the rest should be just you if you've written a koran we've had people pray we've had people saying one guy showed his little boy how to shoot baskets be creative. these are gifts to your children. the families are punished right along with. they have found people don't think so but the collateral consequences of somebodies incarceration effects not just that whole family but it affects the whole community and affects you as an individual or the you know whether or not and whether you know that person or not that's incarcerated . pay informed. you should care. i have a background in film and video as a producer and i thought there's got to be something i can do so why not combine my career and my experience with the present system and come up with something for these kids and then a parent in that camera they're looking at their child and if they can look at them

and say. you know this isn't your fault you did nothing wrong it means a lot and for many of these men and women it's the first time they've really taken responsibility which is huge and that's a first step in recovery of any kind anytime is to take responsibility for. but even with them for we this little. readiness of everybody that. i was going to go to. i'm going to do the best they can to stay out of this booth. job for. good this. is what you guys know the job is so you know we do it's job.

yes chad. from one thousand twenty to one thousand nine hundred seventy this whole half century of american history the rate of incarceration was roughly level or about one hundred ten per one hundred thousand. and this is a broad span of our history this is because the rural twenty's and prohibition the depression and all the social change the world war two the post-war economic boom the the the fifty's the explosion of suburbia the sixty's and all the social turbulence through this whole period the rate of incarceration is roughly level in the united states at about one hundred ten from hundred times and this reflects you know the policies of police departments and prosecutors and judges operating all over the country in local and state level and then in the one nine hundred seventy

this all changes so that by now the rate of incarceration issue why does over seven hundred one hundred three courser issue for african-americans is over four thousand four hundred dollars and so you have to wonder how does one cheat why did this half century of stability get ended with this dramatic increase in harsh reaction in. america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse once the federal government decided that we're going to have war on drugs they were able to then take a lot of money from the federal budget and send it out states help i realize the need for money to deal with this problem and i am glad that in the ministration we have increased the amount of money for annulling the problem of dangerous drugs seven it will be so. hundred million dollars this year more money will be needed to

do it and virtually everybody's on the drug war was the number one issue and so you had politicians in both parties and you know district attorneys and elected everybody wanted to get in to drug cases and get aggressive about it new laws to punish the new agents to arrest the new prosecutors to convict them and new prisons to hold them. we move the train when i was very young we moved here we moved you know to malone's we used to always roll up and down the hallways of course it was the projects so sometime we will sneak up on the roof which was the top floor twelfth floor and you know look out and of course i was very scared as a young child but you know when you live in a projects it's always so much stuff that you can get into my brother was tragically killed when he was ran over by a truck and i remember pacifically going to the corner with

a habanera and seeing all the blood because they left all the blood still in the street the traumatic experience of losing my only brother and that truck eggs and i know it had done something to me you know drugs from our state that time was hard all the way or because my son was doing drugs my nephews was too much drugs my niece was doing drugs my sisters with doing drugs it was like an epidemic. of drug abuse. and i cannot explain. i cannot explain my feelings because i'd at that time i didn't know how i felt you know i was sad because i felt like they were a friend in their lives but there was nothing i could do about it to change their lifestyle. that was it. after my brother passed away i kind of withdrew from

a lot of things i didn't talk as much i was very quiet all probably as early as my teenage years oh twelve thirteen years old you know i started sneaking a drink in a little bit here and there started smoking marijuana at a very young age i started all selling drugs in you know he came right along with. the family you tend to trust family when i first saw here and there with a. in the hallway and i used to be a hopeful monitor and out with station right in front of his locker so when i knew that he was coming to his locker i would put my he is that unlike black youth weight. so he would have to say excuse me something in that we started talking we got to know each other you know at the walk in our home many times in and out over our house. you know my home.

