Donald Trump and not recognizing that he seems like an unhinged lunatic.
It would be like talking about Kamala Harris and ignoring that she didn't do much to advance criminal justice reform.
You have to confront it.
It's there.
Is it that all people that get wrongfully convicted are people of color?
No, but most of them.
Is it that all people of color get disparate sentences?
Oh, absolutely.
So that's why I thought that this is an important conversation to have.
And 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
You 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.
No one cares.
No 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.
I mean, the only way to apply real justice is to have a fucking time machine, right?
But it's broken.
I mean, it's so broken and it seems so overwhelmed and the root cause of it is never addressed.
The root cause of, I mean, I've said it ad nauseum, but I'll say it again.
Where 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, gang-ridden, drug-ridden communities?
We don't do anything?
We have nothing?
I mean, this is my take on this whole make America great again thing.
You want to make America great again?
Make it so there's less losers.
Make it so that more people have a fucking chance.
The idea that everyone starts on the same line.
I mean, I'm not talking about equality of outcome.
That's not possible.
But equality of opportunity is possible.
That's a possible goal.
And at least we could advance that.
At least we could do something to just change the course of who knows how many people's lives.
It makes no sense to me, and it's not a subject of any presidential debates.
It's not a subject of anybody who's running for Congress or running for Senate.
We have to fix this.
This 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?
Yeah, it's hard to know where to pick up because we just had this conversation.
But you're, you know, look.
Well, let's preface the episode by saying this.
We are doing something about it.
I keep telling you that this forum keeps paying dividends.
We are making progress.
We are opening people's minds.
I'm getting letters from prosecutors.
I'm getting letters from sheriffs.
I 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.
And it was from this show.
So we're doing it.
We're addressing it.
We're making it happen.
Why politicians don't...
What drives someone to want to get into politics these days is for a different psychiatrist.
I have no clue what the allure is, but there's such a swirl of...
Ego and power struggle and divided loyalties.
I can't even wrap my head around it.
But, you know, we're doing it.
We're helping.
We got to do it grain of sand by grain of sand until we have a sandcastle.
So that's what we're doing.
So I do think we're making a difference.
But, you know, it's crazy because Sheldon and I are the same exact age.
And we didn't know that until we were on our way down here.
Just the speed of it and just the whole idea of just...
You 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.
Spending 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.
And, you know, the conditions in which I grew up and, you know, how social conditions play a role in the decisions that we make.
Or the lack of achievements or opportunities, like Joe just said a couple of minutes ago, you know, those opportunities are very important.
And being able to start that line where everybody is not necessarily equitable, but, you know, everybody has that same opportunity.
My grandmother came to America in 1918 from a boat from Sicily.
My father is Nigerian.
He's African.
So there was always this contrast where...
I wasn't really sure where I belonged at.
Kids are cruel.
So growing up, kids would say, oh, you're a mulatto, you're a half-breed, and oh, you're adopted.
And 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.
And my father, I'm also a product of intergenerational incarceration.
My father was incarcerated when I was young at an early age.
He did about 15 years.
I was incarcerated.
My grandfather was incarcerated.
My great-grandfather was a slave.
And my son killed somebody when he was 12 years old.
So there's this cycle of incarceration based on the conditions, the social conditions, and where I come from.
I grew up in New York City, Harlem, on the borderline between the east side and the west side on Fifth Avenue.
You hit Fifth Avenue, you're like, oh, wow, you live in a nice place.
Okay.
Crack era Harlem, 80s, 90s.
You know, and I grew up, you know, protecting my mother, interpreting for my mother.
My mother could hardly ever keep a job because of her handicap.
There was always somebody that would replace her.
A lot of people saw my mother as a victim.
She was a white woman on 112th Street in Lenox Avenue, an all-black community.
So as a child, I grew up protecting my mother.
So I never really...
I feel like, in hindsight, I didn't really have an opportunity to be a child.
I had to grow up and be a man early in my life in order to be able to protect my mother.
And a lot of people didn't even know that I could hear.
So 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.
And I would sit there as a kid just kind of like looking up like, like, dude, I can like hear you.
So, you know, I think my life took a significant turn when I was in the fifth grade.
I 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.
So you have one teacher and like 30 kids.
And me just being who I was, I was always pretty smart.
And when I was finished with my work, I would kind of just clown around.
I had this teacher...
In 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.
He had a stack of rulers.
Today he would be arrested.
Back then, but back then it was permissible.
It was considered as, you know, just punishing kids.
And he would call you to the front of the classroom.
He would make you stick out your hand.
And he would put salt.
He had a big salt shaker that he kept on his desk.
And he would sprinkle salt in your palm.
And he would smack the ruler into your hand.
And the salt would kind of embed itself into your palm.
It would kind of have like a little burning sensation.
So...
One day I decided that I was tired of it.
And he called me to the front of the classroom, and I put my hand out, and when he swung, I moved my hand.
And he almost fell over.
He chased me around the classroom.
I ran out into the hallway.
He chased me into the hallway.
I grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall, and I sprayed him until he fell.
It'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.
And then you had the Nelson, the Rockefeller drug laws that came into effect that required mandatory minimums and et cetera, et cetera.
So when we talk about social conditions and we talk about...
Situations that were created for the purpose of what?
You know, you separated families.
You 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.
Because of these conditions.
So now you have the child just kind of left to fend for itself.
And we're not even talking about the children who were born that were subject to mothers who, you know, the crack baby, right?
And 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.
Like Ivan Pavlov, one of my favorite psychologists, he talks about stimulus and a response, right?
A classical condition.
So you introduce the stimulus and then you have a response, which equals to the condition that we see.
And you're also talking about what we were talking about earlier.
You'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.
It'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...
