i needed to film for mayor eyes my sound my case and everything that had gone wrong if you furthered the conspiracy one step you're guilty for everything in the conspiracy no matter when you entered the conspiracy it could have been on the last day. because i had collected some money on i technically was guilty of conspiracy was held responsible for everything that everybody else had done and my sentence my twenty four years was established based on the sum total of all the acts to see that sandy had manufactured that's where my years came from my years did. things that idea came from three point seven million tablets of ecstasy that he had manufactured puts me on the chart at this lab just twenty four years that's how a judge sentences you based on a chart the way the sentencing laws apply to conspiracy. being subject to

being punished for all the conduct that everybody in the conspiracy has been involved in. so the idea of proportional punishment can be lost if this triggers a mandatory sentence to add insult to injury while i'm incarcerated for twenty four years he comes back to the us and goes before the same judge the sentence me to twenty four years and he got three years probation because he cooperated and snatched out everybody. the person who comes in early and cooperates usually ends up with a lower sentence than the person in the conspiracy who walks up two days before the trial and tender simply that sentence will be different even though they may be situated the same it's just plain different and those are the yangs than the of the son in. the same process that the court has not

a whole lot of control over and the u.s. attorneys and the prosecuting attorneys have control over but it does result in a different sentence when you're facing something like twenty or thirty years. you have people that are are doing things they never thought they would do which is turn in their friends testify against friends sometimes they will even make up. false information to testify falsely against people just in order to get themselves out from under the terrible legal situation they are in the pressure to provide information is huge and coercive and un-american. but that's the way mandatory minimums are said. my mother calls me and she said well i need to tell you something. and i'm thinking the worst just while i may is featured in our magazine she's been in prison for a number of years and why that was such

a catalyst was suddenly we had something tangible to hand to people the community found out and my brother got involved and my father and senator and senator pryor and everyone started actually looking into the case and saying well what could have possibly happened here this just doesn't seem right my story in case started gaining momentum and we got i think up to fifteen politicians wrote letters supporting my clemency when i read it i was i was sympathetic. because i thought. that her husband was the primary driver of the offense she was clearly had a subordinate role needs. and she was caught up in the way of these conspiracy laws that are extremely broad ranging and you don't have to do very much

to be to get yourself stuck in a case like i went to my case managers office and walked in the door and she said she was in a frenzy and she said you know where are you going to release to and i was like what do you mean and she said were you going to live when you get out of prison and i said wow i guess what my parents for a while and she said because i've got to set you up on probation and i said why. i just said you're going home. and. i couldn't process it i was just right. and. my reaction was there i think i was sitting down so i stood up and i said they're going to start and i sat down and i said what do you mean and she said you've gotten executive clemency president clinton has ordered you out and you have to be out today by five o'clock the president had granted her petition and she was told that afternoon and evening they let her out that day it was really great because we

always got bad news in there nobody ever got. it was really nice to have all the women walk me across the compound and there was that moment in the compound of victory but it was really hard to because you have to leave you have to leave so many people behind. we can confidently say today that we are finally beginning to win the war against now is the time to show drug users that we mean to reach our goal of a drug free generation in the united states you will be put away and put away for good three strikes and you are. the primary mission of the drug war as stated by the nixon administration is to create a drug free society. that's what it's all about why we spend the billions of dollars and incarcerate millions of people is to create

a drug free society. we've been asked this now for good marks for forty years trillions of dollars into it no wind in sight really within a reasonable person says how much closer are we to creating a drug free society. you begin to realize that perhaps we've been given a mission here that is impossible to achieve we saw violent crimes go through the roof as these. criminal gangster organizations fought one another so we're seeing that type of phenomenon today in our major metropolitan areas like los angeles the crips against the bloods and of course there are endless filings that we're seeing in mexico and in places like south america as these very rich powerful cartels fight one another it lines up perfectly with alcohol prohibition when you look at oklahoma prudish and the richest man in the country was ok he controlled if you tried to get in his market he would kill you there were also kinds of sub factions

they trying to to manufacture it in their bathtubs and still it was once in a teary you didn't know what it was cut with sometimes that indifference people would drink this new group of people who drink it to get cirrhosis kids would die in the crossfire it sounds all too familiar because this exactly was happening on the streets today in the united states when it comes to violence and the drug one of the problems that we have a drug prohibition is so deep of a business you make so much money in such little time and the difference between arresting someone for dealing drugs and arresting someone for committing rapes. when you arrest a rainbow is someone committing burglaries you know what the rapes stop. the burglaries stop when you arrest someone for dealing drugs dealing drugs doesn't stop on that corner you just create a job opportunity for someone else to come in and unfortunately when a job is filled viciously so fighting sioux name and even. the

