Discusses his life in prison and afterwards in his book writing my wrongs life, death and redemption in an american prison. He was sent to 40 years in prison at the age of 18 for Second Degree murder. He is interviewed by professor butler. Much respect my brother. This book, writing my wrongs life, death and redemption in an american prison, is everything. It is visionary, it is beautifully written, and it is even funny. So i just want to know everything about you starting with who is shaka senghor. Guest so, i mean i wear many titles, the most important is being a father to an amazing toddler. I am a writer, mentor, a strategy and innovation, and i am the cofounder of beyo beyondprivilege. Org. Host and you wrote this book that reminded me in some ways of the autobiography of malcolm x. It is a story about a journey to redemption. I have a friend, brian stevenson, who says that we should not judge people by the worst thing they ever did. So i want to get your reaction to that idea. But as fart of your journey part tell us about the worse thing you have ever done. That is a big part of the book. Yeah. I mean, i agree. I have had an opportunity to meet him a couple times and talk to him a few times and someone i highly respects. Host he represents people on death row. He is a famous Death Penalty warer and won the mcarthur genius award. Guest for me, the worst thing i did was commit a murder in 1991 shooting and tragically causing a mans death. It is by far one of the worst things you can do. I made that decision at the age of 19 and devastated a family, you know, took somebodys husband, son, brother, father from a family and it is one of things that stays with me to this day. It is the reason i do so much work i do in the city because i never want another child to grow up with that type of burden because it is a burden that never goes away. Host i want to talk about how this nerdy kid who is kind of a book worm takes this journey that i dont say ends, because your journey is still going on, but a part of the journey is you end up murdering someone. Lets start at the beginning. What was your childhood like . Guest i grew up in a household on the out side looking in was the model for black middle class america. My father was in the air force and my mother was the primary caretaker of all six of us. They had a total of six children at the time. Host this was in detroit . Guest yeah, on the east side of detroit. But unfortunately what was happening on the inside of the household was traumatic. My mother was physically and verbally and emotionally abusive and that is because what she came from. As i became an adult i put the pieces together on why she treated us the way she did and the reality is hurt people hurt people. She came from a background of extreme hurt. She thought her actions were the necessary actions of parenting back during that era. Host you tell powerful i am sorry. You tell powerful stories about some of the things she would do and say to you. Really hurtful things. Guest one of the things that really stuck out to me and lasted for a long time was when i came home from school with a good grade on a test and instead of being greeted with hugs and celebrated she turned and through a pot at me extremely hard and cracked the tiles on the walls in the kitchen. I didnt make the connection until later on that that was a life shattering moment for me as a child. I was around 910 at the time and when i got 14 i just got, you know, tired of the abuse and decided to run away. I thought that running away was the answer to all of my problems but i didnt realize i was running into more problems because i got introduced into the crack cocaine train and dealt with horrors in that culture. Host you talked about your mom some. I loved your dad. He is my favorite character in the book. A lot of brothers have distance relationships with their father and close to their mom and yours was kind of a different story. Guest yeah, my father is one of my best friends, and really a thoughtful well intention guy. I think the thing that makes our relationship so incredibly positive is because he was willing to step up to the plate as a man and say there were things i could have done differently to protect you and the rest of your siblings, there was things i could have handled in a different way, and it takes a great deal of humility to step up and say you are wrong. I learned a great deal from my father in terms of how you handle poor Decision Making once you recognize your were in error. Host what did he do that was wrong . It sounded like me and your mom were not getting along and he tried to make it work but it wasnt happening . What do you think your dad meant when he said there were mistakes me made . Guest i think one of the biggest mistakes was not acknowledging abuse was taking place and being complicit in that abuse and those dynamics happen a lot of time where parents are cocon spirators in what happened with the children. The thing i found was when it was just me and my father, he never struck me, no corporal punishment. But when they were together like that was the normal standard in our household so he was complicit in that. When i began to discover and recognize abuse for what it was i brought that to his attention and we had deep, meaningful conversations and it helped with the healing for the