What has always struck me about Sheldon is his vulnerability but also his honesty.
He's like, he'll be the first to tell you out of the gate, I did it.
I could have made better choices.
He's not asking for a pass based on his conditions.
What he's always said to me was, I just want people to consider How it may have impacted me.
So, and to me, you just can't ignore it.
It doesn't say, well, poor Sheldon.
I think that because, I guess, you know, I know him, the human being.
So, I like...
I trip out when people are like, anybody that murders or robs or does it, lock them up and throw away the key.
I always feel like, well, look, why don't you...
Explain to me how you have gotten to know somebody that has been brought up in different conditions than you were.
How long have you sat and listened to them?
How long have you considered how that might have impacted them and compared it to the conditions you grew up in?
How many people like him have you gotten to know?
So 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.
We're both 48. I don't want to get into, you know, my family, you know, struggled financially but had different opportunities.
My mom was a schoolteacher.
My 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.
But I can't ignore that I had different opportunities than Sheldon did.
So 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, by who are the people you're around, what are the conditions you're born in.
You know, you got a bunch of kids who sit around in a group.
And, you know, they do a feelings check.
But the counselors really...
As far as I was concerned, the counselors didn't really care.
The check, though.
Yeah, there was so much going on.
The counselors were just there for a check.
There was so much going on that was above and beyond what the counselors could control.
It was just ridiculous.
You had the kids going down into White Plains, breaking into cars, stealing, getting high, going across the campus, having sex with the girls.
It was just insane what was going on.
And, you know, I learned.
How to become this person.
I learned how to survive there.
I learned, you know, what it meant to go and steal a Benzie box.
Remember the Benzie boxes?
Where you could snatch them right out the car.
People used to hide them.
I learned how to, you know, break into a car with the older guys and how to take a Benzie box and sell it.
So I learned how to survive there.
I mean, I've always known how to survive superficially, but from...
I 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.
I was young, I was impressionable, and this is what I was seeing.
These became my role models.
These were the guys that I respected, that I looked up to.
They were selling drugs.
They didn't have a care in the world.
They had all of the girls.
And ironically, prison in my community was almost like a rite of passage.
Right?
In my community, when you went to prison and you came back...
And 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.
People looked at you differently.
They treated you differently.
I remember when I was 15 years old, I wanted to go to Rikers Island so bad that I lied to the officer.
I got arrested for smoking weed.
Weed is legal now.
But back then, like, weed was a thing.
Like, 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.
You sat in the bullpens for three, four days before you even got out.
And I remember lying to the officer.
He said, how old are you?
I 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.
And it's really sad.
But that was a reality that I was faced with.
So I come back, I'm 13, and I'm going through this stuff.
My mother's still struggling.
She's on SSD, which is Social Security for Disability.
My father's in prison.
And it's just, I started selling drugs.
Guy offered me an opportunity to be a lookout.
He said, listen, kid, I just need you, I'm going to give you $75 a day.
I just need you to stand on that corner.
And when you see the police car, just yell, oh shit, oh shit.
That was like a little thing.
And 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.
But 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.
It turned me into this person that I was never meant to be.
When you're in this melting pot of just insanity, you lose sense of what's permissible and what's not and what's impermissible.
I'm committing crimes and it just doesn't even matter no more.
I was never the guy, you know, to hurt any old people.
My era, you know, when you see old people come through, you help them with their bags, and we have respect for our elders.
That was something that was always taught to us.
Now these kids, it's just, that's a whole other story.
But 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.
But I'm providing for my family.
My mother doesn't, you know, at the end of the month, we don't have to worry about just eating grits and cheese no more.
You know, we can eat chicken and Velveeta shells and cheese.
You know, and for some people, that's significant.
You know, I can buy a couch now.
I can buy a real couch that's comfortable.
I can buy a TV for my mother.
I 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.
Was significant.
And it made me feel like...
I had a purpose.
It 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.
Like Scarface, the movie, right?
You know, you have this, oh, I don't break my balls in my word for nobody, right?
You know, and I remember one time a friend of mine, he came to pick me up, and he was on a run from the cops.
He had a warrant out for his arrest.
He had a car full of drugs and a car full of guns.
And because I gave him my word, I felt like I couldn't back out of the situation.
Nothing 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.
And you end up making really, really bad decisions that can cost you for the rest of your life.
Like my son.
My son, when he got into a fight with an Asian guy, they called him the Columbia Law Student Killer, right?
He gets into a fight with this Chinese guy.
And this is not to take away anything from that man's family.
And as a man, as his father, I felt some type of way.
But the guy goes into the street and gets hit by a car and he dies.
But this is how fast your life can change from just one simple mistake.
From one mistake.
And I just feel like, you know, a lot of times these conditions are created and there's really no alternatives.
I had never been on a plane, like Josh said.
I never even thought about going on a plane.
So, I'm growing up in this community.
My father's gone.
My mother's, you know, she's deaf.
I ended up having a son.
My son was born in 1993. And that just made things, that just exacerbated the issue, right?
So now I'm really...
What am I going to do now?
I have a son.
I have someone to look at.
And 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.
I 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.
At that time, I was what you call giving out consignment on drugs.
Two people in particular I gave consignment to and I ended up getting arrested for a case.
And 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.
So when I came home, one guy in particular, I ran into him with his girlfriend.
Got roughed up a little bit, but there was no physical harm.
Nothing.
Going back to morals and values and principles, right?
In my mind, he was fair game.
He's selling drugs.
I'm selling drugs.
You owe me money.
I came to take what you have.
In that world, that was considered as permissible.
These are one of the rules of something that was permissible in that world.
Long story short, in December 1997, I get arrested for both cases, really for one of them, for the one with the guy and the girl.
