tv Documentary RT July 1, 2019 4:30am-5:01am EDT
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the present system and come up with something for these kids. and a parent in that camera they're looking at their child and they can look at them and say and this isn't your fault you did nothing wrong it means and for many of these men and women it's the 1st time they've really taken responsibility which is huge and that's a 1st step in recovery of any kind anytime as to take responsibility for. but even with them for we this is the. gravitas of the end of every minute. i want to go mow good i'm going to do the best they can to stay out of this place. continues job for mel i. miss you guys all i. can grab this criticism i've been away from. this once you got to know the numbers so can we be with.
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a. nice shout. from 192-1970 this whole half century of american history the rate of incarceration was roughly level or about 11400000. and this is a broad span of our history this is because the ruling twenty's and prohibition the depression and all the social change the world war 2 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 $110400.00 and this reflects you know the policies of police departments and prosecutors and. judges operated all over the country and local and
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state level and then in the 1970 changes so that by now the rate of incarceration issue why just over $7103.00 courser issue for african-americans is over $4500.00 and so you have to wonder how does one cheat why did this half century 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 send it out to states. i realize the need for money to deal with this problem. ministration we have increased the
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amount of money for handling the problem of dangerous drugs $7.00 it will be 600000000 dollars this year more money will be needed in the future virtually everybody thought the drug war was the number one issue and so you had politicians of 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 when we moved here we moved. 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 12th floor 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 go. my brother was tragically killed when he was ran over by
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a truck and i remember pacifically going to the corner with a habanera and seeing all the blood because they let all of blows the little stream 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 nephew's was too much drugs my niece was doing drugs my sisters were doing drugs and 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 the change their lifestyle. how was it.
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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 01213 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 1st saw him and it 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 was coming to his locker i would put my hands up in like black youth way. so he would have to say excuse me or something in at that we started talking. we
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got to know each other you know at the home many times in and out over at her house . you know my home. was a really a home compared to her house margaret grew up with her parents over 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 our 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 never in our house and in 14 years old i was pretty much stay in there because my mom was on drugs she. knew i was there she really didn't have a problem with it but my kindness started you know liveness day with morgan at a very young age. by the time i was $1617.00 i was fully engulfed in the drug game and fitness only was so big it was only 7.5 square miles so a lot of rumors a stylist britain along to the train detective back then they had to take that one
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to 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 with stuff like that and i remember the 1st time that they that they raided my house i wasn't there but my mother was near and i was so i think i just turned 17 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 17 a let my mother go and i 1st time ever going to joe i went to you found because i was an 18 i was only still still a juvenile 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 18 and it was going to come back give me and if i don't straighten out my life that 1st spears will be nothing compared to why other experiences into. because then i
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would be overweight 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 1970 s. but the war and 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 1980 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 brea powerful new laws on day 2 of a new campaign against drug 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
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what we did we started going at that he users in a prison population soar because obviously they're far more users enter operations major operations and. we started treating sick people people who were addicted to these drugs one member a member 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 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 was that you know god is going to far in 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 it went right back out into the streets. i remember going to new york to cobb then coming back from new york coming down route one coming through union county we had drugs in the car and we had
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a gun in the car. and i remember being stopped at a light and get now a switch with drivers i got around 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 had to try to get all the charges pushed together get me one set as the because there was a time and hopefully straight up my life i remember pacifically the judge said this and just tell me then element to tom loser. and he said tracy you could break that in 1900 you know you can begin again in 1980 he said come back before me for the 3rd time in the 3rd time is going to be a chore for you. you know world of big partisan movie lot and conspiracy it's time to wake up to
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dig deeper to hit the stories that. the stream 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 troops the time is now we're watching closely watching the hawks. deal price just meant if it's i mean crisis and they share. it's as a scale a financial disaster and guns are just like malaysia. and they bring guns to this. into the shia here when japan for the problem of you say a group of substances which are the other being so for us governments and international organizations do not have enough time to change gradually.
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the. the direction to would judge to sentence can be done in 2 ways to say judge here's 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
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on the books in this country for 200 years and there are about a 190 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 790 s. a life without parole robbing banks and crossing state lines in 1934 was you know 10 years of prison skyjacking in the seventy's for 10 or 20 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 3 of public concern congress reacted by creating new mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes which congress sent to president which was 5 years minimum 5.