wasn't really a home compared to our house margaret grew up with her parents before the parents all the nice decent house great mother great father home something that i didn't have and i started you know just being around her a lot and being around family a lot and next thing you know you know i was pretty much you know once we started going to get i was pretty was they were in our house and they were two years old it was pretty much stay in there because my mom was on drugs she longs she knew i was there she really didn't have a problem with it but a kindness started you know livingness day with morgan and a very young age. by the time i was sixteen seventeen i was fully engulfed in the drug game and it is only was so big it was only seven point five square miles so a lot of rumors a start as britain along to the train detectives back then they had to take to that what the high school and they kind of got to know me very well and i guess they relayed that information to the trade narcotics and they started watching me and

follow me around or stuff like that and i remember the first time that they that they raided my house i wasn't there but my mother was there and i was i think i just turned seventeen and um they locked her up and i got a phone call saying that you know your mother was locked up and they want you to turn yourself in. so i ventured i turned myself in a seventeen i let my mother go and i first time you ever going to joe i want to be you found us because i was. eighteen i was always those. still in high school and we missed the part. when i got out i remember the detective telling me that you know as soon as i turn eighteen they're going to come back. and if i don't straighten out my life that first spears will be none compared to other experiences in jail because then i would be over eighteen and i would be going into a facility. most historians look at the origin of the war on drugs as

something of president nixon with his speeches and his creation of of the d.n.a. and other agencies in the one nine hundred seventy s. but the war on drugs as we understand it with. enormous enormous case loads and and in and filled up prison population is really a feature of the one nine hundred eighty s. under president reagan drugs are menacing our society they're threatening our values and undercutting our institutions they're killing our children under reagan there was a tremendous increase in federal spending for anti drug activity cabinet level efforts and congress creating brain powerful new laws on day two of a new campaign against drugs the president backed up a tough talk with action for getting tough on drugs and we mean business it's almost like overnight we had discrete idea what we go after the users. and that's what we did we started going after the users in

a prison populations who are those obviously are far more users than are operations major operations in. we started treating sick people people who were addicted to drugs might remember talking to my grandmother and having a conversation with her about my wife and how far i had fallen she said to me you know tracy it will always pray for you and i'm going to pray that you change your life around. so one of the things that she said that stuck with me was dead you know god is going to find your darkest hour and only there when you realize who you truly your and i heard her but i really didn't hear her. and i left her house that they skip and then i went right back out into the streets. i remember going to new york on the cob when coming back from new york coming down route one coming through your county we had drugs in the car and we had a gun in the car. and i remember being stopped at

a light and get now switching drivers i got round to the passenger side and she took the pharmacy and not knowing that it was a cop car right behind us so once again i didn't want to go to court i was going to try i told my laura that you know we just had to try to get all the charges pushed together give me one sense is that because too much time and over the street not my life i remember pacifically the judge sits in just telling me. element to tom losing. and he said tracy hughes convicted in one thousand nine hundred begin again in one thousand nine hundred eighty he said come back before me for the third time in the third time is going to be a chore for you. the

little detail the slums go in and you may never get out of the most. well. my teenage gang rules here. one of the few moves then let's remind him of those blue clothes you were through with a simple but. name you will be told will come out. minus a murder zero. and now it's looking for the yellow wood on the news that as soon as you stand by and melanie when nobody knew who. you are you about the monkey then the little musical i see.

after the previous stage of my career was over everyone wondered what i was going to do next the hope the ball different clubs on one hand it is logical to sit in the home fields where everything is familiar on the other i wanted a new challenge and a fresh perspective i'm used to surprising people by salt or not if you think. i'm going to talk about football not for you or else you can think i was going to go. by the way ways of the slide here. when lawmakers manufacture consent to instant of public wealth. when the ruling classes protect themselves. with the financial merry go round lifts and be the one

percent of. the time we can all middle of the room. and. the direction to would judge to sentence can be done in two ways

a judge. hears a crime and for this crime you can impose a sentence anywhere in this range from probation to some term of years imprisonment the other way is to say judge you must impose some minimum number of years or months of imprisonment and go up from there so a mandatory minimum this is a sentence where no matter how minor the role of the offender no matter how insignificant a violation of this crime it is a minimum term must be imposed mandatory minimum sentences are not new they've been on the books in this country for two hundred years and there are about one hundred ninety of them or something and if you look at them they read like the crimes issue or so you can see what the public was concerned about and then congress took that concern and translated it into law into let sensing legislation. piracy on the high