relationship we have today. Host that is a beautiful thing, brother. And your mom, trying to understand how a parent could do this. She would say things like she wished you were never born and you dedicate the book to her and your dad. Guest yeah, at the end of the day she is still my mother. The emotional mature part of me realizes that she was hurt at that time and she is not the same woman she was back then. You know, i love her deeply, and care about her, we are still growing and healing together, but i just thought it was important to acknowledge her. Ultimately, she gave birth to me and there is a lot of things i learned from my mother that are really positive. So to me, it was a nobrainer to dead kated the dedicate the book to her, my father and stepmother. I cannot expect forgiveness and redemption without extending that to the grace of someone else including my mother. Host i get that. But how do you not kind of blame her for things that happened to you and for you taking the path you took . Guest ultimately we still have to make decisions. You know, what i try to get people to understand is this book isnt about making excuses for the decision i made. It is about explaining what is happening to so many young men and women in communities where we dont talk about sexual abuse, child abuse and physical abuse and the things that lead to us taking the path we take. I want to be clear this isnt about making excuses and blaming my mother would be an ex cuse. I was ultimately the person who pulled the trigger that night. Host has she read the book . Guest yes. Host what was her reaction . And our dad . Guest initially she was hurt by it as is often the case when you have to recognize ugly truths that are not always comfortable. Same for my dad. But once we were able to talk about my experience with that i am writing from the perspective of where i was at emotionally and mentally as a teenager and young child and that is how i felt, that is what i experienced, and you know, eventually she got to a space where she was willing to acknowledge her role in it. Host very powerful. So you are dealing with stuff that no 14yearold kid should have to deal with. You decide you cannot take it anymore. So you jet. What happens next . Guest so i run away, first couple weeks i bounced from friends garages and basements and hustled food at the local grocery store. Eventually i was seduced by the crack cocaine trade. At that time, crack had just entered detroit so it didnt have the stigma it has attached today. None of us could imagine how devastating this drug was going to be to our community. When i got seduced to that culture, it was an older guy saying here is a way to take care of yourself, lay our head, clothes on your back and money in the pocket. When you are a hurt, broken child and homeless, it is not hard to be seduced into a culture that says we love you and take care of you and provide you. That is what you are cravings an a teenager. As a teenager you are craving to look good also. Look good for the girls. Working this job helped you with that. You got to go to a couple shopping sprees. Guest when you grow up in an environment where, you know, we were middle class, there was six children. So we could not always get everything we wanted and desired and inner cities where we always struggle with our identity, material possessions build up yourself esteem so of course that is part of the allure of the drug trade. You get all of the benefits that come with it like fast money, fast money, shopping sprees and fancy cars. At that age, it was memorizing attaining anything i wanted to relatively quickly. Host that makes it more glamorous than some of what you described. You said it was like a minimum wage job starting out. What was that like . What is it like to be a crack dealer . You wake up, clock in . How does that work . Guest the thing is, you know, on the outside looking in there is a glamorous element and that is part of the addiction and allure of the game and what the seasoned guys use to lure you in. They are driving the fancy cars, they have the jewelry and clothes. When you are naive on how the world works and what your value is economically it is easy to be exploited. There is no clock. Hustling is a 24hour job. Whenever a customer calls, no matter the time, you have to be available to serve them. You are hustling 24 hours around the clock and what you end up making and spread it out over 24hour cycle, it isnt worth it. Host people say the kids doing the drug dealing are some of the best Business People out there. It sounds like you have business skills and grew our business. Guest yeah, Drug Trafficking is no different than any other fortune 500 company. It is the same ideas, supplier, demand and marketing. All of these things you would use in a normal business setting is applicable in street and drug culture. One thing i did as a mentor is point out if you sold drugs, you can start your own business and you can pretty much be highly successful because the same principles apply. It is one of the things i really look at the way we deal with criminal justice reform. I see an opportunity there. I see an opportunity to really take men and women who come from that culture introduce them to legalal enterprise and show them the skill systems they learned in the street an applicable to every day