#2096 - Josh Dubin & Sheldon Johnson

I figured we'd do something a little bit different.

Typically, the person sitting to my right is someone that was wrongfully convicted. So I don't want to bury the headline. Sheldon is guilty.

And I thought it would be a real interesting conversation to learn his background, learn about his upbringing, learn about the crime that he committed, and hear the sentence he got, which I don't want to shade it and inject my opinion. I have a strong one, but it's pretty astounding how he was treated by the system. I think that there's a real interesting twist that happens at his sentencing.

And I know I've said this before, and it probably sounds repetitive, but another miracle sitting to my right, just like a marvelous human being who was basically told by a judge, by an African-American judge, that you don't matter, you don't count, and I'm going to throw your life away for a crime in which the victim received two stitches and on a second offense, his first offense being a gun possession charge. So I will say this, that he received a sentence that far eclipses a sentence that would be commonly doled out for murder or manslaughter. So with that, here's Sheldon.

And I called Barbara back and said, I think I think that there's a mistake here, because it says that he was sentenced to 50 years.

I mean, that's no bullshit. I could not believe what I was reading. And then I read about what Sheldon had accomplished while in prison. And then his earliest date of release was, I think, 20-.

. And he had already served 25 years. So.

I was just blown away by the level of accomplishment and the mental wherewithal that he possessed to accomplish what he did while incarcerated. And then the path he's taken in the eight months since he's been out is it's we talk about on these episodes, how do you make change happen? He's living it and making it happen. So I thought it would be just fascinating to go through, like I said, his life, how he got to, where he was, why he got this, what his thoughts are and our thoughts are on the sentence he received, why that happens too often to people of color. And I know there's one thing I want to say, and I'm going to shut up and really let Sheldon talk and you talk.

I get. I get this a lot. Why are you always bringing up race when you talk about the system?

And my response to that is if you don't talk about how it impacts the system, even for people that have been found guilty,

it's like. it's like having a conversation about President Biden and ignoring the very obvious, apparent cognitive deficiencies he has. It would be like talking about Donald Trump and not recognizing that he seems like an unhinged lunatic. It would be like talking about Kamala Harris and ignoring that she, you know, didn't do much to advance criminal justice reform. You have to confront it.

It's just, it's there. Is it that all people that get wrongfully convicted are people of color? No, but most of them. Is it that all people of color get disparate sentences? Oh, absolutely.

So that's why I thought that this is an important conversation to have. And getting to know. Sheldon just thought he has a remarkable story to tell and a perspective on, on his circumstances, the system. And he's someone that's taken responsibility for what he did and I think is a living example of what can happen if we think long and hard about if someone's life is worth just throwing away and putting behind bars so that they can rot in a dank cell, because he would have been 70 years old when he got out way past his life expectancy.

I mean, the only way to apply real justice is to have a fucking time machine. Right. But it's broken. I mean, it's. it's so broken and it seems so overwhelmed.

And the root cause of it is never addressed. The root cause of. I mean, I've said it ad nauseum, but I'll say it again. Where the fuck did we come up with a hundred and whatever billion dollars to send to Ukraine? And we don't have any money to to try to do something about these insanely impoverished, crime ridden, gang ridden, drug ridden communities.

We don't do anything. We have nothing. I mean, this is my take on this whole make America great again, thing. You want to make America great again? Make it so there's less losers.

Make it so that more people have a fucking chance. The idea that everyone starts on the same line. I mean, I'm not talking about equality of outcome. That's not possible. But equality of opportunity is possible.

That's a possible goal. At least we could advance that. At least we could do something to just just change the course of who knows how many people's lives. And we don't do a fucking thing about it.

We have to fix this. This is a problem that's been going on for decades and decades, back through Jim Crow, back all the way to slavery, the same same communities. And we don't do anything. Pull that a little redlining. Everything.