seas in like seven hundred ninety s. life without parole robbing banks and crossing state lines in one nine hundred thirty four was you know ten years. the prison skyjacking in the seventy's for his ten or twenty years in prison and so you can see the you know what was the point the headlines were the headlines were translated into a mandatory sentence and so in the eighty's when drugs became a big deal and lots of concern about drugs it was in the top three of public concern reacted by creating new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes what congress sent to president bush was five years needed three minimum five grams of crack cocaine grams likes we go. again years minimum is fifty grand of crack cocaine that's like the weight of a kid or these are tiny quantities it's all based on one factor your sense you know how what was a drug and how much of it did you have and that determines your sentence so

culpability no longer really plays a major role in a person's a person sentence when the crime carries a mandatory minimum when president reagan signed the mandatory minimums and ninety six the federal prison population was thirty six thousand. now it's well over two hundred thousand this is a growth that no one could have imagined mass incarceration in the u.s. is really unique in human history there's no democratic nation that's ever tried to have such a mess of social experiment as we've done that incarceration and we've got more prisoners than any other country in the room whenever i rape and numbers i mean i find it a bit disturbing that we are prisoners from china and they have a billion more people than we do i don't think it gives people an i was when they hear that we have twenty five percent of the world's prison population and only five percent of the world's population in other words we are way over incarcerating compared to any other country in the world.

had allowed. somebody who is a. mine and police found it and they came after me i ended up literally holding the bag. i knew nothing about the criminal justice system you know here i was this middle class. career never even a parking ticket and it was quite a surprise when we went to court. i had that kind of time marijuana. and i was charged with possession of marijuana with the intent to distribute money going to conspiracy to murder i received a total of fifty five year prison sentence the judge suspended all but six i was fortunate enough. to make the first parole and i actually served in prison fourteen months and came home. is the cards that we've put in

with the messages and asked the families to respond so we've gotten some really good responses and this one was three fem up three members of the family viewed it . and we ask what were the ages of the children who saw it she quit just want to put six. she says extremely meaningful for the daughter of the mother who was incarcerated she loved it. we all did. and this one said what did the message mean to your family to know their family was ok and it's a huge part of these children who want to know that their families live in their mom or dad so ok. there's. always been three years to see. miss jones looms going to grieve for sure is that you don't read. those unsure fall just to the phone and you want to listen to fail. but you already feel you're going

to fold it's been me. a lot of the sun these last three or four years going to the last. known. want to say the. very first. they said just me to one year administrative segregation and administrative segregation is twenty three hour long going to the you locked up for twenty three hours each day you come out for half hour shower and a half hour break i never bit of allah person. at that time i was treated like one of the worst phone persons in the world i remember going into the cell i believe maybe if i buy a cell. i was dead or close i knew i was going to be there for the next year it's

just an experience that it is going to make your break you you're going to come out a better person are you going to come out of worship person than you were before you went in and being in a hole is mirrors that i know i wouldn't wish on anybody. but you locked up for twenty three hours i think you can do is one of the words of my grandmother just kept playing over and over again in my mind and those words was the guy i was going to farm in my darkest hour you know you know what i realize who are actually was and when i kept hearing that because sand i am at my door now i am at my lowest point. and. i think right there and i realized i had reached my lowest point to life and that the only on the way for me to go from here is. another crime another criminal in a country that already fed up with about you know his rights politicians focus on

often a simple crackdown the reason the criminal justice system isn't working is that we're not sending enough people in jail and keeping there long enough that people are saying. general way that they will to lock these rushed over and keep them there for a long gone through the one nine hundred eighty s. there was a major shift in the congress and in state legislatures of doubt how long sentences should be the public was a long term by increasing rates of crime from the one nine hundred seventy s. and early eighty's and they wanted longer sentences they wanted cracking down and that's what happened across the board for all kinds of crimes not only the mandatory minimum drug sentences the effect of all those sensing laws was not just to increase the sentences that people were exposed to so the people were serving longer time in prison than they did before it was also to take the discretion away from the sentencing discretion away from judges and juries and shifted over to

