travel plans, some high-profile supporters rallied to his cause, including jay-z, and philadelphia 76ers co-owner michael rubin. it s just simple as getting a technical violation and losing your job, losing your house, losing your family. trying to go to work and my travel schedule got confused with my probation officer. i don t think that s nothing to be placed in a cell, you know. people kind of looked at that as normal. the rules are the rules, and if you violate, you can go back to jail. some of these rules are only designed for certain people to fail. kids coming in getting 10, 15 years of probation, and going back to prison for not even committing a crime. tell me how your life has changed, what you have done since getting out of prison. we ve started a foundation called reform. we connect a lot of powerful people, people who have a lot of resources. we try to make change. make the system better. and you re trying to change and create laws here? yeah, we want to go
there s substance misuse. and people, specifically women, are being criminalized for this, for poverty, for substance abuse issues. what does that do for families? play it out for me. if women are being separated, where are the children going? the children end up in foster care, they end up with different family members, they end up broken from their parents. so unfortunately what s happening is that it s spilling and trickling over into our communities and then what happens is the children end up with no one. and consider the inhumanity that we re perpetuating in this system. we re having wome ining women b children in prisons with handcuffs and leg cuffs on. we re having women who some programs we visited in washington state, there was a women s prison where they were doing something that s a bit more humane by saying, we ll allow you to rate your kids up to a certain amount of time in the facility. then you turn around and think, that s the humane thing to do, but it s inhum
drugs. so she spent some time in the local jail. she wasn t incarcerated for a long time. but i have plenty of family members who have been through the system. and we ve seen both as re19ing family members who are still in the community, and we ve seen with the individuals themselves the need for a smarter system that actually helps people get better. my mother didn t need to be looked up during that time, she needed help. she needed help with her dependency issues and the trauma she went through, having lost her mother. i think so many folks are reacting to the traumas that they ve felt, the fear that they feel in their neighborhoods, by doing something they shouldn t do, doing something that s illegal. but we re not fixing the problem by locking them up for a long period of time when we should be really trying to figure out a way to help them. before we go to a quick break, bryan, react to that notion, primary damage as opposed to collateral damage. i don t think there s any ques
so no, i don t think we should be putting children in adult jails and prisons. i also think we ve got a lot of reform work to do in this space. we ve got 13 states in this country that have no minimum age for trying a child as an adult. in angola prison, i meet a guy henry montgomery, 17 years old, killed a cop, life in prison no possibility of parole. he was 72 when i met him. we talked to the grandson of his victim. and i want to play this. it s opened up a whole other question about where we re going here. here it is. there s no parole for charles hurt. his life sentence is permanent. and my mom, my aunt, my uncle, our belief in the system is that it s equal justice. quite honestly, i don t think anybody can sit there and say that he can never be a threat again. he needs to finish doing whatever his obligations are to get the parole. if he s ever going to parole, then congratulations to him.
safer place, there s so much involved. they have fantastic ideas. we re putting them to work. you came here when you were 16. yes, i was arrested when i was 16 and left when i was 34. how did this place change you for the better? it sounds crazy, but i lived in nine prisons over 16 years. i never met a warden until i got to sing sing. he would walk the halls and say, are you in school, and really push us. i realize you said to me, hey, what if we did more. and it s just not a normal question from a superintendent in a maximum security prison to think about doing more here like college and music and theater and work to make us dig deeper into what caused us to be here in first place. you have been out about a year? about 15 miss. 27 years in the system. what was it like stepping on the outside? it was wonderful. i ve been dreaming about my rerelease since the first day i