a16z Podcast | Your Worst Deeds Don’t Define You -- Life and Redemption in Prison

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. On this segment of the podcast, Ben Horowitz sits down with Shaka Senghor, author of Righting My Life, Death and Redemption in an American Prison. Senghor talks about his almost two decades behind bars, the brutal rules of leadership on the inside, and Sanghar's own life and redemption on the outside. Ben Horowitz kicks things off.

How's everybody doing? I thought I'd introduce our speaker by just telling the story of how he and I met, because it's an interesting story and how we met and how we became friends. So it actually started with an event that some of you may have been at when I interviewed Oprah. Were any of you at that? So on the car ride over, I was like, super nervous because I'm interviewing Oprah and that's like trying to give Albert Einstein a physics pop quiz or something like that. And so I was like, oprah, please help me. Teach me how to interview real quick before I interview you. I was like, what's the secret? How do you get people to open up like that? And she said, well, Ben, I always ask people before I interview them. I ask them, what are their intentions? And. And she says, and I'll give you an example, because you have to know their intentions. And then, like, I have them trust me to help them get their intentions no matter what I ask. And she said, so I just had this guy on my show, Shaka Senghor, who just got out. He was 19 years in prison and, you know, up for murder and all these things. And he was like a big guy, scary looking guy. And so I asked him, I said, you know, Shaka, what are your intentions? And he said, well, my intention is to let people know that just because you were in prison for 19 years doesn't mean that you're a bad person or that's who you are. You can change. You can be redeemed. And I want people to understand that it's very important to know. And so she said, okay, I got it. And so we went into the interview and. And she said, so I'm asking him, I said, when did you get into crime? Like, at what age? And he said, well, I hit the streets when I was 14 years old. And Oprah said, well, Ben, I had read his book, and I knew there was a part in the book that I wanted to ask him about, because I didn't think that was right. And I said, Shaka, I said, what about when you were nine and you came home and you had a perfect grade on your test, and your mother threw a pot at your head. How did that make you feel? And she said, he tensed up and said, hey, like, I didn't feel good about that. And she. And she said, I looked at him to make him know that I knew what his intentions were, and, you know, to try and get the real answer. I said, no. Like, how did it really make you feel? And he said, look, it made me feel like nothing that I would do in life was ever going to matter. And she said, you hit the street when you were nine years old. And, you know, and then, like, she said, and, like, me and him were just, like, both crying together. And I was. I was starting to cry. It was, like, extremely emotional. But then she said, you know, afterwards, in the epilogue, I asked Jacques. I said, you know, I think your mom may have had, like, a mental health issue. And she said, afterwards, Shaka called her back, like, a week later and said, you know, I checked it with my family. And she did. And he never knew that. And so, you know, his whole life went that way on that. And so I was like, wow, what a great story. So I called my wife, and I'm like, look, Oprah told me the story about this guy Shaka. Like, it's an incredible story. And I just wanted to tell her the story, but she goes on Facebook and, like, tries to connect to him, and then he accepts the friend request. And so next thing I know, she's like, oh, look, I got his book. Like, I got the galley. And I was like, okay, well, I'll take a look at the book. And I read the book, and it was surprising to me because I hate books that other people write. But this book I liked, and I liked it one because it was super honest, which I wasn't expecting, because for somebody who's gone through something like that, you don't expect them to actually tell the truth about it honest. But the thing that I liked more was as a writer, you know, if you're not, like, a writer who's been trained that way and so forth, like, it's easy to, like, you get to a point and you're tired, and a cliche pops into your head, and you just write it. But if I read that in a book, I read somebody just go, oh, like, you could cut the tension, like, with a knife. I'm just close the book. That's it. And so I'm reading Shaka's book, and he never fell. And so he would be like, if he got to there he'd be like, well, you could cut the tension with a prison shank. So he would take you right back into the story. And I was like, this guy's really poetic. What an interesting book. And then Felicia says, well, he's coming out for a visit. I was like, well, I said, I like the book. I said I wanted to meet the guy. Did you read the book? That could be scary. So she's like, well, can you go to dinner? I was like, ok, but I want you to schedule the dinner two blocks from the house in case it goes bad. Which she did. She scheduled it two blocks from the house. And then we had dinner and he and I literally, you know, we went to dinner at like 5:30 in the evening. And he and I were up till 2:30 in the morning just talking the whole time. And we, it was crazy how much we had in common from. We listened to the exact same music. And I'm not just, I know a lot of you guys think, oh, it's the new, the latest rap this and that, but I'm talking about going all the way back to Parliament Funkadelic and fellow Kuti and all these guys. But he also, what I found out is, you know, through his life, he got into a prison, he was running a business, and then within prison, he was running a business. And not to say I don't like everybody who runs businesses, I absolutely do not. In fact, I don't like most of them. But when somebody runs something, like, I can talk to them about how they see people and how they see motivations and systems and how they see decisions. And that was another thing we really saw eye to eye on. So I would like to introduce to you author, poet, great manager, and my friend, Mr. Shaka Senghor.

