the most important thing. as to talk from your heart if you have more than one child give a like an overall message but then do an individual one to each child throw them a kiss or talk to them about what you do daily the rest should be just you if you've written a poor we've had people pray we've had people saying one guy showed his little boy how to shoot a basket be creative. these are gifts to your children. the families of punished right along with. the have found people don't think so but the collateral consequences of somebodies incarceration affects 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. get to inform. 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 a parent in that camera. and 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. this little. episode with everybody that. i was going to go to the movie i'm going to do the best they can to stay out of this belief. for.

goodness. it's been the way. this was you guys know the numbers so can we be you would show. us the. next chapter. 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 four hundred thousand. and this is a broad span of our history this is the ruling twenty's and prohibition the depression and all the social change the world war two the post-war economic boom boom through this whole period the rate of incarceration is roughly level in the united states at about one hundred ten four hundred dollars and this reflects you

know the policies of police departments and prosecutors and judges operating all over the country in the 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 just over seven hundred and. wonder how does one cheat why did this half century of stability get ended with this dramatic increase in incarceration in spades from america's public enemy number one in the united states is drug abuse once the federal government decided that we're going to have the war on drugs they were able to then take a lot of money from the federal budget and send it out to states of health i realized the need for money to deal with this problem and i am glad that in this

administration we have increased the amount of money for handling the problem. it will be six hundred million dollars this year more money will be needed in the future and virtually everybody thought 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 new laws to punish them 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 below we used to always roll up and down the hallways of course it was the projects so sometimes we will sneak up on the roof which was the top floor twelfth floor and in the projects it 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 you know of drugs from our skate that time was hard all the way or because my son was doing drugs my nephew's was too much drugs my niece was doing drugs my sisters with doing drugs he 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 different in their lives but there was not than i could do about it to change their lifestyle. how 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. 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 you know. family you tend to trust family when i first saw him and that was in the hallway and i used to be a hopeful monitor and i was stationed right in front of his locker so when i knew that he. with come into his locker i would put my hands up in like black with weight. so he would have to say excuse me or 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 at our house. you know my home.

wasn't really a home compared to her house margaret grew up with her parents before the parents all the nice decent house great mother great father. 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 never in our house and in fourteen years old i was pretty much stay in there because my mom was on drugs she long she knew i was there she really didn't have a problem with it but a kindness started you know live in this day with morgan at 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 stylus britain along to the train detectives back then they had to take to that one high school and they kind of got to know me very well and on i guess they relayed that information to the trade narcotics and they started watching me and

follow me around and stuff like that and i remember the first time that they that they raided my house i wasn't there but my mother was near and i was i think i just turned seventeen. so i ventured i turned myself in a seventeen a let my mother go and i first time we ever going to joe i went to you found because i was an eighteen i was only supposed to do when we waited still in high school and we missed the prom. was when i got out i remember the detective telling me that you know as soon as i turned eighteen and it was going to come. if i don't straighten out my life that first bears will be none compared to other experiences in jail because then i will be overweight and i will 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. the 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 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 population seward because obviously they're far more users than her 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 life and how far i had fallen she said to me you know jason 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 to stuck with me was that you know god is going to find your darkest hour and only there were you a but i left the house that they give a dinner i want right back out into the streets. one coming through union county we had drugs in the car and we had a gun in a 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 driver's seat 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 have to try to get all the charges pushed together give me one senses let me go to my time and hopefully straight not

my life i remember pacifically the judge sits in joe's telling me. element to tom loser. and he said tracy hughes convicted in one nine hundred eighty nine you can 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 charm for you. dan . financial survival. plus it is it is a central plank support diet film is kind of common right now so you stop to. this is a stick. in the stomach of a fish the brand is part of the coca-cola company which sells millions of bottles of soda every day the idea was that let's tell consumers there are the bad ones

there the litter bugs are throwing this away industry should be poisoned for all this waste the company has promised to reuse the plastic. but for now the mountains of moist only grow higher. so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy confrontation let it be an arms race. very dramatic development only. very.