Pull that mic up a little bit. Yeah, just just, that's good. That's good. Yeah, that's good. I mean, it's wild.

It really is wild. And, you know, in the race part of it is a major factor. It's a major factor. And it's a factor that gets ignored when people start talking about racism, systemic racism in the country. Talk about sentencing.

How come that's not talked about?

I'm getting letters from prosecutors. I'm getting letters from sheriffs. I got a letter from a sheriff in Oregon last week, and he sent me a badge and said, I want to show you how committed I am to trying to make change happen. And it was from this show. So we're doing it.

We're addressing it. We're making it happen. Why politicians, don't? I, you know, what drives someone to want to get into politics these days is for a different psychiatrist.

I have no clue what the allure is. But, you know, like there's such a swirl of ego and power struggle and divided loyalties. I can't even wrap my head around it. But, you know, we're doing it. We're helping.

We got to do it grain of sand by grain of sand until we have a sandcastle. So that's what we're doing. So I do think we're making a difference. But, you know, it's crazy, because Sheldon and I are the same exact age. And we didn't know that until we were on our way down, days apart.

And he, he flew. when we flew down. It was the first time he'd ever been on an airplane.

I was very excited. I'm kind of like an adrenaline. I like the adrenaline rush. Just the speed of it and just the whole idea of just, you know, I had this analogy in my head when I was up in clouds and I'm looking down and I said to myself, I said, I just came from the bowels of hell. Spending 25 years in prison.

And now I'm in the sky, above the clouds and the heavens, headed to a destination to talk about change and to talk about all of the things that brought me to this place today.

And, you know, the conditions in which I grew up and, you know, how social conditions play a role in the decisions that we make. Or the lack of achievements or opportunities, like Joe just said a couple of minutes ago, you know, those opportunities are very important. And being able to start that line where everybody is not necessarily equity, equitable, but, you know, everybody has that same opportunity.

My aunt is deaf. I grew up in a deaf household.

So there was this always, this contrast where, you know, I wasn't really sure where I belonged, that, you know, kids are cruel. So, growing up, you know, kids would say, oh, you're a mulatto. You're a half breed. And, oh, you're adopted. And for a long time, I kind of suffered as a child with an identity crisis, not really knowing where I fell at on either side, what my identity was, who I was supposed to be.

And my father, I'm also a product of intergenerational incarceration. My father was incarcerated when I was young, at an early age. He did about 15 years. I was incarcerated. My grandfather was incarcerated.

My great grandfather was a slave and my son killed somebody when he was 12 years old.

So there's this cycle of incarceration based on the conditions, the social conditions and where I come from. I grew up in New York City, Harlem, on the borderline between the east side and the west side, on Fifth Avenue. You hear Fifth Avenue like, oh, wow, you live in a nice place. Okay. Crack, era, Harlem, 80s, 90s.

You know, and I grew up, you know, protecting my mother, interpreting for my mother. My mother could hardly ever keep a job because of her handicap. There was always somebody that would replace her. A lot of people saw my mother as a victim. She was a white woman on 112th Street and Lenox Avenue, an all black community.

So as a child, I grew up protecting my mother. So I never really, I feel like. in hindsight, I didn't really have an opportunity to be a child. I had to grow up and be a man early in my life in order to be able to protect my mother. And a lot of people didn't even know that I could hear.

So there were times where I would be standing there with my mother and, like people, would just be making all type of random comments and just disrespectful, you know, just hateful stuff. And I would sit there as a kid, just kind of like looking up, like, like, dude, I can like hear you.

So, you know, I think my life took a significant turn. And when I was in the fifth grade, I was always pretty smart. But, you know, as as being smart and growing up in these neighborhoods, you know, the school systems are not really equipped to handle the number of children that's coming through. So you have one teacher and like 30 kids. And me, just being who I was, I was always pretty smart.