Wow, thank you.

Thank you. Wow.

Wow, this is beautiful.

All right, so I think let's start with you just kind of telling your story from your perspective and just give people just a bit of a flavor for the background.

Yes, sir. Hey, how's everybody doing? It's an amazing evening. Thank you all for coming out. So I grew up in the city of Detroit on the east side in a neighborhood that on the outside looking in. I was pretty much the model for black middle class America. And my parents were, for all intents and purposes, they look like that model black couple. My father worked in the mental health industry. He was also in Air Force Reserves, and my mother was a homemaker. But beneath that surface was some deeply entrenched internal problems in our household. My mother was very abusive, very Domineering. And as her and my father's relationship began to deteriorate, her abuses escalated. And they reached such a point to where at the age of around 13, 14, I decided that I couldn't stand one more hit from her. And I decided at that point that, you know, I would run away. And, you know, all of you have been 13, 14 at some point in your life, I think most of you are seen a couple people acting a little juvenile. No, but seriously. So at that age, you really feel like you have life just figured out. And I thought that one of my friend's parents would see this smart kid and that they would take me in. And unfortunately, life just didn't work out like that. And so what happened was I bounced from kind of garage and basements and, you know, slept in clubhouses. We would make up. And after a couple of weeks, you know, I realized that I was in way over my head. And I fell victim to what happens oftentimes to young kids who run away. I got seduced into the drug trade, and this was the beginning when crack first kind of hit the Midwest in Detroit, 1986 or so. And I got pulled into this culture. Within the first six months of being sucked into that environment, I experienced every imaginable horror that comes with that culture. My childhood friend was murdered. I was robbed at gunpoint. At one point, I was beaten nearly to death. And I also became addicted to the drug. Fortunately, I liked making money more than I liked getting high. So at the age of 14, I figured out how to break that addiction. Fast forward three years. I was still deeply immersed in that culture, and I got into a conflict and I got shot multiple times. My friends, they called an ambulance. Ambulance never arrived. And one of my friends who had previously been shot, he actually took me to the hospital and dropped me off. He wasn't, you know, a guardian or anything, so he couldn't check me in. I was 17 years old. So he basically had to drop me off and leave me and go inform my family what had occurred. Got in the hospital, doctor pulled the bullets out. With exception of one, I still have a bullet in my foot. They pretty much patched me up, and within a couple of days, I was back to the same block where I got shot at. At that time, I didn't even know what post traumatic stress disorder was. All I knew is what I felt like. No one stepped in and was like, you know, hey, this shouldn't happen, or you're going to have all these different feelings. You're going to be paranoid you're going to be fearful. And so at 17 years old, I was left to grapple with those emotions. And looking around the environment that I grew up in, where I saw multiple friends shot. You know, my mother has three males. She has a total of six children. All three of us have been shot. One of my brothers is currently paralyzed. He's been paralyzed since 1998. Looking around, I began to process what I had experienced. And I realized in the hoods that I grew up in, it's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot. And so I began to carry a gun every day. It didn't matter what I was doing. Cooking, eating, sleeping. I had a pillow. I mean, a gun, like, literally right there by my side. But I was also processing it in my head that if I found myself in a conflict, that I would shoot first. And within 16 months, I got into multiple conflicts, and in each one, I fired first. And tragically, in July 1991, got into a conflict. It was nearly 2 in the morning. Drug transaction that I didn't want to make because a guy brought two guys to my house that I didn't know, and I wouldn't make the drug transaction. And we got into a conflict, and it escalated. Threats were exchanged, and I turned to walk in the house, and when I took that step to walk in the house, he attempted to open the car door. And I turned around and fired what turned out to be four fatal shots. I was subsequently arrested a couple of days later, went through the legal process, and sentenced to 17 to 40 years in prison. 15 years for the murder, two years for the gun. And I was one month into my 19th birthday at the time. And so when I entered prison, I was just bitter, angry, broken, didn't want to be responsible, confused more than anything else. And I continued in that same energy.

