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. as to take responsibility for. but even with him for we this is the. gravitas of a random very minute. i don't want to go no good i'm going to do the best they can to stay out of this place. finish the job for my. misguided goal i. can grab this. been the way. this was you guys in good numbers can we be with. the. next chapter. from nineteen twenty to one thousand nine hundred

seventy this whole half century of american history the rate of incarceration was roughly level at about one hundred ten per one hundred thousand. and this is a broad span of our history this is because the worrying 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 for 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 one nine hundred seventy this all changes so that by now the rate of incarceration issue why does over seven hundred one hundred three when. african-americans there's over four thousand

five hundred dollars and so you have to wonder how does one cheat why did this half century of stability get to destroy a magic increase of incarceration 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 the war on drugs they were able to then take a lot of money from the federal budget and then send it out to the states alex i realize the need for money to deal with this problem i am glad that in this administration we have increased the amount of money for handling the problem of dangerous drugs seven 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 sheriff everybody wanted to get in to drug cases and get aggressive about 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 middle homes we used to always run 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 the 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 ags 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 different in their lives but there was not the not to 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 well when i first saw him. and it was in the hallway and i used to be a hopeful monitor and i was 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 wait . 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 at 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 it's pretty much you know once we started going to get i was pretty was there in our house and fourteen years old i was pretty much stay in there because my mom was on drugs she no longer she knew i was there she really didn't have a problem with it but a kindness started you know living this 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 stylus britain along to the train detectives back then they had to take to that one 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 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 visually 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 be. because i was an eighteen i was only supposed to do when we were that still in high school and we missed the prom. badge which 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 back give me and if i don't straighten up my life that first spears will be nothing compared to why other experiences in jail because then i would be over eighteen and i would be going to a dull 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 in drugs as we understand it with food nor 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 yes 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. obviously there far more users than are operations major operations and. we started treating sick people people who were addicted to

drugs like a member 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. here one of the things that she said that stuck with me. you know god is going to find dark is our only there where you realize who you truly your and i heard her but i really didn't hear her. and i left her house that they've given it went right back out into the street. i remember going to new york. coming back from new york coming down route one coming through your county roads in a car and we had a gun in a car. and i remember my. i stopped at a light and get now switching drivers i got around to the passenger side and she took the privacy 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

trial i told my laura that you know we just had to try to get all charges pushed together get me one senses because too much time and over the street not my life i remember pacifically the judge sits in just telling me. now i'm a two time loser. and he said tracy you was convicted in one nine hundred eighty nine you can begin again in one nine hundred eighty eight he said come back before me for the third time in the third time is going to be a chore for you. after the previous stage of my career was over everyone wondered what i was going to do next the ball different clubs on one hand it is logical to sit in the home field where everything is familiar on the other i wanted a new challenge and a fresh perspective and i'm used to surprising people and i saw one on t.v.

if. 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 that slide here. is this is a sticker from the water bottle phone in the stomach of a fish the brand is spawns of the coca-cola company which sells millions of bottles of soda every day the idea was that let's tell consumers they're in the bad was there the litter box or throwing it away industry should be blamed for all this waste the company has long promised to reuse the plastic. ons it's not. it's difficult absolutely. demand that seems cool sets their classes chris takes a close ally and i think staying thing usually means that special projects funding he tells it to. be on i'm your best bet is the end of

a footy team not fun now the mountains of waste only grow. you know world of big partisan. 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. and shouting past each other it's time for critical thinking it's time to fight for the middle for the troops the time is now we're watching closely watching the hawks. they can come and blow our brains out at any given time and we can't really do anything actually america is the only country in the world where you can kill

people. war illegally get away with. all the fire crawls still beriah all the trouble here's three failed the point it's hollow flying to k.k.k. exists because america wants it to exist they are the biggest terrorist group to ever operate in this country and they're dead to media war saul's and the people who destroyed the world trade centers are those girls like. the direction to a judge to sentence can be done in two ways you can see. 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 so piracy on the high seas in like seven hundred ninety s. 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 us 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 which was five years me to the minimum five grams of crack cocaine grams like sweet. minimum is fifty grand of crack cocaine that's like the weight of a kid. 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. chairmans 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 in ninety six the federal prison population was thirty six thousand. now it's

well over two hundred girls this is a growth that no one could have imagined mass incarceration in the us is really unique in human history there is no democratic nation that's ever tried to have such a mass social experiment as we've done in incarceration and we've got more prisoners than any other country in the ruling over by rate and numbers i mean i find it a bit disturbing that we have more prisoners from china and they have a billion more people than we do i don't think it gives people an eye 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 is a story here a line and the 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 i went to court and 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 for a. eighteen months on the moon. 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 fam up three members of the family viewed it. and we ask what

were the ages of the children who saw it should just want to put sex. she says an extremely meaningful for the daughter of the mother who was incarcerated she loved that. we all did. and this one said 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 i mean their mom or dad so ok what is the sole shoulders they know it's been three years since the age of you seen. mr jones looms going to agree leave the issue here is that you don't agree. doesn't your fault just bear in the jones phone anyone else in the family of done which already filled you to the fold has been the. role of the law just on his way through for years going to the law. go.

swimmin say the. very first. they said is me to one year administrative segregation and administrative segregation is twenty three hour long the locked up twenty three hours each day you come out for half hour hour and a half hour. i know a bit of all a person. at that time i was treated like one and were thrown persons in the world i remember going into this i believe maybe if i buy. it was the door 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 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 wouldn't wish on anybody. but you locked up for twenty three hours i think you can do is. my words my grandmother just kept playing over and over again in my mind and those words was the guy was going to fire me in my darkest hour you know you know what i realize who are ritually was what i kept hearing because and i am at. my lowest point. and. i think right there i realized i had reached my lowest point in life and that the only on the way for me to go from here. i know that crime and other criminal country had already fed up with me it was right politician focus aleutian 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 in a very general way that they want to block these rascals 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 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 a process. 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 nineteen sixteen and she was very very shy but by the task that in high school people can sat it in or she 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. 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 and everybody knows everybody but she got 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 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 got 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 wants us but 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 and so fascinated with. that 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 he drank 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. asks 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 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 he. gave me very fen 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 him in germany. 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 mrs and somebody that i really want to confide in so 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 i'm not going to do this and this prosecutor said you need. to cooperate or will ruin your life.

so what we've got to do is identify the threats that we have it's crazy. let it be an arms race off and spearing dramatic development only closely i'm going to resist i don't see how that strategy will be successful very critical time to sit down and talk. oh. he says move for you.

we have no political agenda here we just if it if it costs more to get out then what you get when you get it out that's a called a loss it's a minus sign that's it you can't figure that out you think there's a political agenda. you're blinded by your. dream agreed to pretty much almost remember that it was most of the family were unemployed working. there wasn't it was bed much worse subject to listen today but there was an expectation of the things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hope. there isn't a day to day's america where shade my the turn principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy attack so low down engineer elections manufacture consent and other principles according to no i'm

trying to. one set of rules for the rich. that's what happens when you put her into the. truth will switch. to increasing power for chills just you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america. but fuck. it. all of you know what will soon be. a little better that's a little of the little. i use this is

a phone call though. i. bet is when it's all positionally to one why dog calls for another day of on to government protests heavy clashes were reported on the outskirts of the country's capital caracas choose day while president nicolas maduro says the government has quashed the coup attempt. some are calling on the u.k. government looks to make the house. business ties with russia and china saying it's just about making. russian nationals jailed in the u.s. for working as an unregistered foreign agent has been fielding reporters' questions for the first time since their arrest. she was briefly quizzed by the investigation and how she coped with confined.