And then the other case drops with the auto parts store, the guy that I said they were selling drugs out of the auto parts store.
I am in the process of going to court.
I'm going back and forth to court.
I'm on Rikers Island at the time.
It's just crazy on Rikers Island.
That's when the gangs was involved.
Prior to that, a year before that, I had got involved with the gangs.
I was blood.
I was a gang member.
This is where the cut comes from on my face.
I have a bunch of stab marks from just being in those environments and being on Rikers Island and just...
Warring with other rival gangs, mostly Latin Kings and Inietas.
My 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.
So on my mind, it just didn't make no sense to me.
Why would I forfeit my rights to an appeal if there's only a two-year difference?
I told the judge I would take 15 years right now.
I acknowledged that I had made some mistakes and I had done some things that were wrong.
And I said, I'll take 15 years right now.
He refused to accept my plea offer and I went to trial and I ended up getting 50 years.
Let'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.
The rules say you can't do that.
That's his property.
That's his belongings.
So I was a rule guy and they just, you know, it was to their advantage to get me out of the way.
So when I decided to take a step back, they were like, yes!
I got my GED. From there, I got involved in correspondence courses.
I 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.
Deep breathing.
How to remove yourself.
Conflict resolution.
All of these ideas of change began to take place with me.
Substance abuse.
I stopped smoking weed.
I stopped smoking cigarettes.
I was smoking like 30 cigarettes a day.
I'm literally having chest pains from smoking cigarettes.
And I realized that I wanted to live.
And the only way that I was going to be able to live and walk out of prison was to remove myself from these substances.
I've seen so many guys get carried out.
I've seen guys dying.
Not just from just being stabbed or with altercations from officers.
I've seen guys dying from...
One guy I knew, he used to drink so much hoop, his liver failed on him one night.
He died in the cell that night.
The morning when they came to do that count, he was frozen.
He was stiff as a log.
But these are the things that I was seeing, and I was really in a situation where I had to ask myself, do I want to go out like that?
Not 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, fucking twisted,
The horrifically sad irony to all of this is that it took prison to save him.
And...
Why couldn't he be saved as a kid?
That's what I am really trying to sort of put energy towards now.
When you asked him earlier, wasn't there counseling in the group home?
And 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...
You know, I've had people on, you know, the podcast with me, and I'm listening to their anger management classes, right?
I won't mention who it is, but I'm listening to, like, the anger management class that they take.
And it's fucking...
It's on Zoom.
It's run by a guy that can't fucking turn his camera on.
And it's like...
It is...
It's bedlam.
There's just people screaming, hey man, I can't hear you!
What the fuck did you just say?
You 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.
Real advice and constructive feedback on how different people are.
He's checking a box, this guy, to do a job.
Is that happening with everyone?
It's not happening with everyone.
But again, just the paradox here is that this insane, inhumane sentence...
Actually saved Shelton.
But why weren't there those programs, that thought, that implementation in his community to save him as a kid?
You 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.
And we get a lot of people calling us to help out on cases.
I 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.
And, you know, on paper, you can see pretty quickly what somebody has done with their time.
You know, I've sat with people in institutions all over the country where I said, what programs are you in?
And I feel like an idiot asking, because I'd be a fucking puddle on the floor.
I asked him many times, how often did you cry?
How did you extract yourself from the gang?
How did you sleep at night with the noise?
Sheldon told me about this thing called a human harpoon that people make out of magazines and a sharpened toothbrush.
The 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.
You keep on working the paper between your hands, and then you attach with soap, newspaper, A sharpened toothbrush handle at the end of it.
On one side I had the guys who I used to run with saying, what the fuck is he doing?
And 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.
If you need some help, I can help you do this or I can help you do that.
But, you know, I just felt like everybody in the world was watching, including my family.
Because they didn't believe it.
Up 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.
I 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.
So, you know, I had family.
I had everybody just kind of just waiting for me to fail.
But I just felt like I was just determined to succeed.
I just had this...
I just had this energy in my spirit.
And I just...
And it was the will to live.
As far as I'm concerned, it was the will to live.
I had read, when I was in solitary confinement, I read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.
And one of the things that struck me as being so powerful, he says, if you have a why, then you have a reason to live.
And this is a guy who was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust.
And he found a reason to live.
He found a reason.
And I'm sitting there in the cell and I'm asking myself, Do you have a fucking reason to live?
And I think about my family and that was my reason.
And I wanted to beat the system.
And that was my way of beating the system.
I'm not gonna let you motherfuckers kill me.
And that was my spirit.
And I know it was only one way for me to accomplish that.
So like I said, I started going to school.
I did the correspondence courses.
I got involved in the Cornell Prison Education Program.
I obtained my associate's degree.
And then I went on to obtain my bachelor's in behavioral science for Mercy.
But in this process, I'm going through...
I'm mentoring other young men.
Now guys are looking at me and saying, Hold on, wait a minute, man.
This guy is on to something.
I got guys on both sides now saying, yo, can you help me?
I started working in the law library.
I 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.
I got arrested in 1997 and about 2005, this is when I started to make my transitions.
About eight years in.
And it felt good.
It felt good.
It felt good to be able to call my family and send them pictures and invite them to these events where they can actually see me change.
They could see actual, tangible change.
It felt good for the guys that I knew that were coming to me and asking me for help.
I was helping guys with their GEDs.
I became a tutor in the program.
And the rewards that I felt, you know, it didn't even matter anymore about when I was going to get out, right?
It was just now about how can I help other people not go through what I went through and wait so long?
Because I feel like I wish I had somebody that would have came along at an earlier stage.
And like he said, don't wait till I fall.
Catch me before I fall.