And it's, you know, it's interesting how as you're going through that, you're picking up lessons from your experiences. They just happen to be a real certain kind of experiences. And one. One of the things I remember from the book that really struck me was the first time when you were in jail, not even prison, but jail, and the guy bought the other guy a donut or a cereal or something. And then his expectation was like, you know, okay, you owe me. And then he ended up choking the guy and raping him. And, like, when you saw that, what did you think you took away? And then what did you end up taking away from? Like, witnessing that kind of thing?

That was. That was one of those moments where Everything became starkly real for me. And that I realized that I was in one of the most barbaric and depraved environments imaginable. And what I said to myself was that no matter how much time I serve, I will never allow myself to reach that level of depravity. But the flip side of that is that I realized that in that moment that prison and jail is the equivalent of a jungle and it's the law of survival. And that you have two type of people in the environment, lions and sheep. And I made it up in my mind that I would be a lion. And that set the course for how I experienced my time in prison.

Yeah, yeah. And when you. Because you're. And you think a lot in terms of systems, how is it, you know, like, what is it about? Like, when you separate the prisoners from the prison in terms of what makes it a jungle? Like, what contributes to that? How do you see it?

So the way I see it.

And.

Just even in the way that you articulate, there's the prison and then there's the man that's in prison, and there's two different systems running at the same time. So there's the administrative system, who, you know, their responsibility is to ensure the safety of society, make sure that the prison system runs within the boundaries of the rules. But then there's the system of the jungle that is kind of more about who rises to the hierarchy and how do you manage that? How do you acquire finance? How do you take care of yourself? How do you protect yourself? And it's a very sophisticated system. It's the drug trafficking, loan sharking. You know, I ran a loan sharking business with like ridiculous markups, like entrepreneurs in the room.

Imagine if you need to borrow money.

In prison, like literally 100% markup, right?

That's a big interest rate.

You know, I ran stores where. And I had like a floating economy, right? So I was in a cell block where Michigan Reformatory has two cell blocks, was J block, and it's I block. And they get money on alternating weeks. And so the way that I made things function was that when they didn't have money, I had all the money in this cell block. So I would just send money over there and just cycle it at 100% profit each time. And so the way that those systems work is that the administration, they have to allow it to exist because otherwise they can't control the environment.

So they rather have you guys have a system of how you survive or that. Because if you take that system away they don't know what's going to happen or like.

Yeah, because then it creates this other utter chaos. So it's kind of like a self governing.

So it's rules, environmental rights and behavior.

And it's the unwritten rules of prison. It's kind of like you can do whatever you want to do until you blatantly get caught.

Right.

Or you put it in our face in such a way that it goes to our higher ups who don't, aren't at the prison.

Right.

But it's just a very, very sophisticated way that the prison systems operate. And it's very corporate though. And it's, you know, it's probably a little more cut though than most situations.

Most places I work probably don't have the same consequences.

Right, yeah. Hope it's not many shankings going on in Silicon Valley. Wouldn't be cool. But the mentality of like, you know, even like corporate takeovers, taking over other territory and ensuring that like product placement, it's just like all these different things about entrepreneurship that manifest in that environment, but from a very psychologically warped way.

Now when you came out of the shadow economy outside of prison and that had a hierarchy and then like, is that the, does that hierarchy translate into prison? Are the rules harder? Are they like, how is that, how does that change?

So the going in, depending on what your status is in the streets dictate how you know you're incorporated into the prison system. Right. So if you're really respecting the street, it depends on what you're respected for. You can be, you can get a lot of money in the streets and guys respect hustlers, but you also got to be able to keep your money. And so that's a different thing once you go to prison, is that you can be a hustler, but if you can't protect your money, then your status change. Right. Basically. Right. So in the streets where money kind of trumps everything else, in prison, violence trumps everything else because it's through violence that you dictate who can keep their money.

So violence is power. So really the rule of the jungle. Yeah, like a big lion, he's a little lion type thing pretty much. So, you know, one of the, one of the things that really surprised me about your story because it's, you know, story of prison and redemption at the high level. You know, you have it in your mind one way. But when I read the book, what I started to see was a lot of your reflection came as the guy says, as you said. So the prison system and then the prisoner system. And you ended up because you were so determined at the top of the prisoner system. But then you're making the decisions and you have to decide what the consequences of somebody's actions are. Somebody robs a guy, then like you're the judge and where did that take you? And how did that start to move you to the path that you're on now?