business and help them make that transition. We would reduce the recidivism rates and give people an opportunity to get back in society. Host i know a lot of Young Brothers, i used to be a prosecutor and i am ashamed to say i put some of those Young Brothers in prison. But a lot of Young Brothers, if they had other opportunities would become entrepreneurs. They would lead organizations and young sisters as well. Why dont more of us do that . Why do we chose, and chose in quotation marks, selling drugs as opposed to moving legal freight . Guest i think part of it is access. A lot of us dont know how to access you know, credit and loans, and the technical know hows of setting up an enterprise. That is being literate and literacy rates among people from the street are not that high. When you add that equation, you factor that in, and often times what happens is people dont realize these guys have the technical know how they just dont have the literacy rates to make that transition. It is part of our responsibility to bring that back and show guys the easy route to do it and help them learn what they need to learn to make a successful transition. Host and he to acknowledge the issue about access to capital; right . These are young, africanamerican women and men, so if they walk into the local bank it is not like they are going to get a loan. Ironically they get more capital to start a drug selling business than they do to start a legitimate business. Guest that is the thing. With ill ligitimate enterprise you dont have to capital. Just risk your life in prison n. But legal enterprise there is a lot to go to. I think you need to make capital more available to men and women coming from that culture as they transition back to society if they have a proven Business Model they are willing to invest in. I think we can create that and make it the day to day reality. There are some organizations around the country doing it on a small scale. But we have to take the different skill sets that exist in prison. Not just the entrepreneur side. But there are many men and women who have writing, art, management skills, you know, wood working skills, whatever the skill set is we need to create a space for them to utilize it once they get out of prison and insure they get out and stay out. Host in some of my academic writing, i described drug selling as a victimless crime. I say that you are selling, at least selling to adults, the people who want to consume the substance and i dont see what the criminal law has to do with it. If people want to do something that is not good for you it is like smoking cigarettes and if they want to do that they can. I kind of rethought some of that because man, some of the work you were doing, not even the shooting, but just some of the reality you were enhancing for people was dirty work. You talk about what it was like seeing these addicts. Guest yeah, it is a horrible, horrible culture. But again, it is no more horrific than somebody drinking and driving when you think about it. The reality is that people drink every day and do all type of, you know, inhumane things to other people. So while i think the culture is deplorable and dehumanizing there is an element that is based in choices and addiction and the choice of being brought up in that culture. So i dont think it is necessarily a criminal situation but a Substance Abuse situation where we need to offer alternati alternatives to incarceration. Addiction is serious and has mad consequences. But so is addiction to cigarettes, and alcohol, and you know, unhealthy food. Most of us partake in some form or faction. Host absolutely. And you know, we think about the most harmful drug has to be alcohol. It causes more deaths, dysfunctional families and crimes than all other hard drugs combined. But i will never forget your description of ghosters. Tell us about that and the crack house. Guest yeah, so part of the addiction, the crack addiction, is hallucinating and paranoia and then a deep craving for the drug. So often times when i would be in the crack house after the person smoked the crack and it is all gone they would begin to look around on the floor for anything that resembled crack. They would just pick up anything white, whether it was lent, with the ability to see if it was something they could consume. It is a highly addictive drug. Extremely addictive. And hence you have the devastating impact it has had on a lot of communities where people who were teachers, lawyers, doctors, factory workers, lost everything in the matter of months because the drug is that highly addictive. Host and you were this 1415 year old kid, and women would offer to do anything in order to get drugs from you . Guest yeah, i mean i think it is part of when you think about some of the massagisogyny exists in rap music, you go back to that behavior playing out in rap music, and i think it is attached to street culture where you had adult women who were preying on young drug dealers sexually because that was a way for them to obtain drugs. All of my early Sexual Experiences were very di dysfunctional, and rooted between drugs and sex at an early age. I didnt grow up with the traditional, you know, fall in love with my childhood sweetheart. I grew up having sex with adult women who were addicted to drug culture. I didnt realize later on what the emotional