And that's part of my motto now and some of the work that we do at the Queens Defenders, Alternatives to Incarceration.
And this is why I'm so passionate about a lot of the work that I do now.
I'm trying to catch these kids before they fall.
I don't want to wait till they're falling...
And I want to show them the way.
And I feel like I'm a credible messenger because when they see me, they know that I came from the same place they come from.
Like Josh was saying earlier, right?
There's a difference between being qualified and certified, right?
You could read a hundred books about drug abuse, but how...
How 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?
And 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, they just was like, nah.
Here's what I wanted to say, is that you now are seeing the connections.
And so, you know, Legal Aid was representing Bruce.
There was an army of people.
So that all believed that he could make change happen and do positive things when he got out.
So now he's a client advocate of the Queen's Defenders doing this kind of work, trying to explain to judges this person.
Don't let them be another Sheldon Johnson.
Don't let them be another me or Derek Hamilton.
They deserve counseling.
They deserve a second chance.
They deserve to help really be rehabilitated.
And 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.
They're criminal defense lawyers.
So 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.
And I know I said it before.
I'm very thoughtful in who I bring with me.
Look at this beautiful mind and how he articulates himself and educated himself.
And you want to tell me That this couldn't have happened earlier.
He doesn't need anyone's sympathy and he's not asking for it.
It's something I admire quite a bit about him.
He doesn't want poor Sheldon.
How could you have gone through this?
I've seen him do it right in their tracks.
Listen, I just don't know that my life was worth throwing away.
But to watch them now on the other side of it The change that we talked about that I'm like, how do we change it?
How do we do it?
It's starting to happen.
Could we use Jeff Bezos to sit down and think through how we can build a community center in East New York?
In Harlem?
Yeah, we could.
The means are out there to do it.
All 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.
But the reason why I mentioned Scared Straight is because, sure, I could go in there and talk to these kids.
They're not going to fucking listen to me.
They're just not.
I might be certified, but I'm not qualified.
I can sympathize, but I can't empathize.
I go through that talking sometimes like...
You know, to fighters that I manage, right?
I do it with Shakur Stevenson.
You know, he's like a little brother to me.
I love him.
Sometimes I feel like, you know, the message might be better coming from Jay Prince than it is for me because he's more qualified.
Try 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.
They're getting judges to change their mind They're getting prosecutors to think twice.
It 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.
Is this someone who can identify, empathize with what I'm going through, where I'm at right now in my life?
Like a lot of the young kids, they're involved in the gangs.
And we have this reculturalization program, right?
Where we're trying to teach them, because in many of our communities, the gangs have become a part of the culture.
Like, you have parents who are gang members, you got the kids who are in communities and it's just saturated with gang culture.
Language, dress, music, food, everything else.
So we're trying to extract them out of these places and say, okay, This is something that you can do differently.
We're taking them to different places.
We're taking them to HBCU so that they can see what people who look like them look like when they're going to college.
This can be you.
This is some of the...
Take them into classrooms to meet with the professors.
We 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.
And 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.
You can't appreciate the money that you get from the streets.
But 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.
You can take that card and you can actually utilize it to withdraw your money out the bank.
That's a big difference.
Civic engagement.
You 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?
We go into the rallies.
We take them to the rallies out of Albany.
Yesterday, they went to a rally.
Last week, we went to a rally about treatment, not jails.
How to set up what they call diversion courts for people who have substance abuse problems.
Instead of sending them to prison, they need treatment.
And the money that they save is clear.
It's clear.
When you do the math, the money that you save, it costs almost up to $70,000 to incarcerate one person.
Yeah, we're trying to take the charge out of their battery.
We'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, any other civilized...
Anywhere in the world, really.
In any event, I was doing a relative comparison.
How do we put those privatized prisons out of business?
We have to start on the ground.
It's almost like a rallying cry to myself because we get a lot of...
Not a rallying cry to myself, but...
The 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?
Listen, I wasn't born a civil rights lawyer that was working on innocence cases.
I have a trial strategy company called DRC. We do focus groups, mock trials on big cases, right?
Try to unfold the thinking of jurors in a jurisdiction where the case is going to be tried.
And we make demonstrative aids and we are alleged experts in jury selection.
And that became a platform.
I said, how can we use...
This is a platform.
Now that I'm operating the Perlmutter Center as well.
So just being in the boxing industry, speaking to Jay-Z's team at Roc Nation and Jay-Z and his mom, how can we do this?
And he has something called the Sean Carter Foundation.
So it's kind of remarkable that people know it because of his name and they've heard it, but no one really knows what it does.
They take children from all over the country.
A lot of them are in the tri-state area that have difficult circumstances.
A lot of them come from single family households.
And they're not just mentoring them from high school, but they are trying to do some of the things that Sheldon talked about.
They do a college tour.
It's run by a woman named Danya Diaz and really Gloria Carter and a woman named Miss Archer.
And I saw what they were doing.
And I said, if we took these kids and created a fellowship program where we pay their last year of college...
And 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.
They spearheaded the free Bruce Bryant social media campaign.
And watching this program These kids, if they're given the opportunity, three of them now work for me full-time.
One of them is the mail intake coordinator at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice.
So she is receiving mail from inmates and helping screen which cases we might want to investigate.
Her name is Samilia McFarland.
There's an old girl that works at my firm doing advertising and publicity.
Her name is Jayla Madry.
She made a presentation to me the other day.
I was fucking blown away that this girl was passionate about marketing, not advertising, marketing.
And 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.
And I was just thinking to myself, you know, all right, so this is the change that we're making happen.
And it was just an idea that I had.
I didn't actually think that Jay-Z and his mom and Donya would go for it.
So I was reluctant to pitch them the idea.
And just being able to say, well, what do you have to lose by putting it out there?