So in the rise to that space, always grapple with the reality that we were extending the hurt that we experienced in the streets and the street culture to the environment that we were in. And unfortunately, it's a necessary evil in an environment where everything is so contained. It's kind of like this in prison. It's like, you know, if you allow a transgression to go, then you become prey. And so, you know, you're compelled by rules that may not be based on your moral compass, but they're based on your survival instinct and the necessity of survival. And as I rose through those rankings, it was one of the greatest battles that I had to face. Because every decision I made was could potentially cost somebody their life or could cost somebody life in prison.

Right. And sometimes your guys their life or the other guy their life or you.

Yeah, because it can come back. Like, I mean, I've been caught up in conspiracies that I was fortunate to not actually have done anything. But people trying to get rid of me would, you know, make up these stories and the administration would initially believe them because of the ranking in prison. But what I also began to understand about myself as a human being is that you can resolve conflict if you are a compassionate and thoughtful person. And ultimately really what it came down to is both people want to walk away with a sense of respect. And the thing is, in prison, the only thing that they have been taught we had been taught to respect was violence. We hadn't been taught an alternative way to live our lives. And that can still allow us to walk away, you know, after a conflict with our dignity intact. And as I began to discover these things through reading and self examination, it made it easier for me to kind of resolve some conflicts in a non violent way and in a way that actually allowed for personal growth on my behalf, but also allow for growth on other people's behalf.

And how do people react when you, because they're expecting you to, you know, that guy's gotta go or whatever, and you go in and you resolve it and let them go with their respect. Like, were people, like, what was that? Or like, how did it, like how did it play out? Did you have to then go, like, send a message after the fact or How'd you manage that?

So because I had proven that I would go to the extremes to survive in there, it was more a matter of being a man of my word. Because prison people aren't always men of their word. Right? So you're like, oh, yeah, the problem is resolved, and then the next thing you know, he shank you in the shower.

Right.

So.

There'S a version of that in business, but it's not.

It's not an actual shank. Shower sank. We should incorporate that into, like, a business manual. How not to get shanked in the shower.

That's the secret.

But that. That became, I mean, like, that, you know, the integrity and, you know, being honorable about my word was, like, really, you know, of high value in that environment. Because they knew it wasn't a matter of just me being fearful to, you know, do whatever, retaliate or whatever the case may be. It was just I saw a better way, and I saw a different way. And ultimately, you know, if you kind of think of it like this, like, you know, it's a reason that most male lions don't, you know, you know, inhabit the same space because they know when that battle occurs that, you know, nobody's walking away or wintering that. Right. And so, but, you know, it's translated to me being out of prison because they're, you know, my friends are still in prison, and I have, like, some of my best mentors are serving life sentences and never going home. They've been in there for 30 or 40 years. And I, you know, I honor my word that I told them from the moment, you know, I had the awakening. And so, you know, I still reach out to them. I still ensure that they're, you know, whatever I can do to, you know, be there for them, that. That's still important to me.

So when you resolve a conflict and you say, look, here's what I need you to do, and I'm gonna make sure that I always have your back. That extended even when you left prison?

Definitely.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow. And then, you know, you talked about. And I know about the things that you read that influenced you. And, you know, one of the remarkable things about your story is just how much you read and, like, the variety of what you read. So tell us a little bit about, like, you know, what you got started with and then where it went over time and then what really affected your thinking and caused you to kind of move into, you know, away from the pure violence to a different way of thinking about it.

Yes. So the. The first book I read that really got me excited about reading was actually written by another guy who locked in a cell across from me. And so he would write these fascinating stories about neighborhood he grew up in in Detroit. And they would be like, you know, 60, 70 pages of folded paper. And I would just, like, read these stories. And he wasn't a great writer, but he was a great storyteller. And one day after I had read, he had wrote like four or five of them, and I got done reading them, he was like, you know, you want something else to read? You should go to the library and check out Donald Goins. I had never heard of Donald Gornes up to this point. And so I went to the library and they had a specific process for actually checking out Donald Goins books. Like, you couldn't just go in and check it out the regular way. You had to fill out what's called a disbursement form to ensure that you return the book. Otherwise they would take the money out to account for the cost of the book. These books were, like, extremely popular. In prison, you check out a Jim.