emphasis over criminal justice system should be on violent offenses this is where most people are concerned about. they won murderers and branded they want murders and rapes solved and they want these people taken out of the community and locked away in prison so that our communities can be safe i don't know what to come out just as one of them be like without the war on drugs. my only experience of it has been during the war on drugs. when i started family in one thousand nine hundred ninety one war on drugs really heated up in the eighty's kept rolling through the ninety's you know sort of started tapering off and then to thousands but it's still alive and well it's like pounding funder of anti drug is styria in one thousand nine hundred six we must do something anything and that meant grasping

at straws and not looking ahead at what the costs are going to be and what might be effective while i was on the hill i increasingly became convinced that the war on drugs was a mistake it was. counterproductive and i wanted to put my energy into ending it and so in january one thousand nine hundred eighty nine i started the criminal justice policy foundation. and that is been the opportunity for me for the last twenty five years to. mobilize different kinds of strategies to end drug prohibition a lot of it has been through other organizations i helped start families against mandatory minimums and my office i'm still very active with students for sensible drug policy. and with law enforcement against prohibition. and so a lot of my work is advocacy. strategizing you know what are the

ways to change drug policy to reform from the justice system. there are. countless numbers of people who are in prison for inconceivably long sentences for being minor minor offenders in the drug trade these are just a handful of you know files from families against mandatory minimums. where these people you know james dealt life sentence. clark thirty five years timothy tyler life sentence. sharan the jones life sentence. this is not an aberration this is the life blood this is the typical case this is the typical. clarence aaron whose numerous cases these are all long cases these are. colombian drug lords here you see mexico. the mexican

drug lords here. changed there are. racial of the level of the physiology that is at the level of the brain the brain as a form of plasticity can rewire itself and not just the rest of.

the body. because you're in the form of the view. almost you must be the. most from people for people for the sperm or two to move closer to. your people feed the economy because they buy scratch tickets scratch off lottery tickets they you know when i was living in the ghetto in new york you know the red apple grocery store uptown had the highest prices in town right and

a liquor stores are open any buy you know more expensive in the ghetto and that's how you build an economy it's always felt at the back of the poor america was built on the slave market america was built on prison labor to give them it looked at the good times of america the ne'er do wells it's all very swishy and swell that's over we got to go back to basics. i had a great education a good job and a family that loved me. i never had to worry about how i would eat some where i would sleep. but i'm facing christmas alone out on the streets of london. while you look to. the oriel a grown up. you know to simulate it to still give up food for the homeless. but you don't really feel like a human being you know. and then. go i just came

over from you saw me and gave me misspoke a job.

i am. going to it. was. i was so glad to to start to work my way out of prison. so go in the clinton hell's was a halfway house you were half way all but you were still open. so i got the clint house already already has some experience or moved out of the background. i call my old boss so he was in a halfway house at the time and i think someone i don't know what company i'm doing

roofing and his mother came to me and next we would out by him appear. that he needed to do his group and he just blossom he just blossomed from there i was so happy to be at work and be then to have the ability to work again that i never missed a day i was always there i was always there hour early before anybody else can do. so unless i was hungry i was all agreed to work i was already too. to be free. to have the ability to change my life around so all those stains. made me a good employee in the nets when he dismayed is mine and think he was going to go in for you know go into business for yourself in the ass out all starting i just really felt that i had what it took to be entrepreneur and to be successful. so i quit my job and i was fully fledged into business and i had to leave my first year business i made about thirty some thousand dollars or more for

a shit. i remember a vest i'm back into the business i'm buying tools a mile ladders some growing the business a day my second year party did about the some. third year i did about one hundred thousand some stoli was surely progress and so now i'm up to half a million dollars missing a normal to say i want to thousand miles. in the early two thousand and two united narrowed two thousand my family went over the million dollar more. so wow wow no i never thought that i would call a million dollar business. a person has to have a dream. you know they have to want to do better for themselves you can bring a person out of prison. and they can have nothing and they can make something of themselves if that's what they want. when you lived

a certain way for so long and came as far as he. became a way. dad needs to be put out here. because a lot of people don't know how to break to change from mission creep thing that's saying get ahold to you a single hold you want to you gary to be on that ball for. for me is to be that beacon of hope oh follow. matter where you come from the what you've done you can because the same they sold drugs or. directly across the street for my office is used to set a bar called the night light. sold drugs out of that war for a number of years inside and out so they have mobility almost it became before and then to show people that yes i was that once drug dealer that read up and down the street sold drugs and did all that stuff there i'm now a changed person and i'm now somebody that they could expire to also.

executive clemency was a better sweet victory to be honest right there because it didn't take me very long . after i got out and the excitement exhilaration wore off that i realized that that. i may be free. so many of my friends and other people aren't and. as long as they're not then i'm not really so i started the can do foundation which is clemency for all nonviolent drug offenders to try to continue to help some of the women i left behind i did time with danielle barbara mary richardson and they've all done well over twenty years these are all guys who are serving life these are for pot he's for l.s.d. . i have just got back from washington d.c. i was fair for a on a fundraiser about the whole clemency project that's happening and in fact i took.