And they have been remarkably supportive.
So I think that there's a lot of people that want to help.
Sheldon and I were talking about it before we came, and we often think, how can listeners help?
There is not, if you have an idea like I had, just try to put the next foot in front of the foot that's behind you.
And just keep walking forward and don't be afraid to ask.
There is not a public defender's office in this country.
There is not a civic engagement organization.
That if you call them and say, I want to volunteer, or I'm interested in helping, that will turn you away.
You just have to say, alright, I can sit here and talk about it, and, you know...
Like 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.
Even if it's hopefully my flight.
Not hopefully, but I get a better view of it if it's my flight.
To watch people stand up and get frustrated, berate, raise their voice at the fucking ticket attendant.
It'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?
There's only two real possibilities of why this plane is not going to fly on time.
There's either a mechanical problem or weather.
Do you want to fly in either of those situations?
You 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, and rather than get intimidated by the problem, try to just keep putting one foot in front of another.
And then when the flight gets canceled, maybe I could read something interesting and catch up.
It's inconvenient or come up with an idea.
I mean, trust me, I'm an average guy of average intelligence that just I think I have like more tenacity.
So I don't if I can help make some of this stuff happen, other people can make it happen.
And Sheldon asked me, should I go to law school?
I changed my mind, by the way.
I might have an opinion now.
But I told them, like, most of the lawyers that I find that are most effective aren't the smartest.
They're not the savviest.
They possess something that...
Most lawyers don't, which is common sense and street smarts.
And they marry that with what they learned in school.
And they're able to sort of, that perfect stew, I think is what leads to a successful advocate, counselor, attorney, whatever you are.
And 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?
It matters.
But does it matter to the degree we place an emphasis on it in our society?
I'm not sure.
But my whole thing is, rather than be intimidated by the problem, I think it's...
Recognizing that it exists.
Just decide one discreet thing you want to do to try to help make a change happen.
And then, you know, again, just try to get some forward momentum and you'd be surprised at the buy-in that you get.
I 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.
I'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, had nothing to do with this kind of work.
Listen to the podcast.
He's a passionate, passionate advocate.
And he's going to get justice one of these days for Peter Rushing.
We've tried to help apply pressure through this show by having people reach out to the DA and write letters on his behalf.
And it's, you know, has it worked yet?
It's working.
We're going to get there at some point.
So, you know, that's my objective, you know, with continuing to do these stories.
Because you're right.
The privatization of prisons and the industrial prison complex, is that a solvable problem?
I'm not sure.
I 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.
As much as we can until they're like, well, we don't have any fucking people.
Or you begin sabotaging pieces of the machine, right?
Because, you know, a lot of these corporations are what you call well-oiled machines, right?
And it's like a watch.
When you open up a watch, you see so many intricate pieces, right?
And sometimes if you break the right piece in the watch, the whole watch ceases to keep time.
And 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.
We're going to pass the buck.
And let somebody else deal with it.
Now you have these corporations who they really don't care about, you know, rights and humanity and cruel and unusual punishment and due process.
Well, 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.
Once 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.
If they have shareholders, it's their responsibility to those shareholders to maximize profits with each quarter.
Now, 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.
So 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.
They're on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi, and Whole Foods.
Some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
Slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
And we go back to Jim Crow.
That's what they did.
Yes.
Right 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?
And it just continues today, like 13 cent hours, 17 cent hours, 19 cent hours.
During the pandemic, Great Meadows Correctional Facility had these guys working 24 hours a day making hand sanitizers and masks.
What you're seeing on the screen is not some new thing.
You know, speaking of the Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King writes a lot that is rooted...
I'm not talking about Cujo.
I'm not talking about, you know, his horror writing.
His short stories, most of them are rooted in some sort of truth.
Rita Hayworth in the Shawshank Redemption was a short story that he wrote.
That ended up getting made.
I think it was part of Apt Pupil or one of his books of short stories.
And 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.
That was true back then.
He was basing that on something that was happening in the Northeast back then.
So, you know, the notion that this is still happening shouldn't be that shocking.
It's just like, what is our news cycle pay attention to?
And how do you make sure that this kind of stuff doesn't keep happening?
My idea is you need people on the ground that are working on policy and reform.
So at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo, we have a policy advisor.
Her name is Sarah Chu, who knows forensics.
She'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.
Well, blood spatter, ballistics, even fingerprints to some extent.
Yeah, and lobbying to make sure that laws get changed.
And, 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...
These are the fucking people.
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These are the people that are sitting in some white fucking building at your state capitol.
But before you get to the prosecutors, these are the people writing the laws.
These are the people writing the statutes.
They need to be influenced by people like Sarah Chu, other great people that work in policy and reform advocate.
There's a woman named Rebecca Brown.
Her and Sarah Chu both used to be at the Innocence Project.
Sarah came to work with me.
Rebecca Brown is a great one.
They're working boots on the ground and trying to change and educate, really.
I 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.
How bite marks leave an indentation on someone's skin.
You 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.
That 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...
So when bite marks became subject of a report that everybody should read...
The National Academy of Sciences did a report in 2009 that should have changed our criminal justice system.
It 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, none of them were supported by a scientifically credible body of evidence.
There was no repeatability.
There was no reliability.
The scientific method that you learn in grade school, you could apply it to any of them and they would all fail the test.
Yeah, because there is such sensitive, what they call low copy or touch DNA that can now be detective.
That can now be detected.
And the mixture can be untangled.
And they can say, well, Joe Rogan's DNA is on the knife.
Where was he at this time?
There'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.
He ended up getting, you know, sitting in prison for, I think, seven or eight years before he finally got acquitted.
So this report should have turned forensic science on its head and no one gives a fuck.