And when I was finished with my work, I would kind of just clown around. I had this teacher in the fifth grade, my math teacher. And what he would do was he when you acted out in the classroom, he would call you to the front of the classroom. He had a stack of rulers. Today, he would be arrested back then.

But it was back then. it was permissible. It was considered, as, you know, just punishing kids. And he would call you to the front of the classroom. He would make you stick out your hand and he would put salt.

He had a big salt shaker that he kept on his desk and he would sprinkle salt in your palm and he would smack the ruler into your hand and the salt would kind of embed itself into your palm and would kind of have like a little burning sensation. So one day I decided that I was tired of it. And he called me to the front of the classroom and I put my hand out. When he swung, I moved my hand. He almost fell over.

He chased me around the classroom. I ran out into the hallway. He chased me into the hallway. I grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and I sprayed him until he fell. That was my reaction too.

I was like, he sounded like he deserved it. 10 year old kid, man, just, you know, just.

From Pleasantville, I went to Hawthorne. And, you know, and I'm gonna be honest, this is where I learned how to become a criminal, because prior to that, I was just a kid. They put me in this place where, you know, I was around older kids, and these kids were really like about their life. There was stuff, there was really bad stuff happening. If you look up Hawthorne, Cedar Knolls, to this day, it's been closed for allegations of sex trafficking and child abuse.

So I finally got out of there. I went through a lot there. I was molested by a counselor.

And I finally escaped from there. And I just went back into the streets at 13 years old, and I just was defending for myself.

Wow. And, you know, I always look back and I see that as a trajectory in my life. that just changed everything. I went from, you know, it changed me as a person. I lost my innocence.

I felt like after I left that place, I was a darker person because of the things that I saw and the things that I went through. So I come back and we're talking about this is 1988..

Crack Arrow, Harlem.

You know, you got kids 13, 14 years old making a thousand dollars every two, three days. Selling drugs, looking out on the corners. This was like real stuff. You see, New Jack City. New Jack City was for real back then.

I had Freeway Ricky Ross on here twice.

And that was the Freeway Ricky Ross situation, where they were using that money to fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

And the fathers were either in the streets using drugs, selling drugs or in prison, with astronomical sentences and removed from the family structure in totality. Because of these conditions. So now you have the child just kind of left to fend for itself. And we're not even talking about the children who were born that were subject to mothers who, you know, the crack baby, right? Yeah.

And that's just I mean, the list just goes on and on. when we talk about social conditions and we talk about the long term effects of. These conditions and how it produces behavior, like Ivan Pavlov, one of my favorite psychologists, he talks about stimulus in a response, right? Classical condition. And so you introduce the stimulus and then you have a response, which equals to the condition that we see.

Has always struck me about Sheldon is his vulnerability, but also his honesty. He's like, he'll be the first to tell you out of the gate, I did it. I could have made better choices. He's not asking for a pass based on his conditions. What he's always said to me was, I just want people to consider how it may have impacted me.

So, and to me, you just can't ignore it. It doesn't say, well, poor Sheldon. I think that because I guess. You know, I know him, the human being. So I like I trip out.

when people are like anybody that murders or robs or doesn't lock them up and throw away the key. I always feel like, well, look, why don't you. Explain to me how you have gotten to know somebody that has been.

Brought up in different conditions than you were. How long have you sat and listened to them? How long have you considered how that might have impacted them and compared it to the conditions you grew up in? How many people like him have you gotten to know? So, again, I'm trying to walk a fine line between sounding preachy and just saying, let's just consider the circumstances in which he was born.

We're both 48.

I don't want to get into, you know, my my family, you know, struggled financially, but had different opportunities.

My mom was a schoolteacher. My dad was a knock around Brooklyn guy that did what he could do to, you know, provide for his family and wasn't always great at it, but he was a wonderful man. But I can't ignore that. I had different opportunities than Sheldon did. So when he gets out and then he arrives back on the street.