Kahn's book, it's no problem.

Yeah.

Business BookTube.

Right, right. And so I started. I went over there and I read the book. And they had them actually in one section of the library that had, like, all these black writers that I had never heard of, like all the Harlem Renaissance and, you know, Langston Hughes and, you know, Claude McKay and Ralph Ellison. And then they had, like, a bunch of African history books that I'd never encountered. Great Men of Color by J. Rogers, which is one of my favorites. And so I exhausted Donald Gorn. He wrote probably like 13 books or so. And I literally read all of them. They're like, really quick reads. So they're like, you know, 140 pages. But it's the type of book that you read in a few hours if you're a reader. So I exhausted his catalog really quickly. And I just grew interested in other books that I saw in there. And I ended up getting introduced to Malcolm X's autobiography. And that book became probably the most pivotal book in my life. You remember on the cartoons, like, when you would have, like, the Bad Little Devil on one shoulder and, like, the Little angel on the other shoulder. So that Malcolm's book became like that to me. Right.

He's the angel on the shoulder.

He was the Adrian Shore. Right. He was kind of like the person saying, you know, brother, your life is redeemable. You can do something with yourself, you know, read a study. But then I had the reality of prison life. Like, you need to shank, dude. Cause he owe you $3. It's kind of like, which one of these cats I'm gonna listen to, right?

Yeah.

So it took me a long time to listen to Malcolm, even though he was talking to me all the time. But I ended up reading Malcolm multiple times. And what I found is that, you know, obviously, you know, the way that Malcolm is portrayed is, you know, the black nationalist, the angry black man. And what's often overlooked is how profoundly intelligent he was, how well read he was and the things that he read. And so I started going back, and he would be discussing books that he read.

You know, so he'd read what he read.

So that's. That was the start of it, Right. So I got off into reading political science and philosophy, which originally I thought philosophy was, like, the boringest stuff in the world. And then I urbanized it, Right?

Yeah.

So, like, I started Translate that. So what you translated to, like, the hood, Right. So I was reading the Cave Allegory one day, and I was like, this would be, like, so much doper if you. If Glaucomb's name was like, Tyrone. And this is like, a basement or some shit, Right. But that's how I had to read it to really relate and connect to it. And I realized I was like, these stories were relevant to the world that I live in, but I also began to understand the world in a vastly different way. And, you know, that led to me getting off into Eastern philosophy and theology, and I went through all these different iterations of personal growth. But it started with just being inquisitive and wanting to know more about the world and how it operated. Because what I knew inherently was that I was more than my number.

And how'd you know that, like. Cause it seems like guys in prison don't know that.

Well, I knew it because I knew the difference between how it felt when I was doing something bad and how it felt when I was doing something good. And doing something good felt natural to me. You know, doing the wrong thing felt like survival, like, out of necessity. And so because I knew that, I knew that it was important for me to figure it out, I didn't know how I was going to figure it out or what was going to be that ultimate prompt to get me to that next phase. But I never stopped reading. I never stopped examining and challenging myself, even when I was in the midst of so much Volatility and turmoil.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And when you came out of prison? Well, first let me just ask, like, what was that? Like, 19 years. Like, you're living in like, literally the jungle, and then all of a sudden you're on the outside and. And you don't have all those dynamics. So.

It'S the equivalent of what I say is like Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of the Jetsons. That's literally what my life was like, right? So, I mean, they was like Skyping back on the Jetsons back then. I wasn't even up on it, but that's what it was like. It was like I walked out of prison into a vastly different world than I left. I was mind blown at the technological advancements. Extremely curious. I was fortunate that I had a partner in EBONY who's sitting in the front, who would send me whatever I request. I was just curious about this Twitter thing and this Facebook, these wild names. I was like, who came up with these names? It's kind of wild. But my curiosity wouldn't allow me to be complacent with where I had been stopped at in the world. Because there is an element of arrested development that takes place when you're incarcerated because you don't have access to everything that's happening in society. And so I remember one of me and ebony's biggest arguments. It was literally like an argument like every day. Like the first three days I got out, I didn't know the difference between Word documents and the Internet. So every time I posted a big difference.

Delegate software is no good.