Well, bite mark evidence is still admissible in all 50 states.
So, 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.
How often, Sheldon, do you hear from an attorney, well, I don't want to piss off the judge?
To protect their rights, their constitutional rights.
That's what the Constitution was designed for.
And it's so interesting when you think about the Constitution, right?
and the founding fathers and the Bill of Rights and how it has just transferred over hundreds of years into today and how our rights are still fundamentally protected.
But, you know, when we talk about rights, there's two different worlds.
Like, you know, his rights and my rights may be two different kinds of rights because of where we come from and because of the color of our skin, unfortunately.
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
And 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?
You know, you have, like he said, you have people at all of these different organizations.
Reach out.
Google is very effective.
I've only been home nine months, and I've pretty much learned how to navigate Google pretty good, better than most.
And, you know, it's actually pretty easy to be able to find different organizations.
Like he talks about the people at his organization, Sarah Chu.
And we have Gina Mitchell at Queens Defenders, who is our policy coordinator.
And we work on so many different subjects.
Reach out.
Reach out.
Change is real, but it has to begin somewhere.
You have to just be willing to take a step forward.
It doesn't matter where you're from, how old you are, Republican, Democrat, rich, poor, black, white.
It doesn't matter.
You 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.
And it just blows me away how And I'm just going to be straight out.
I 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.
I work for the Department of Homeless Shelters.
Like, I've worked in there.
I've seen it with my own two eyes.
Like, 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.
They get housing vouchers, they get education vouchers, everything.
Like, you know, make America great again.
If you're gonna make America great again, focus on the people, the citizens, the people who put you in office.
Look, I've been reading this book called Thinking Fast and Slow.
Have you heard?
It's a fucking phenomenal...
I highly recommend it.
It's about how your brain works and why we believe what we believe and the two systems of our brain.
And one is the quick judgment and the other is the slow it down and critically think about it.
And there are all these puzzles in it where he makes the point by saying, like, consider the following.
And 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, are astounding.
Just by keeping...
I mean...
Trump might be, in my opinion, a little nuts, but he's a little crazy.
He's crazy like a fox, though.
He knows if he keeps on saying those words, those words are going to stick.
If he keeps saying witch hunt, people are going to start repeating it, and they do.
So maybe think a little, like, I don't even know what it means.
I just know that we need to start, like, having some individual thought before we...
It's just like this group think about other people and, you know, how they're different and lock them up and throw away the key.
And, you know, I just think, like, we should all slow down and really think.
And what I hope to bring is these stories where you get to know the person.
Look, I'm deeply, deeply flawed.
Sheldon will be the first to tell you, like, I did some fucked up things.
But when you watch what he's doing, you know, why can't we make people in these communities...
Why can't we make them great again by giving them a better chance?
Like you said at the outset of the episode, let them hit the starting line.
Well, 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, what the problems with it are, how many people are wrongfully incarcerated.
How incredible some of these people are, wasted potential, locked away forever, something never did, and they didn't break.
Instead, they got stronger and wiser and more intelligent and more educated and came out better.
The cycle of from the street to prison back to the street to prison, most of the time— Recidivism.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just saying it in plain English.
Most of the time, it's churning out monsters, because what else would you expect, right?
I 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.
And then he goes out and he murders someone.
And he writes this book just explaining, I want you to understand what this did to me.
I read it when I was in college.
And I should read it again.
I probably have a different perspective on it now.
It might hit home even more.
Yeah, these are talk about grains of sand on a beach.
If you look at the population of people that keep getting churned out of correctional institutions, most of them are not getting corrected.
Why do I like to spend my time with these guys?
Because I hope some of their strength rubs off on me somehow.
It took me almost 30 days to get any type of benefits or help.
And I had to call this lady.
I called this lady.
I 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.
And I had a conversation with a lady on the phone, and she told me She said, you don't qualify for emergency services.
And I said, what?
I said, miss, I just spent 25 years and five months incarcerated.
If that is not a qualification, then what is?
Oh, sir, I'm just telling you you don't qualify for it.
I said, I need to speak to your supervisor.
It took me two days to get to her supervisor.
But when I finally got to her supervisor, her supervisor, oh, I'm going to look into it.
And they finally gave me my benefits.
But I'm saying all of that to say that there's these institutions in place that need to change.
And 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.
How 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?
So I obtained my degree of mercy from Hudson Lake.
Sean Peaker runs the organization amongst many other formerly incarcerated individuals.
Sean Peaker is also formerly incarcerated.
They have a post-secondary education program.
On the inside, and they also have a post-secondary.
They're actually paying for my master's right now to go back to school.
They have a housing reentry program called New Beginnings.
Amazing.
That's where I went when I first got released.
But, you know, going back, had it not been for these formerly incarcerated individuals, I don't know where I would have been.
Had 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.
He's like, man, it's like, he's like, it's life changing.
You know, it really is.
And we had a great talk about it.
He 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.
Speaking of Michael Capper, right, so prior to my release, me and Bruce, Bruce Bryant, were working.
So we created a number of programs.
One 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.
And Michael Capra was pivotal in allowing us to be able to create these programs and have a platform in the school building.
One of them in particular that we are trying to work on now is dyslexia, right?
And this blew me away.
According 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?
That's almost half of the individuals that are in the Department of Corrections that have some type of reading disability, right?
So 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, right?
And 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.
However, 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.
So when we talk about recidivism and we talk about preparing someone to be reintegrated back into society, the Department of Corrections has failed.
How can you say you're going to rehabilitate somebody?
Reading, for me, right, I believe that reading is a fundamental right.
My grandmother used to read to me when I was a kid.
I would lay in her lap and she would read to me.
And 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.
And it made me respect her.