prosecutors it didn't limit it discretion it just gave prosecutors. the power to determine what your sentence was going to be by making charging decisions and even by bargaining over what the facts of your case were. so it didn't mean that discretion it was eliminated from the system it just put the prosecutors in charge . amy was born in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight and she was very very shy but by the task that in high school people can cite it in or she played basketball she made good grades high school that we went to a seven hundred twelve grade i was kind of the little tagalong sister. me and my brother were friends and i mean my sister were friends just kind of watch sure she was. always really friendly always showing nice this is a small town. everybody knows everybody should get in trouble we'd know about it. i had what i consider an ideal

a child. at some point when i'm in college i mean guy that works for southwest times record. newspaper there in fort smith arkansas and he asked me if i would be a subject for him to go out and take some modeling photos we went to like several locations and he instilled in me that i really ought to pursue a modeling career consider it my mother says to just you know i mean ralston moved to dallas my gosh no you know. what she's thinking what's she going to do and so i think she's going to model so i created a little portfolio before i went to dallas that i could show to the modeling agencies fandy it was well read well traveled well educated graduated stanford law school i had gone to princeton theology school so it was it was very appealing to be around somebody who i was frankly very impressed with and so fascinated with and eight months later we were getting married at the dallas arboretum and all of our

family and friends were there and it was at that point seemed like a dream come true. there were red flags before we got married there were there were frankly there were red flags all along the way sandy has what i consider to be a dual personality and that this other character would emerge whenever i don't literally had to do something radical. the only remedy to remove him from my life was for me to leave dallas i had to leave dallas and i'd leave all my friends behind and completely. move to a different city. sandy. but he wouldn't leave her i just kept saying you know let's be friends let's be friends he wanted it to be more so he told me that he was going to europe and then i never heard anything for

a while though word got back to me that he'd been arrested. i hadn't been in dallas in over a year of the. only thing i knew to do was to book a flight to dallas to see if i could go through the house listen to the answering machine and try to piece this thing together and eventually think you're going to find out more information and while i was in the dallas house the phone rang and it was sandy's german legal counsel who had been assigned to the case in germany and at that time. gave me very thin details but said that sandy had been arrested for manufacturing ecstasy and that he wanted to redeem an attorney for him there in dallas it was a pretty interesting revelation. i did there was money in the safe that was in the house in dallas and i took that money and retained an attorney to go over and meet with any attorney. seven months after sandy has been arrested and i pull into

the garage of my car as rushed by law enforcement people who are screaming and have a gun out and they're pointing at my face i'm being told you know you're in hot water we know that your husband was arrested we know you know we know you visited him in germany and they said we know you have information and all you have to do is just tell us what you know and i wasn't going to say anything because i'm literally watching these people destroying mine this isn't somebody that i really want to confide in so that it wasn't very long after that that my lawyer explained to me exactly what it is that my prosecutor wanted they wanted her to wear a wire. and try to employ a other people people she didn't even know and. she would she refused to do it she said i don't know they speak on that i'm not going to do this and this

prosecutor said you need. paraphrasing you now to cooperate or will ruin your life . boss on the war consider the most needy against india in the mostly among to its nationals against any one of its neighbors as boots did more to the right this is where pakistan is very different than. india right now if they go on this trajectory unfortunately even not being able to be responsibly is in the speech and the speech in the cell phone for far too long because of this ongoing conflict between these two giants in the region.

they all. lead. yes to all this is all the. closely. monsanto's round up our cigarette. money is the same thing as financially carcinogenic and you need to eradicate what's last by simply getting lighter fluid

throwing it in a big pile and setting up by. the cia it will no longer be obliged to reveal how many civilians it's. drone strikes kill thanks to an order by president trump. the pentagon announces plans to change its arctic strategy to counter a perceived russian and chinese threat. i mean. i mean and fans of pop legend michael jackson the vent their fury over a new documentary alleging the star committed to child abuse. should not be talking about michael jackson's music michael jackson's music was created through decades of also a lot of suffering every.