all these guys to the front in front of the white house and anyway there's several that i stood out in front of the white house advocating for their clemency when i started practicing law almost forty years ago there about a half a million people in prison. and today there are two point three million people in prison billions of dollars have been poured into the prison expansion not only of the federal prison capacity but billions have been sent to sate local governments to expand their present capacity and during the one nine hundred ninety s. we were building on average a prison a week and as soon as these prisons were built it's important to emphasize that they were immediately filled up with first ners and even today many of our prison facilities are operating beyond their design capacity if you compare in the u.s. with other industrialized nations canada or western europe we lock up our citizens

at five to ten times the rate of those other nations it's not that we have five or ten times the rate of crime of those other nations but we have consciously chosen to have a much more unity new production. then other comparable nations have announced it was only see a massacre as. teams we go i. got a job. and. a lot of. parents. as are their child and the child has from their parent children's lives and going to. marry and conditional and. loving and. just because. mars. bred jellicoe one to six thirty seven zero

six my first encounter of the of the prison systems are pretty young. lifestyle drugs you know starling the thing with me was i got out february i think it was two thousand and twelve within three months i got out they mccourt fives fame arrests to sion paid. child support paid everything i. zero. i started my own business i got a vehicle had tags had a license and everything in october that year i decided smokes weed and i thought the worst case scenario if i go to probation offices i have to go to a program where i'd be urine test regularly or go to a meet and well the reality in fact is dirty urine is a violation and probation officer i have was new and she was a stickler for the law and she violated me their own spot i wept like a little child i couldn't believe i had all made all this work on my i have all this to show you look at all this i have i've done it she's that you've done

a lot but you still using drugs and it's against the law. to get sentenced to four years for dirty you're in the houses. it's a lot watching your children grow up in issue in wave and say bye daddy as you're walking out of the visit it's just it doesn't get easier you don't stand and as you get older you think you become more custom of this but never under any circumstances gets easier. for. c.n.n. . i want to say thank you for spending as much time as you do at the halles watching everybody all moms at work i know you miss out on playtime i know you miss out on a lot of banks so i just want to start off by saying i think. i'm proud of you wrestling. i'm glad you're sticking with it i know you're going so just like i said

try to stick with it and you know why you're the manor house still the best you can take out the trash drive things you manners i love you so we're very proud of you of those wonderful. little varies from seven to thirteen really growing up. and i'm sorry i'm not there to go. had you as much of a life lived. to turn out pretty good and i'm very very proud. i really am. now oh i don't surrender my baby. i love you no vision very recently you just got. so very boring i know you worked hard to tell me how you were doing when. you're strong so friends. and i. want to know i love you here i miss you very much

oh here's a man i miss you and there is a culture that i went through it is more moments or any time you hate me you miss me there's a there's a new evening same things mama shoes. i love you and i miss you all and i hope to see you soon and that he loves you. and it's. the fourth of july. because of the fact that so many of us have lived for thirty years in this box of mandatory sounds federal sentencing guidelines and you know the drug war we have to start breaking out of that box and thinking about a world away that out the outside of those confines if you're interested in reducing the injustice and to see mass incarceration you have to go to the root of the problem which is too many laws on the books and what is the primary problem

there as far as prioritizing which was ought to go first top of my list is the drug laws because i think we're in another situation where it's very similar to the days of alcohol prohibition where the government has just declared millions and millions of people to be criminals and that's what they've done with the stroke laws there danger of looking at one out. just days after another can. do to the broader perspective that there are so many excuses and these are actually the typical this is the system it is flawed the unjust and that it is so wasteful it's so counterproductive it's so inefficient wanted us to be why does it continue. why are we going to be able to spot. the more efficient of the policy that's been going

on since man even six months want to know so many lol that is meant to be his major. that's a very deeply disturbing indictment of the waste so much treasure. and conflict so much more. and cause so much injustice in a society where our credos are about liberty and justice for all.

so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation let it be an arms race is all off and spearing dramatic development only personally i'm going to exist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time time to sit down and talk. with no let me just manufacture consent instant to the public will. when the ruling classes project themselves. with the claimant

merry go round lifts and be the one person told. to ignore middle of the room sick. in the real news room. lawyer think it certainly makes sense for for moscow to think strong in its contacts with the united states i just fear that the dominant view in this city is that it is merely impossible until the united states kind of settle this domestic divide the environment and in these seas you know i hate to see these laws work toxic but that's exactly what it is and then i think it's in a way you know you're damned if you do and you're down to film.

the. russian military conducts a public test run of a new part of sonic strategic missile. in the south british newspaper the. fighting. forces in eastern ukraine he says the. government forces are.