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am's of crack cocaine grams like this we. gain years minimum is 50 grand of crack cocaine that's like the weight of a kid. 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 in $96.00 the federal prison population was $36000.00. now it's well over 200000 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 mess of social experiment as we've done that incarceration and we've got more prisoners
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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 1000000000 more people than we do i don't think it gives people and when they hear that we have 25 percent of the world's prison population and only 5 percent of the world's population in other words we are way over incarcerating compared to any other country in the world. i had allowed. somebody is a storage area. 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 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
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charged with possession of a. marijuana with the intent to distribute not a conspiracy to murder i received a total of 55 year prison sentence the judge suspended all but 6 i was fortunate. to make 1st parole and i actually served are in prison 14 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 3 fam up 3 members of the family viewed it. and we ask what were the ages of the children who just want to put sex. she says an 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
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a huge part these children want to know that their families i've met their mom or dad so ok. there's just soul shall want to say to those been 3 years since either of you see. mr jones looms very relieved for sure is that you don't read. those unsure fall just heard enough to join the phone anyone else in the family. but shown a photo of you to fold has been made. of growth a lot of just. through 4 years going to. go. swimmin say the. very 1st. they said is me to one year administrative segregation and administrative
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segregation is 23 hour long the locked up. 23 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 you know i wanted words from persons in the world i remember going into the cell i believe maybe if i buy a cell. it was that door closed i knew i was going to be there for the next year this is an experience that it is going to make your break you you going to come out a better person are you going to come out of worse a person than you were before you went in. the end in a hole is mirrors and i wouldn't wish on anybody. but you locked up for 23 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 fire me in my darkest hour you know what i realize who are actually was and when i kept hearing that because
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saying i am at my door that i am at my lowest point. and. i think right there i realized i had reached my lowest point to life and that the only on the way for me to go from here. another crime another criminal a country that already have fed up with both real is right politicians focus on often a 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 the people are saying very general way that they all of these rascals up and keep them there for a long time during the 1980 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 1970 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
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mandatory me. drug sentences effective all those sensing laws was not just to increase the sentences that people were exposed to so that 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 1968 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 a 7th through 12th grade and i was kind of the little tagalong sister. me and my
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brother were friends and i mean my sister were friends just kind of watch sure she was. always really friendly always really 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 ought to pursue a modeling career consider and my mother says to get you know i mean 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
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a little portfolio before i went to dallas. 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 8 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
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my friends behind and completely. move to a different city. 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 europe and then i never heard anything for a while the 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 thin details but said that sandy had been
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arrested for manufacturing ecstasy. that he wanted to redeem 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 the attorney. 7 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 it 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's isn't somebody that i really want to confide in so i have it wasn't very long after that that my lawyer
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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 what 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 either am paraphrasing. here cooperate or will ruin your live. shows seem wrong. will just don't hold. any you get to shape out just to come in as a kid and in gainesville equals betrayal. when something find
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themselves worlds apart when she's to look for common ground. this is a stick of water bottle phone 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 was there the litter bugs are throwing this away industry should be blamed for all this waste the company has long promised to reuse the plastic. funding. on the. phone now the mountains of
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waste only grow. welcome to max kaiser survival guide. to. yanks this is what happens to pensions in britain. watched as a report. dream agreed to pressure. to remember that it was most of the family were unemployed working. there wasn't it was bed much worse objectively day but there was an expectation of the things were going to get better. there was a real sense of hope. there isn't today today's america was shaped by the 10 principles of concentration of wealth and power. reduced democracy attacks. engineer elections manufacture consent and other principles
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according to. one set of rules for the rich. officer said. that's what happened when you put her into the. narrow sector of will switch is dedicated to increasing power for chills just as you'd expect one of the most influential intellectuals of our time speaks about the modern civilization of america. must. see close. it's a minute let me. give you. more
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from says it was a great on amazing kim jong un face to face in north korea but he's accused back home of squandering american influence will succumb to syrian state media recused israel of conducting an airstrike that's left 4 people killed and 20 more injured. and in germany 3 men it charged in connection with the sexual abuse of more than 40 children missing pleading guilty a lawyer for one of the victims tells us the authorities failed the children. this is simply unacceptable for a department to react in this manner and then tried to cover up his or negligence.
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