So literally every time I would be working in a document and I got ready to save it, I would freeze up because I had heard about, like, viruses. And I'm like, if I push the wrong button, it's gonna like get a comparative virus and it's gonna shut down. And so it was a major, major learning process. I mean, you know, when I went to prison, we had pagers, you know, for you young people, that's these little things that you can, like get numbers through. I mean, cell phones was like. Were they even cell phones? Mobile phones, they were like this big and came in like a, a bag, trying to be at the club looking cool with that bag and that big ass phone. So when I came out and, you know, I was so ambitious though, right? So I told ebony, I was like, you know, I want an Android. That's like. I saw it was like the fanciest touch screen because that's the only commercial I saw. And she was like, no, I think you should just start off with this little BlackBerry. But I got out here and I was so fascinated by technology and how it was moving the world, but also how I was connecting people in these really nuanced ways. And even today, sometimes I think I have a different appreciation from people who actually grew up alongside it. Because the way that I see the ability to connect in real time with real people, I mean, you know, I met you guys like through Facebook, right. It was interesting. I like set up a Facebook page the first day I got out and I did, like, literally I set up a Facebook page and I also got the first paying gig. It wasn't like a real job, like literally in a matter of weeks because I got out and I made a post and said I wanted to review music by local artists. Yeah, just. And part of it was I just, you know, I missed out on so much music. We didn't have MP3s or anything like that in there. And so once they stopped selling cassettes, for years we couldn't get your cassettes. That's these things. Yeah. Like literally like we was listening to cassettes like all the way till I came home, which was 2010. So you can tell how, how backwards that is.

And then if they're magnetized, they mess up your whole mess up.

Right. So I wanted to get caught up on music and I really just wanted to see what the music scene was about. You know, music influenced so much of my life. And so I made this post in one of the local newspapers, like, hey, could you write music reviews for us? And I was like, you know, sure. And that actually led to me writing four feature length stories and ended up dominating like the arts and culture page until they couldn't afford to pay me anymore. So. But technology is just, you know, it's mesmerizing to me. But it's also frightening.

How so?

So it's frightening in the sense that, you know, I went to prison. I had an advantage that a lot of guys in prison don't have. I was literate, you know, I can read. The average reading grade level in prison is third grade. And there's no pressure to get an education if you think you're not getting out till 20 years down the line. And so we have this, you know, now the war on drugs is really coming back to, you know, bite us in the ass because people have to look at guys who were sentenced to, you know, 15, 20, 30 years ago. Now they're on their way home and they've missed this tremendous leap in technology. And so the thing that's frightening to me is that we haven't done anything about it. Like, we haven't had the courage or the fortitude to just stop for a moment and say, what does that look like for somebody coming out on the other side? And when you really look at it, you realize they don't stand a chance in hell of surviving unless we act now and do something now. So my interest in the space is, you know, I realized how important it is for the guys that I left behind to be literate when it comes to technology, you know, so, you know, I try to share information with them and talk to them about, you know, what it's like to set up an email. Like, nobody taught me that before I got out. You know, figured a lot of these things out on my own. But again, being literate, that put me in a position to where I can actually figure it out on my own. I mean, you can't even put out an application these days without having to email. So if you don't know how to function in this modern world, the likelihood of you going back to prison is extremely high.

And a lot of people don't know, but in prison, you don't have access to technology or even regular email. They've got a prison system.

Yes. So, and that system is kind of modern. Right. So right before I got out of prison, they started this thing called Jpay. And it's a system that allows you to communicate with men and women who are incarcerated, but you have to reach out to them first. They can't just, like, you know, be like, hey, I want to get in touch with my cousin. Let me just email them. But once you reach out to him, it costs 15 cent to exchange what's basically an email. So I put money on my phone, I say my phone. Cause I use my mobile, my mobile device. And that's how I communicate with my friends inside. So while I can text you or email you free all day, you can't email somebody who doesn't, you know, 15 cent is an hourly wage in prison.

Yeah.

You know, so literally, you talking about an hourly wage to send an email. So I'm quite sure nobody here would like to send an email for their hourly wage. And imagine it's a little bit more than 15 cent up in here, but a little bit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's that. So that way of communicating, that was kind of like the first form of technology inside prison, but it's entered in a very exploitive, you know, and insensitive way.

And that kind of, you know, the prison system itself. And I think that, you know, now it's become a bipartisan issue that, wow, we put too many people in prison and. And we got to do something about that. But talk a little bit about. Because it's a system that itself makes money by failing and then follows you once you leave prison. So it's not like, I did the crime. Now I have to do the time. Like, the time doesn't end because you come out and you still can't vote. Most places still won't hire you. Talk about the system and, you know, when you think about, like, how it needs to be reformed to give people a chance and also, like, just from people who, you know, who don't even care about anybody, but, like, don't, like wasting money. Like, it's bad on that front, too.