impact that had on me and how i interacted with young ladies growing up. Host speaking of that, in the drug trade, you make a funny story about boy meets girl. Tell us how you met your then partner and the mother of your son. Guest yeah, again, the dysfunctional environment and it is like boy meets girl, girl meets boy, we decided to sell drugs together. Host there was a gun in between. You met because she needed a gun. Guest yeah, i loaned her a gun and we became an item as a result in the interest of making money into the street. That is the reality of that culture. Host she was selling, you were selling, and it was basically a merging. Guest yeah, we started selling together. Guest she needed a guns and guns played a role in this. I wanted to ask you first, when you saw this kind of horror, it is almost like a horror house that you describe where the crack was being sold from. What did you feel like personally when you saw that . Did you feel like you were enabling this addiction . Or if that is what they want to do that is what they want to do . What was your relationship to that scene like . Guest at that age, you are not thinking that deeply about it. You are thinking about i am making money and this is how i provide for myself and take care of those around me and obtain things. You are really not thinking about the deep psychological trauma that is happening in that space. You are just thinking about making money and there is no judgment one or the other. You realize people are are addicted to drugs and they will buy it. These people have names and qualities about them that humanize them in a way to where you dont speak it as this disconnected element. You know . So, at that age, you are not even mentally evolved enough to understand how devastating this is to peoples lives. Host you are a conscious brother. There wasnt any idea man, i dont feel good about my work . Guest i mean, yeah, there is so much happening in the environment. So much violence and people getting shot and robbed. And i mean eventually it starts to take its toll on you. You start seeing pregnant women who are addicted and people who are instead of providing for kids they are using the food stamps to obtain drugs and so there is so many of these different elements that start to affect you on a deeply human level because it is a miserable way to live. But again, at that age, it is hard to put all of that stuff in the proper context. So it is kind of like you know this isnt healthy for you, but you dont really understand the deeper implications. But even more importantly, the systematic implications which wasnt until later on i was kind of able to say this is deeper than someone being addicted to drugs. This is about a culture that exists in a country where people feel isolated, alone, marginalized, and pushed out and they end up selfmedicating as a result. What was happening then in detroit, there were so many elements of that dysfunction going on at one time. When you start seeing it from a very conscious perspective things look different. And in the suburbs they were self medicating as well just with prescriptions they get from the doctor and alcohol guest and most of our clients came from the suburbs. They dont deal with the league consequen consequences and it takes longer for their addiction to have that deep impact because they are coming from positions of wealth where it is easier to cover up a lot of things as opposed to coming from being one second away from being unemployed or broke. It is a different pace in terms of the devastation. Host so you met your girl because she needed a gun for protection in her business and guns, it turns out violence plays a big role in this business and you start seeing that personally. Guest yeah, i mean, if you are selling drugs and making a lot of money you have to be able to protect your interests. You cannot hire a Security Firm or offduty police because it is illegal. And there is constant rivalries and people fighting over territory and fighting over who makes money in this area and it leads to a lot of, you know, gun violence. Host including you find violence against you. What happens to you . Tell us. Guest yeah, so, in march 1990, i got into a conflict, a minor conflict over an exgirlfriend and her new boyfriend rolled up and shot me multiple times. Even though that wasnt a drugrelated incident, you know, the reality of the gun violence is connected to that culture. Culture. So i got shot, got taken to the hospital, they patch they patch me up and pulled the bullets out, be one year making that soundmake than it really was. Guest it was really robotic. In detroit at that time there is shootings every day. Basically the way most of those shootings were young black man. We were basically patched up, pulled the bullets out and sent on our way, with cocktail of emotional fear, heres a hug, what can i do, heres who you can talk to and reach out to. I was pretty much left to grapple with my life at the age of 17 and as a result, i began to carry a gun every day. I had to make up my mind if it i was a similar con conflict i would have to shoot first and 16 months later i shot first and caused a mans death. Tell us how that happened. July, of 1991, there was a guy who brought two other guys with him to make a drug transaction and i did not know the other two guys and so i