The idea of what it means to read, right?
But when we talk about going back to the PDF thing, right?
A guy comes home and he's supposed to go online and fill out an application, but he can't even read.
How is he supposed to follow basic instructions during transportation and trying to get onto the train and navigate through all of the basic instructions?
There are necessities in life and he can't even read.
There's an even more startling picture to that, right?
I can't even count how many motions I filed throughout my incarceration.
44010 is with a motion to vacate.
Ritter ericom nobis, which is an appeal to a judge, to the appellate division to overturn your appeal, your right to appeal.
I filed a motion called the Domestic Violence Justice Survivors Act.
And I knew that the motion was going to get denied because I didn't qualify for the motion.
But my spirit told me to do it.
My intuition told me to just file it.
And I filed it.
And in the process of filing that motion, that's when I met Allison Hart and Barbara Zoloff at the Center for Appellate Litigation.
And they have what they call is the YEARS program, Youth Emergent Assisted Resentencing Program.
And 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.
So 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.
We think you're the poster child for this program based on your circumstances.
And that began the process of my release.
I 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.
That's one of the major things that Josh and Allison and everybody had brought to the attention of these people.
Say, okay, you know, you have a guy who Has these set of circumstances, but look at what he has done while he was incarcerated.
Look what he has been able to accomplish.
And he did all of this under the pretenses that he was never going to get out.
So we were going back and forth.
We filed a bunch of paperwork.
We had to get a bunch of documents.
I sent out a whole bunch of documents, and they put together what they call a mitigation packet.
And a mitigation package just outlines everything, my circumstances, my sentence, my crime, accountability, and a whole bunch of other factors.
And they submitted it.
It was a 440-20 in New York State, which is a motion to resentence or a motion to vacate the sentence.
And initially, the ball was rolling.
The district attorney's office had initially conceded to the motion, saying we're not going to oppose the motion.
And then something happened.
I'm not exactly sure what happened, but maybe Josh, he has more of a background insight.
And at that time, me and Bruce were working.
I didn't know Josh.
And Bruce said, yo, listen, man.
I'm going to talk to my man, Josh Dubin.
He knows some people that know some people.
And I didn't know that he was working with Derrick Hamilton.
Derrick Hamilton and I had worked in a law library together.
So I think what he mentioned to Derrick, he said, you know, my nickname was superb.
That was my nickname in prison.
And he said, you know a guy named Superb?
He said, yeah, I know Superb.
So 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.
Well, I mean, listen, I don't want to get too much into the details, because...
I don't think they matter.
And 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, and they got to know him.
You 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.
You know, it's like, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, I gotta go by.
You know, or, oh, they're giving me a hard time, they're doing a count now, I gotta go by.
Or sometimes it'll just click off.
So, Bruce is, you know, about to get out.
He'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.
But he has clemency with no strings attached, other than being on probation until they make a final decision on his innocence.
He's on the phone with me going, yo, yo, I got this guy, Sheldon Johnson, right here.
And he wants to talk to you.
His lawyer knows your cousin.
And I was like, what the fuck is this guy talking about?
And I was like, Bruce, man, I got to worry about getting you out.
And this was going on for like a full month.
And, you know, he's right here.
He's right here.
He wants to talk to you.
I said, I'm not talking to anyone else.
I'm dealing with your case.
I got to get you out.
He's like, please talk to Allison.
She's been at your house before.
No, you got something, you got your lines crossed somewhere.
So I finally like paid attention to it.
I 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.
And 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, I was at your house for your baby shower.
I remember your wife, Jillian, real well.
She's like, tells me, I remember your house.
And I'm like, well, come on, you can't make this shit up.
So 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, but we ended up...
You know, kudos to the Manhattan District Attorney's Office for actually paying attention and seeing that Sheldon was worthy of a second chance.
And really, the sentence did not fit the crime.
And the twist on Sheldon's story that...
It's like a head-scratcher to me that I asked him about...
Was the judge that sentenced him as a black man.
And, 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.
And I said, so what do you do with that fact?
And 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.
I don't know what to make of that.
It just seems so strange to me that that is who said, this guy's not worthy of redemption.
One 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, right?
They struggle with this idea that they feel that they have to be harder on their own people.
For 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.
But 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?
He 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.
I don't know what his experiences was.
I can't speak to that.
You know, maybe he saw me as a menace, you know.
But I do honestly believe that.
We need these people to be able to look at things from an objective, right?
Because as a person of color and in a position of power, a lot of times it's a subjective reality.
It'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?
When we talk about objectivity.
And I think that's what it boils down to, you know, subjectivity versus objectivity, right?
So, you know, just to speak to what he said, right?
Like when I was in upstate New York, Auburn and Clinton and Attica, you had a sprinkle of maybe one or two black cops.
And the black cops were always the worst.
Right.
Because, 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.
So they go out of their way to just be extra.
That's what we used to say.
He's just being extra.
He wants to enforce all of the rules.
What a white cop might say, this guy got a pot and an eye.
So, you know, in prison, you know, we have like, you know, you have pots, guys cook, and you have an eye.
It's usually like a coil that's detached from a hot pot, and you use it to make food.
There's been times when, you know, you'll have a white cop that'll come in the cell, and it's contraband.
You'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.
Then you'll have a black cop that'll come and be like, no, he can't have that.
You know, and it's...
And it's just interesting.
And I think it goes back even farther than that, right?
When you go back all the way into slavery, you know, you had the house nigga and the field nigga.
And the idea of the person, the guy who was in the house...
He was harder on his own people, his fellow slaves, than some of the overseers may have been or the slave masters.
So 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.
I 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.
How much money would be saved by the state for investing that money?
So, for example, right, on the 17th of this month, we went to, I told you, we went to the rally.