Yeah. I often say that one of the greatest and longest enduring marketing campaigns was the fallacy of the War on Drugs. That campaign we bought hook, line and sinker, and it led to devastating consequences, which taxpayers.

Still a lot of drugs.

Yeah, still a lot of drugs. Which taxpayers are footing the bill for the 1994 crime bill. Devastating consequences, record leaps in terms of prison population. And when you really step back from the marketing that was done, and you can get that out of your head, this idea of punishment is completely absurd because it's a proven fact that hurt people, hurt people. And when you think about two wrongs.

Don'T make a right.

Two wrongs don't make a right. So the punitive nature of locking people up and throwing away the key. Politicians sold the American public on that. But what they didn't. What they didn't tell American public is that 90% of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to society. And so when you think about the barbaric mentality to punish people over and over and over and over again and then say, hey, it's time for you to come home and be free. It's not healthy for society. That's not making society safer. It's not smarter, you know. And so when. Where we at today is that the financial cost of that is starting to be felt. And so both parties are finally agreeing for whatever their motives are, to agree that we have to do something, you know, about it. And just to kind of illustrate what that looks like, when I was in prison, I started writing. I wrote and published along with Ebony, my first novel. So we scrapped up our little funds and probably invested about $3,000 to buy 1,000 copies of the book. So we was basically paying $2 a book selling for 15 or whatever the case may be. When we did that, we was going through the process of designing the COVID and the mailroom person immediately assumed that I had got some type of book deal. And so they sent that to the state attorney and they sued me for the cost of my incarceration. And basically what they did is they tallied.

And that's not uncommon, by the way. That's the new thing they do.

So that's how you basically pay for your incarceration.

If they find out you have money, they'll sue you for.

Yeah, but they pay. They itemized how much it costs per day, and it varied based on security level. The higher security level, the higher the cost. And so when you really think about, you know, at that time, I had, when I got sued, I had about 17 years in, they estimated the cost of my incarceration to be like a million dollars. Now imagine how many different scholarships and different people you can put to school in that time frame.

And the disincentive for not going back to prison, because if you go out and succeed, you got to give them your first million dollars. Oh, and how crazy is that?

Yeah, well, fortunately for me, I knew enough about the law that I knew contracts were legally binding. So I wrote a contract to myself saying I would only accept 10% of the profits once the company regrouped its production costs. And so they went from suing me from 90% of all profits to 90% of 10%.

So, you know, I think a lot of people assume, well, prison is prison and, you know, like, you can't really design a better prison, that it has kind of a better outcome. But, you know, now since you've been out, you've actually been invited to prisons in other countries and tell us about kind of what you found in Germany and whatnot.

So in June of last year, I was given a wonderful opportunity to travel to Germany to do research on their prison system. And given Germany's, you know, horrific past, I didn't know quite what to expect. We got over there and it really was mind blowing how different their prison model is compared to our prison model. For one, it starts off at the common ground that we all have, which is our humanity. They don't believe in throwing people away. They don't believe that the more you mistreat a person, the better that person will act. So from the very beginning, from the very time a person enters their system, they're working on how to resocialize them back to society. They have stuff that are actually not privileges, but part of their constitution. Like you have to be able to, to have conjugal visits with your family. If you have a family. You have to be able to go back into the community and work even while you're incarcerated. You know, it's mandatory that you actually get furloughs and you can actually leave the prison even if you're serving a long term sentence. They don't have life sentences at all. They have what's called a lifelong sentence. And basically what that is, is the longest you probably would serve is like 15 years. And if they didn't, excuse me, if they didn't feel like you were ready for society, they would put you in another part of the prison that really isn't a prison. It's kind of like a transitional housing type situation. But the thing that struck me most was I was talking to one of the wardens there and she asked about my time in solitary confinement. And when I told her that I had served a total of seven and a half years in solitary confinement, she began to weep.

The German prison warden.

Yeah.

I just want to make sure you guys are following the stories.

Yeah. And what she said to me is that we would never do that to one of our citizens. And resonated with me in a way that made me think about how do we shift toward the compassionate empathy that Germany, with this deep rooted history, this dark history that they've surpassed us in.