refused to do the exchange. Like, that was one of the rules we had about drug selling is that if you did not know all parties involved dont make the transaction because it could be eight set up. You did not know if they were cops or not. Three white guys in a car. Yes. Its common for when a person who is coming to buy drugs gets caught with drugs is coming common for them to set someone up, the dealer so they could get out of trouble and they did not know if it was a set up, so i asked them to leave and they refused to leave in front of my house and we began to argue back and forth about that. The argument escalated and i turned to walk in the house when the passenger opened up the passenger side door and literally no split second night turned and fired for fatal shots its one of those moments that i can never take back. You know. It devastated to families and its one of the reasons that i am a firm advocates of turning things around in the community and working with young men and women and one of the reasons i wrote writing my wrongs because i think its important for people to be in close proximity to the problem because thats really wake you can solve it and i think the book brings you as close to the posttraumatic stress disorder similar in this communities without being a victim of gun violence, but also brings you as close to the prison experience without having to get arrested and go in handcuffs and end up in a sale. Host the whole thing is very vice role and you feel like every moment of your life you feel like you are right there with you including in that very horrific scene that uses the worst thing youve ever done. Im curious what it feels like to kill someone. Does it make you feel powerful or does it make you hate yourself, what is that feeling likely to see to in the moment in the moment its happening, there is a multitude of feelings i can tell you what i was feeling at that time and it was paranoia, fear, fear, anger, was it in power seeing empowering to feel like i was in control to fire first . I think there was an element of empowerment there. Ultimately, it ended very sad and tragic when i realized what i had done and that momentary decisionmaking process. I was able to sit with the reality of what i had done and it was a very devastating experience. Host and it doesnt take long for the police to catch up with you in part because your girls snitched. What was that about . Guest yeah, and, i mean, thats the reality i always caution young people who are in here in the streets, the culture that the people you think are your friends will definitely turn on you and they will, you know, tell the police that i did not have anything to do with it, but he did and when that happened, when it originally happened i was extremely angry because i felt like we all signed up for the culture and everything that came with it, but as i evolved as a man i realized these are young kids who were bought caught up in the culture like i was and the police threatened them with life in prison in 25 years and etc. , being an accessory even though they had nothing to do with the decisions i made and so when i matured beyond that i realized we were all kids caught up in this very dysfunctional unhealthy culture. Host and the police as you described them were not exactly serving or protecting your community anyway, so, i mean, they were doing dirty stuff as well, so in that sense you could understand why people at concerns about cooperating. Guest yeah, they pull out every trick in the book to get the case off the books and they not mind roughing you up. They dont mind at line two people and telling empty things they want to hear and i dont like to make blanket statements about all officers because all officers are not bad they are human like the rest of us, that there is an element in the inner city when it comes to how young black males and young black women of that culture are treated. You know, now, we see when some of this Police Brutality being caught on camera, people are finally seeing what we have known all along and experienced and dislike this agreement to that we have had in the hood for years like they catch you with drugs, they catch you with money and they may just step on the drugs and keep the money. They may refuse up and keep the money or they may turn it all in, you know, but we know those things happen every day. Host so, you are before a judge. The judge sentences you. Much time to you get . Guest so, i got a total of 17 to 40 years and 50 degrees for seconddegree murder, two years for felony firearm with a 40 year, which basically means the 17 was my minimum and 40 was my maximum. 