Treatment, not jails, right?
So, 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, right?
And for every dollar that is spent in this program, you save $2.21.
Then they have to worry about how will that impact my electability, right?
Because are the corrections officers union, the police union, are they going to get behind me in the next election?
I think when you take a step back from a governor, Like, we have a guy who is the DA of Brooklyn.
His name is District Attorney Gonzalez.
And, you know, we have an amazing relationship with him.
The 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.
And the diversion programs, the drug diversion programs that are available now weren't available back then.
He's 69 years old.
So, you know, we're really hoping, I think we're very close to the finish line of getting him released.
So...
You 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.
You talked about, just one second, you talked about HBCUs.
FAMU 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.
I was recently arguing on behalf of these students that just want to be funded the same way Florida State, University of Florida, and all the other public universities are.
Like two weeks before my argument on the state's motion to dismiss, the United States government, the United States Department of Education, sent a letter to the governor in Florida and said, here are the statistics.
This is all traceable to what they call du jour segregation.
There was the, you know, and please fund the school appropriately.
Well, the judge just dismissed the case a few days ago.
And I would invite people to go online and read the decision.
Because we're going to appeal it to the 11th Circuit in Atlanta.
But it's not a matter of...
There's no controversy.
There's no argument that, no, we are funding it appropriately.
FAMU was founded on a slave plantation, a former slave plantation.
And when I brought that up at the oral argument, the judge went nuts on me.
What?
No, you're saying it's a slave plant?
No, I'm saying that's where it started.
And 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.
And they entered into these consent decrees with them, where they had to do what's called destroy vestiges of du jour segregation.
Because 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.
And the state of Florida just has ignored it.
So does Governor DeSantis have the ability to make sure that FAMU is funded appropriately?
Or is Governor DeSantis going to worry more about Florida State University being somehow shortchanged in the national championship and earmark funds to...
Challenge the college football folks to make sure...
I mean, are you fucking kidding me?
I went to Florida State.
I think it's fucking...
It's lunacy.
So the answer to your question is yes, but he's not going to do it for whatever political reasons he has.
Why not fund the school so that there is some, you know, a level playing field?
It'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.
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All he has to say is woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke, woke.
All 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.
And there is no reason for it.
Other than that it is a vestige of segregation.
And, you know, really the state has the burden to say no, there is a justified reason for it under the law.
I'm just giving it to you in plain English.
They don't put anything forth.
I mean, I had the judge asking me questions in the oral argument on the motion to dismiss, questions like this.
Well, couldn't it be that Florida State University had a better boosters club and that they were able to raise more money?
And I said, you're absolutely right.
You're making my argument for me.
When 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?
Well, couldn't they have gone and lobbied the legislator?
Yeah, they could have.
Who was running the legislator in Florida?
You 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.
This 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.
So 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.
Let's just fund FAMU proportionate to how we fund every other school.
So to piggyback off of what you just said, right, you know, when you say, can the governor do these things, right?
Yes, they can.
A lot of times these...
These objectives are long-term and it takes time to quantify them.
So 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, you know, whether liberals Or conservatives are going to go against them and vote against them because they supported education of incarcerated individuals.
I remember when I was going to Auburn and I was in the Cornell Prison Education Program.
This 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?
And the idea was that we were receiving a free education because we were incarcerated, which is not the case.
The idea is that education has been proven to prevent recidivism.
Individuals who have been shown to acquire associate's degrees and bachelor's degrees are like 91, 92% less likely to return back to prison.
So this is quantifiable evidence of how you take money...
And you allocate it into one project so over the long run you can save money.
I 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?
Yeah, so I think that the time, energy, and resources are better spent.
I think the private sector comes up with better solutions oftentimes at helping, like, watch how, what do they call it, the virtuous cycle?
The virtuous cycle works like this.
When 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.
This is like beautiful stuff they're doing.
And they're on a shoestring budget.
So rather than be like, you know, the civil rights community can be interesting.
It brings out the best and the worst of people.
A lot of these civil rights organizations, you know, again, you throw human beings into any endeavor together, they're going to fuck it up.
Egos, and look what happened to me by coming on this show.
Some folks tried to censor me, and I just wouldn't have it.
So I saw the work that they were doing, and I said, you know what?
Do you need help?
And they said, we need help.
We 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.
And we don't have the money to get the reports done.
And there's just two of us.
So the Perlmutter Center is providing them with the money to do those reports.
Steve Zeidman at CUNY, he's this guy that I think that he's responsible single-handedly.
He's a letter-writing machine, and he keeps the pressure on, and he just doesn't give up on people.
And, you know, he needs help.
And we're looking for ways to collaborate.
So we said, what is it that moves the needle to these clemency units at governor's offices?
Because the governor's not paying attention.
They have a battery of people.
That listen to these cases and what they do are videos.
He 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.
So he needed a little bit of help to get these videos produced.
So we've agreed to donate some funds there.
And I think it just like...
Having this more synergistic approach rather than have it be about me or put my name on the door, let me get the credit.
To 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.
They can go to the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law.
It's like Sheldon can Google.
Anyone can Google it.
There it is right there.
And I think Googling it would be faster.
If you scroll down to the bottom of it, you'll find the Donate button.
You know, there are ways, and there's some of my students, there's a Give Now button.
We put it all the way to the bottom.
But in any event, you can reach out to me at joshua.dubin at yu.edu.
That's my email for the Perlmutter Center.
You 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.
That came as a result of the exposure that we're getting here.
So as I always do, I thank you from deep within my soul for allowing us to have this platform and, you know, the commitment that you made to doing this quarterly and telling these stories.
I 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.
Thank 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.
We'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.
And, you know, we can use all of the help that we can get.