Yeah. And it's one of the things you pointed out to me is that the US prison system, the incentive is for you to go back to jail once you come out. And why don't you talk about that?

The prison system is the only big business that succeeds with a 70% failure rate. Like.

Cause they get paid by prisoner.

They get paid by prisoner.

Not on outcomes.

Not on outcomes. So 70% recidivism rate means 70% failure. I'm quite sure none of y' all would like, be CEOs if y' all had a 70% failure rate. But that's the standard that we've allowed to be, you know, the norm in this country by comparison. I think Germany has maybe.

Yeah, we looked it up. This is a crazy story. So he's telling me about the Germany story and I was like, wow, I wonder what their recidivism rate is.35%. So like, you, you think, oh, it's a prisoner, like, that's a bad guy. He went to jail, he's going back to jail. Doesn't matter what you do in prison. Not true.

Yeah.

Like you can get literally 70% to 35%, but there's. The financial incentive is to do the opposite if you are privately owned prison or even a government owned prison.

Yeah.

So really, really tragic and amazing, but. Sorry, that beat me. There's so many things wrong with that. It's incredible. But when you think about what it takes to make. To change the way prison works, how much of it is just a philosophy change and a culture change in how they run it versus it's underfunded or how do you think about that?

So I think there's a couple of things that has to happen, and some of them are happening. The first is that we have to have transparency. You know, when you think about last year, President Barack Obama went into a prison, the first sitting prison, sitting president to go inside a prison in history. Now we have over 2 million people who are incarcerated, another 5 to 6 million who have felonies or who are on some form of, you know, probation or parole. And to think that there's that large a segment of society and most of people in society are clueless about what happens in there.

Well, and it's a segment that the government is most directly responsible for.

Right, Most directly responsible for. But there's also owners of responsibility that we have because, you know, men and women are coming home every day and they're gonna be your neighbors. Maybe not y' all neighbors. Might take a little.

Take a little white collar criminal.

It might take a little minute to get there.

But he's been over to my house.

Yeah, well, you know, I technically got a house at Ben's house, so I'm breaking things up a little bit. I'm disrupting this thing here. But I mean, in all seriousness, you know, these men and women are coming home, and so they're our responsibility as well. And I think our biggest responsibility is to get in close proximity to the issue. It's not a person in this room who probably doesn't have a family member with some type of mental illness. And they're probably in a treatment center or they're getting whatever psychological help that they need. When you're poor, your treatment is prison. We've allowed that to happen on our watch. Drugs. You know, you think about the drug laws. Who does it apply to? You know, we've allowed that to. If you pour black, brown or, you know, grow up in a trader park.

Yeah. Rich people don't go to prison for drugs, that's for sure. Yeah.

And so when you, when you think about all these different ways that we're allowing this to just go unchecked and we're not paying attention. And horrific things happen when citizens don't pay attention. The things that I experienced and witnessed in solitary confinement is part of what fuels my work today. You know, this work that I do is so much bigger than me. It's so much more important than my personal success because these are real lives. You know, I was in an environment that would horrify most people by being in there just one day and to see the complete and absolute abuse that's, you know, poured onto the most vulnerable people, society. And so we don't talk about that. You know, we don't pay attention to it because it's easy to ignore until it happens to you. And it can happen to you. You know, it can happen. And so I think in order for us to get, you know, to that next level of how do we tear the system down? Like, you really have to look at it first. You have to be honest about it, you have to be transparent, but you also have to humanize it. You know, you have to understand that, you know, politicians play word games. You know, they'll be like, hey, we're going to let all the non violent offenders out and we'll keep the violent offenders in. But let's just have a real conversation. The real conversation is most people who are non violent offenders, if you sold drugs, you had to be violent at some point to protect your interest, just didn't get caught with violent crime. And so that's not the issue. Like that's the superficial way of looking at it.

That's how you market, right?

That's how you market. So it's part of the marketing campaign. And so what we really have to think about is that 90%, which represents everybody, violent, non violent and those in between. And you know, again, we have to think about do we want to continue to throw people away or do we want to be, you know, what most of us, you know, the core of our principles. You know, most people have some type of religious philosophy, spiritual, whatever that is, and redemption is the cornerstone of that. If you look at every religious philosophy in the world, redemption and second chances are the building blocks of those spiritual institutions. Yet we have been unwilling to live our lives in a way that allowed for men and women to get a second chance.