40 years was my only guarantee. Host how old are you at this time . Guest i was 19 years old. I just knew my life was over. I didnt think i would ever get out of prison. I mean, i never knew anyone to go to prison that ever came back. Host chock, i know now you are very involved in efforts to reform criminal justice, so one question i have is a judges sitting as a 19year old man is in front of him and they have pled guilty to seconddegree murder, what should the judge do, do you think . What should the judge have done in your case . Guest i think the judge should look at all of the facts. What traumas trigger the gun violence in the first place and make sure the treatment is in place in front of the sentencing and make sure there is, you know, a complete understanding of whats really happening as opposed to this person is a danger and threat to society and other people and make sure treatment is a major part of the judicial the experience, you know. Host what do you think would happen an appropriate sentence, way to resolve your case, what in a just world would have happened to a 19year old kid with a background like yours who has just on this horrible thing . Guest i mean, i think when you factor in the way that kids brains develop, to sense a person am a young person to life or numbers that resemble life and doesnt allow them an opportunity to successfully turn their lives around, i just think that is an injustice. I dont think any young adult or teenager should be set to 20 years in prison, basically. I do think there are alternatives to incarceration, not for everything, but i think there are different ways that we can deal with young people when they run afoul of the law. Host i agree with you, but you dont get one of those alternatives and you go to prison. There are so many powerful passages in your book and its almost like a sensory experience because you are very good at and again, bringing the reader writes there with you including in whats got to be some of the worst places in the united states, some of the Michigan State prisons you served a time men, so when we think about what is prison now like . Guest horrible. Definitely has unique institutional smell. You cant know what part of the cellblock you are in and where you ask. The first prison i was at, michigan reformatory is one of the oldest prisons in the states and so the plumbing system was horrible. Which means when people flush the toilet it backs up into yourself, so the cellblock constantly smelled like human waste. Solitary confinement smells like human waste mixed with pepper spray. The officers used to subdue men in their cells and its a spell i will never forget. Like i have a physical reaction to it every time i go inside prisons because of the institutional smell. Host what does prison taste like . You talk about some of the food and i barely want to call the food. Guest yeah, i mean, its not a place, you know, where gourmet food is on the menu. Or just quality food coming out. Its institutionalized food and often time the cooks are the men who are incarcerated, some of which dont come from a cook background and just move up the ladder of the kitchen based on seniority. So, most of the food that i consume while i was in there was extremely bland and horrible. Yeah and so its definitely not anything anyone should look forward to. Host one of the things that put me out was that incredibly sometimes they use food as a form of punishment. What was that about . Guest yeah, so in solitary confinement they have whats called food lover, which is a mixture the way its supposed to work as its supposed to be a mixture of all of the food that was on the menu, whatever your meal was it supposed me mixed up with a little block to serve to you so you cant throw food etc. Etc. Often tempted to use 2d to great people, so its something as a blessed turning your lunch tray back in you forgot to put a plastic spoon on the tray and they discovered it in your cell and now they put you on food loaf, which is this loaf of food like a brick of food thats really just all the food from that week mixed up and baked into this loaf and you can be on that for upwards of seven days. You know, so that means you dont get no regular meals just a food loaf. Host as a former prosecutor i know what prison feels like and whenever i would go to a jail to interview someone the first thing i would do when i left is take a shower. It just felt grimy and dirty. Guest yeah, i mean, the feeling of being in that environment clings to you, you know. Its very real. That smell is so strong a prevalent and its like any other factor you go into and you walked away with those smells attached to you in just a few minutes human disparity. So, i think its a Good Practice to leave there and shower. Host and that despair, i mean, it takes its toll and it took a toll on you, so you did not start out as a model prisoner. Guest no, i got into all kinds of trouble. I accumulated a total of 25 misconducts my first five years that ranged from dangerous contraband to assault on inmates and staff. I didnt adjust well. I did want to be responsible or accountable, so i lashed out out of anger. There are other times i stood on principles that got me trouble. I ended up doing seven years in solitary confinement. Host seven years. Guest the longest and was four and a half years straight. Host i cannot imagine that. What is that like . Four and a half years, what was the spacelike . Guest probably about a six by nine cell, just a slab of concrete which i laid my mattress on for a bed. Another slab of concrete used for writing service and a steel toilet seat combination. Host how many hours a day were you in this cage . Guest twentythree hours a day, five days out of the week and 24 hours a day the other two days out of the week. Host so, almost no other country in the civilized world uses this as a way to punish people and those prisons and those other countries are probably safer than ours. In states that have gotten rid of solitary confinement, the prisons are safer for the inmates and