You know, I don't think anyone's going to argue with the fact that you're impacted and molded from 10 to 13 and forward 13 to 18 by who are the people you're around? What are the conditions you're born in?

And I really didn't go back to school and really educate myself until I went to prison. Today, I'm pursuing a master's in human services.

There was so much going on. that was above and beyond what the counselors could control. It was just ridiculous. You had the kids going down into white planes, breaking into cars, stealing, getting high, going across the campus, having sex with the girls. It was just insane what was going on.

And I, you know, I learned how to become this person. I learned how to survive there. I learned, you know, what it meant to go and steal a Benzy box. Remember the Benzy boxes where you could snatch them right out the car. People used to hide them.

I learned how to, you know, break into a car with the older guys and how to take a Benzy box and sell it. So I learned how to survive there. I mean, I've always known how to survive superficially. But from, I just feel like at that point I was put into a place where, instead of getting real therapy or real help, I was just kind of put into a place and I was like, I was malleable. You know, I was young.

I was impressionable. And this is what I was seeing. These became my role models. These were the guys that I respected, that I looked up to. They, you know, they were selling drugs.

They didn't have a care in the world. They had all of the girls. And, you know, ironically, prison in my community was almost like a rite of passage, right? In my community, when you went to prison and you came back and you didn't tell on nobody and you were able to hold it down, you know, and word got back to the streets that you didn't get robbed or, you know, you didn't get pumped. People looked at you differently, treated you differently.

I remember when I was 15 years old, I wanted to go to Rikers Island so bad that I lied to the officer. I got arrested for smoking. I got arrested for smoking weed. Weed is legal now. But back then, like, weed was a thing.

Like, if they saw you smoking weed, that gave them justification to get out, stop you, take you down to the precinct, run you for warrants and all kind of other stuff. You sat in the bullpens for three, four days before you even got out. And I remember lying to the officer. He said, how old are you? I said, I'm 16, because I wanted to go to Rikers Island so that I could come back and be around the older guys and tell them, hey, listen, I went.

I still got my sneakers, you know, and the girls and everybody just treated you different. And it's really sad. But that was a reality that I was faced with. So I come back. I'm 13..

And I'm going through this stuff. My mother's still struggling. She's on SSD, which is Social Security for Disability. My father's in prison.

And it's just, I just started selling drugs. Guy offered me an opportunity to be a lookout. He said, listen, kid, I just need you. I'm going to give you $75 a day. I just need you to stand on that corner.

And when you see the police car, just yell, oh, shit, oh, shit. That was like a little thing. And I would just stand there. And eventually, I just slowly moved up the ranks. And I became this person that I feel like I was never meant to be.

But because of the conditions and because of where I was at, and because of what I saw, what I was exposed to, made me into someone else.

It turned me into this person that I was never meant to be. And I just, you know, just when you're in these, these, these, when you're in this melting pot of just insanity, you know, you lose sense of what's permissible and what's not, and what's impermissible. Right. You know, I'm committing crimes, and it just doesn't even matter, no more.

I was never the guy, you know, to hurt any old people. My era, you know, when you see old people come through, you help them with their bags, and we have respect for our elders. That was something that was always taught to us. Now, these kids, it's just. that's a whole nother story.

But, yeah, I'm just and I'm committed and I'm getting arrested for little, stupid crimes, driving without a license, standing on a corner, little small, petty drug cases.

And I'm just. I'm just kind of just moving through my life with no purpose. But I'm providing for my family.

My mother, doesn't, you know, at the end of the month, we don't have to worry about just eating grits and cheese, no more. You know, we can eat chicken and Velveeta, shells and cheese, you know, and for some people that's significant. You know, I can buy a couch. now. I could buy a real couch that that's comfortable.

I can buy a TV for my mother. I can, you know, set up a cable where she can watch HBO. All of these little, small things that I wasn't able to do that she couldn't really do for herself after she paid the rent.