can be done in two ways. here's a crime and for this crime you can impose. anywhere. from probation to some term of years in prison and 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 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 so piracy on the

high seas in like seven hundred ninety s. got a life without parole robbing banks and crossing state lines in one nine hundred thirty four was you know ten years of prison skyjacking in the seventy's for as 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 congress reacted by creating new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes which congress sent to president when he was five years me to the minimum five grams of crack cocaine grams likes we. can years minimum is fifty grand of crack cocaine that's like the weight of a kid or these are tiny kuan 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 dollars. now it's well over two hundred girls this is a growth that no one could have imagined mass incarceration in the u.s. is really unique in him. in history there's no democratic nation that's ever tried to have such a mess social experiment as we've done that incarceration and we've got more prisoners than any other country in the window for. numbers i mean i find it a bit disturbing that we have more prisoners from china and they have a billion more people and we do i don't think it gives people enough 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.

had allowed. somebody is a storage area. 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. 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 put just want to put six she says an extremely meaningful for the daughter of the mother who was incarcerated she loved it. we all did. and this one said our what did the message mean to your family to know their family was ok that's a huge part these children want to know that their families have had their mom or dad served. this is the sole shoulders they need to go no it's been three years and so you have you seen. this show so lives are going to grow to leverage here is that you don't feel. doesn't your fault just very good nothing shows phone anyone else

in the family love does that show me filter you to the polls has been me. up growth a lot of this town these last three or four years going on the last. go. swan say the. very first. they said is me to one year administrative segregation and administrative segregation is twenty three hour long going to be locked up twenty three hours each day you come out for half hour shower and a half hour break i know a bit of olive person. at that time i was treated like one of them were thrown persons in the world i remember going into this 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 is

this an experience that it is going to make your break you know you got to come out a better person are you going to come out of worship person than you were before you went in. the in the whole of this mirrors that i wouldn't wish on anybody. where you locked up for twenty three hours i think you can do it. my words 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 it was what i kept hearing because saying i am at. my lowest. and. i think right there i realized i had reached my lowest point in life. the only on the way for me to go from here. another crime another criminal hundred already fed up with both real is right politician for the solution is simple crackdown the reason the criminal justice system isn't working is that

we're not sending enough people to jail and keeping there long enough that people are saying general way that they will lock these rascals up and keep them there for a long time during the one nine hundred eighty s. there was a major shift in the congress and in state legislatures have thout 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 effective all the 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 it was born in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight and she was very very shy but by the task that haskell people confided in or played basketball. she made good grades high school that we went to was seventh through twelfth grade and i was kind of the little tagalong sister and me and my brother were friends and i mean my sister were friends just kind of watch sure she was. always really friendly only showing nice this is a small town and everybody knows everybody but she got in trouble we'd know about it. i had what i consider an idyllic childhood. and some point when i'm in

college i mean guy that works for southwest times record the 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 my mother says to get you know i mean ralston moved to dallas my gosh no you know mom what's was she thinking was she going to do it 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 brad 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 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 you know 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. leave all my friends behind and completely. move to a different city i am a sadly sandy. that 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 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 so 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 he. gave me various then details but said that he had been arrested for manufacturing ecstasy and that he wanted to retain an attorney for him there in dallas it was a pretty interesting revelation but 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 germany. seven months after sandy has been arrested and i pull into the garage of my car is 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 my mom says it's somebody that i really want to confide in so that was. 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 m.k. other people people she didn't even know and. she would she refused to do it she said i don't know they speak i'm not going to do this and this prosecutor said you need. to cooperate or will ruin your life.

yes this is all that.

there was no trade or labor there's an environment standouts in the original nafta five years ago. relations were more punitive but now the relation is very very close. so i think it's ok to have a new treaty and you negotiation. for fair and i don't think i want to. pick up because a couple of. things just got me. the

case none. came. there from. the get on faith no nothing. i don't know how that came fucking. full of opening night he said. you know world of big partisan movie lot and conspiracy it's time to wake up to dig deeper to hit the stories that mainstream media refuses to tell more than ever we need to be smarter we need to stop slamming the door on the back and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the truth the time is now for watching closely watching the

hawks. in. the. us back forces poem bod islamic states last stronghold in syria people fleeing the area including the wives of i still find some of whom remain loyal to the so-called kind of. venezuela's self-proclaimed leader says he will ask the national assembly to declare a state of emergency this comes up to one white all called for a us intervention. today the solution is intervention but it's always a clone. to green. lines playing with one huh.