the guards, but one of the concerns is its not a way to treat human beings. It makes people guest you know, i was fortunate. I was fortunate to be able to read books by Nelson Mandela and spiritual books that kept me strong and kept me focused. I set my days up like i was in college i went study different subjects every couple of hours. I wrote a lot and did a lot of journaling. I began to write stories. You know, literacy played an Important Role in my survival. Surviving with my mind and tax. Ive the biggest thing i ever feared in prison was going crazy because i saw that happen to so many people who were normal, originally. Solitary confinement like psychological trauma is at an extremely high level and the guys down there had some type of mental illness. Host and so you talked about the violence, the shanks, the ways that people would resolve kind of bribery, but you also talked about extranet accept kindness from one inmate to another and one of the times you were in solitary, people would send you food and send you gifts tell us about that. Guest yeah, i mean, theres a Human Element that people dont think about when it comes to the men and women incarcerated and i think its so important for people to understand that and thats why i write about in the book. Its like i want people to understand that these are brothers, sisters, husbands, wives who may have made a poor decision, but they are still human beings who care, who are thoughtful who are always willing to share and make sure others are taken care of in the prisons and we in solitary confinement where you are restricted, your friends or people you know and that working down there to clean up the cellblock and me, you know, smuggle used up and you cant get in solitary. Host and some of the gifts they gave you were books. This is book tv and Everyone Wants to know who you read. So, who did you read . Guest i read anything. I Read Everything from malcolms autobiography to platos republic, all of the harlem renaissance writers, gloria naylor. I read political science. A lot of african, you know, history and world culture. Ja roberts. Host wow and at the same time you are doing doing all this reading you also had this growing spiritual consciousness. So, when you went in, you are christian, you grew up in that christian household. Tell us about that evolution. Guest my mother was churchgoing and is still a churchgoing lady. I grew up, but not with a hard structured you have to go to church every sunday. One of the things i respect about both of my parents as they left that choice up to a as most of the times. There were times we had to go to church when it was like easter, christmas etc. , but for the most part they let their religious choices up to us which created really an opportunity for me to grow in my own and to understand my life spiritually, so i started off for reading the bible and then i studied islam for a while, practice a very way should of that faith for a few years before i got disenchanted with the structure of religion and then i just began study eastern philosophy and got off into studying buddhism and hinduism and Different Things and what i discovered most of that was most important to me was that all of these different religious, you know, perspectives offer a wealth of wisdom that i was able to apply to my everyday life without feeling that i had to be boxed into one ideology. So, i studied theology, you know its interesting to me the way religion emerged into society and the role it plays, you know, the wisdom in these books is incredible and so i just enjoyed the process of studying and learning. Host i know a lot of people like watching you now will just not be able to fathom that you took a life, so when we think about your journey to redemption , theres the literacy , theres the spirituality, theres also a couple of letters that made a huge difference. What are those letters . Guest yeah, so one of the letters was the first of forgiveness written to be by that god mother of the man i. Host wow. Guest shes a really deep woman of faith and she wrote me about five or six years into my sentence and it she told me she forgive me and she loved me and at that point i did not even let myself and so the idea of a forgiving myself was so foreign to me that when i got that to me that when i got that letter it was kind up mind blowing to know heres a woman whose family i devastated and yet she is the first one to say thats i forgive you. Host wow. Guest it opened up the pathway for me to finally forgive myself and make peace with the poor decisions i made and began loving myself in a healthy way and then also received a letter from my son who was around 10 at the time i was in solitary confinement explaining his mother told me him why i was in prison and that letter just shattered every, you know, i did i had about my stealth from that street perspective in prison yard perspective and made me reevaluate my life. Host that was the first time you cried in all the time he had been imprisoned thats what made you cry. Guest yeah, i mean, in prison youre tired taught to suppression emotions like on the street. Host what was it about your son writing to you that caused that reaction . Guest well, i mean, i realized i left him out there alone and i realized that unless i did something to turn my life around he would forever see