What's significant? And it made me feel like I had a purpose. It made me feel like a man when, in all actuality, you know, many of the values and the morals that I adopted growing up, which is so warped and so misplaced, like Scarface, the movie. Right. You know, you have this.

Oh, I don't work. I don't break my balls in my work for nobody. Right. You know, and I remember one time a friend of mine, he came to pick me up and he was on a run from the cops. He had a warrant out for his arrest.

He had a car full of drugs, in a car full of guns. And because I gave him my word, I felt like I couldn't back out of the situation. Nothing bad happened, but it's just the idea of sometimes growing up and adopting these values and these morals. And you begin, you begin to take them on as part of your characteristics. And you just you just make.

you end up making really, really bad decisions that can cost you for the rest of your life. Like my son, like when my son, when he, when he got into, he, got into a fight with an Asian guy, they called him the Columbia law student killer. Right. He gets into a fight with this Chinese guy. And this is not to take away anything from that man's family.

And, you know, as a man, as his father, I felt some type of way. But the guy goes into the street and gets hit by a car and he dies. But this is how fast your life can change from just one simple mistake.

From one mistake. And I just feel like, you know, a lot of times these conditions are created and there's really no.

There's no alternatives. I had never been on a plane, like I said, like I never even thought about going on a plane.

So I'm growing up in this community. My father's gone. My mother's, you know, she's deaf. I ended up having a son. My son was born in 1993..

And that just made things that just exacerbated the issue. Right. So now I'm really, you know, what am I going to do now? You know, I have a son. I have someone to look at.

And despite how many times I said that I was never going to be who my father was, my actions were actually setting me up to be exactly who my father was and remove me from my son's life.

And in 19, I caught the gun charge that that that that triggered the felony, that allowed them to be able to sentence me the way that they did in 1994.

I also caught another case. At that time, I was I was. I was what you call giving out consignment on drugs to people in particular. I gave consignment to and I ended up getting arrested for a case.

And when I sent someone to go pick up the money from them. It kind of just was like, you know, whatever, I'm not paying. So when I came home, one guy in particular, I ran into him with his girlfriend.

You're in jail. Yes. These guys figure, since you're in jail, fuck it, we're not going to pay him. Yeah, I'm not going to pay. And then the case that you were arrested for got dismissed.

Got dismissed. I got it. So then you come home.

I need my money. I'm just just. it's just me. being honest. This is, Miss, being straight.

No, I gave you something. And we had an understanding that you were going to pay me. And when I came home, when I finally located this particular individual, he had his girlfriend with him. And this guy owed me five thousand dollars for some drugs that I gave him on consignment. I gave him an eighth of a kilo, which is one hundred and twenty five grams of cocaine.

And when I saw him, he had a bunch of jewelry on. He was with his girlfriend. She had a bunch of jewelry on. I said, hey, man.

Where's my money at? Oh, you know, I was going to pay you. As far as I was concerned, his jewelry was. We was even. So I robbed him.

And I took his jewelry and his girlfriend happened to be there. And unfortunately, she got caught up in the situation. I had a bunch of young guys with me and they robbed her as well. And he got hit in the head with the gun right here on the side of his head. And he got two stitches.

And they gave me twenty five years for that case.

And he identified me in a photo array, unbeknownst to me, he identified me in a photo array. This guy, you know, as far as I was concerned, he was in the streets just like I was. So, right. I didn't really understand that. You know, like I said, we go back to morals and values and principles, and how warped they can be.

Right. In my mind at the time, this is a guy who I gave something to. He's living an illegal life. I'm living an illegal life. So, as far as I was concerned at that time, it was fair game.

In hindsight, as I, as I moved on and I became more mature and I began to reevaluate myself, I realized how wrong that was. But that was later on. At this time, I committed the crime and I just kept moving. Another guy that I ran into, he also owed me some money. He owed me seven thousand dollars and it kind of went along the same ways.