me as or murder and as a father no one wants to have that type of burden for their child to look at them in the most horrific way host so, you get these two extraordinary letters, one from the godmother of your victim and one from your son who you basically dont know because you have been locked up during this time. Was the impact those letters have on your journey . Guest they were very impactful, i mean, the first letter basically laid the foundation for me turning my life around and for me to be able to see myself from a different perspective and the letter from my son really was just about that was the spark for me to find my pathway and get back to my authentic self and really move forward in a way that honored my existence on the earth, but also honor my role as a father and as someone who young men in the community was looking up to. Host and to also give credit for part of your journey, my favorite character i think was your dad. You are also one of my favorite characters and then theres ebony. What role did she play . Guest ebony and i met in 2006, 20 and of my sentence. I had two years before i saw the parole board and we asked them in 2000, and began to correspond in 2006. We became really good friends, supersmart beautiful woman and at the time everyone thought she was crazy for exploring the relationship with me given i was incarcerated and was incarcerated for seconddegree murder. Here is this beautiful model of looking, recent doctor graduate and she falls in love or as we say grow some of with me while im still struggling to get out of prison and we ended up establishing a wonderful amazing friendship that has endured to this day. We just celebrated connecting with each other 10 years ago. Host congratulations. Guest today she is the mother of my child and hands down one of my best friends and actually she is my best friend in the world. Super courageous woman. Very smart, cares about real issues and works externally hard to change the world. Im proud to have her as the mother of my child and as my best friend and someone who i love dearly. Host i love that phrase, he said it wasnt so much falling in love, but growing in love. Guest yeah, i mean, she taught me how to love in a different way, you know. So, she was that missing piece of the puzzle for me getting out, which was someone that could help me on package some of the hardness of prison life and she was a safe place to land when she came into my life. Host so, eventually 19 years later you are released. Shaka, what was it like to leave prison after 19 years, to walk out of that jail. What it if youre likely to i walked out of prison june 22, 2010, 1 day after my 38th birthday and at that point answer by life in prison. It was beautiful, but it was beautifully scary. I came out to a different world. It was like Fred Flintstone walk into an episode of the jetsons. People were scraping and Cell Phone Technology and the internet like the internet didnt exist when i went to prison turkey was a thing just getting started. So, i came out to a very different reality than the one i lefts and the reason i say it was beautifully scary is because while i have absolutely loved walking out of prison, realized that we were in a lot of trouble in this country when it comes to the men and women coming home because we are not preparing properly for their reintroduction into the world. So, had a little whole lot of stuff relatively quickly. Fortunately, i am a relatively smart person, but the scary part about this that i know that a lot of the men and women incarcerated have thirdgrade reading and math skills, so thats a scary thing when we think about that we are not preparing people for life out of prison. Thats one of the reasons host i want to correct one thing you said. You said you were relatively smart person. You are a brilliant man and i think not just intellectually, but also spiritually to evolve in the way that you have and when concerned that some people, reformers have as we spent a lifetime thinking about nonviolent drug crimes and a lot of people are on board with treating those folks differently , but a lot a lot of these ideas about ways to do duty to do things differently also play to people at risk for violent conduct, even people who have committed violent crimes, even murder. Guest yeah, i mean, heres the thing, politicians for decades have played this fear based game with the minds of american citizens. What they have done is said, you know, we will lock them up and throw away the heat if you vote for me. The reality is they lock people up and may hide the key until they decide for them to come home decades later and then they release people on an unsuspecting Society Without proper skill sets, without counseling, Transitional Counseling and without access to employment and housing. The American Public has been duped into believing that only nonviolent offenders get out of prison and thats hogwash. Its one of the tactics politicians have used to get voted into office over and over and over again. The majority of people in prison are getting out of prison. Host 90 . Guest 90 and we have a conscious choice and what kind of men and women return to our society. We have to stop warehousing people in these volatile environments and expect them to get out as Healthy Human beings. It doesnt matter if you go in to prison as a