He was selling drugs out of an auto parts store. He was a Spanish guy. I got word that this is where he was at and he was selling drugs and I was going to get my money. And the same circumstances kind of ensued. So, hey, what's going on?

You know, I'm reading in between the lines and outside the margins without really going into all of the details. I robbed him because he owed me seven thousand dollars.

I'm going back to morals and values and principles. In my mind, he was fair game. He's selling drugs. I'm selling drugs. You owe me money.

I came to take what you have. In that world, that was considered as permissible. These are one of the rules of something that was permissible in that world.

Long story short, in December 1997, I get arrested for both cases. Really for one of them, for the one with the guy and the girl.

And then the other case drops with the auto parts store. The guy that I said was selling drugs out of the auto parts store.

I am in the process of going to court. I'm going back and forth to court. I'm on Rikers Island at the time. It's just crazy on Rikers Island.

That's when the gangs was involved. Prior to that, a year before that, I had got involved with the gangs. I was blood. I was a gang member. That's where the cut comes from.

on my face. I have a bunch of stab marks from just being in those environments and being on Rikers Island and just warring with other rival gangs. Mostly Latin Kings and the Nietas.

My final offer before trial was 23 years. Which kind of blew me away, because my lawyer kept telling me that my maximum sentence was 25 years if I went to trial. So in my mind, it just didn't make no sense to me. Why would I forfeit my rights to an appeal if there's only a two-year difference? I told the judge I would take 15 years right now.

I acknowledged that I had made some mistakes and I had done some things that were wrong. And I said, I'll take 15 years right now.

He refused to accept my plea offer. And I went to trial and I ended up getting 50 years.

Five-zero.

Consecutive.

I remember blowing trial and just not really understanding what was being there, but it was almost surreal. I remember when I went and got sentenced and the judge said 50 years. Now, mind you, I had a black lawyer, a black judge, and a white prosecutor.

And I remember when he said 50 years. He said he went into all of these reasons why he was sentencing me, the way that he was sentencing me. There was never no post. There was never no... They're supposed to do a report prior to your sentencing.

And it's called a post-supervision interview.

Pre-sentencing investigation is called PSI. Pre-sentencing investigation. There was never no pre-sentencing investigation. There was never no mitigating evidence presented on my behalf to highlight why I may have made some of the decisions that I made. And he just called me a menace to society.

and he just gave me 50 years. And I remember when I first got to Downstate, which is a processing facility, and they give you what they call is a time computation sheet. And on the time computation sheet, it gives you all of the numbers, like the beginning of your bid, how much jail time you have. And I just remember 2049.. That's all I kept looking at.

And I was like, 2049?

Are they fucking serious? This is 1998, 1999..

And I'm trying to do the math and I'm just like 2049.

. I'm like, that's 50 years from now. And I remember going to the law library and I forget how I get the World Almanac. And something just says, look up life expectancy. And I look up my life expectancy.

And, as an African-American, me and my life expectancy. at that time I was 67 years old and I did the math. And I said, I'm going to die in prison, man.

I just really believed that I was going to die in prison.

One thing I learned really, really quickly when I got to prison was that prison does two things to you. It brings out the best or it brings out the worst. And what I saw was, I saw individuals who were at their worst and I saw guys who were at their best. The guys who were at their best were guys who were involved in education, post-secondary education programs. They were running the violence groups.

They was running the substance abuse groups.

And I remember saying to myself, I want that. And I remember just being involved in so much bullshit because I was in a gang and I was top of the food chain. I had my own nation. I wasn't just like the random gang member. I had a whole nation under me.

And I was just in and out the box. In and out the box, solitary confinement, which has been considered as unconstitutional now.

And I remember just having these moments of reflection and just asking myself, like, what are you going to do? Can you spend the next 48 years living like this?

I said, I couldn't do it. And I had lost all my privileges. They took everything from me. I was in Southport at the time, which is closed now. It's a solitary confinement facility in New York State.

And I was on a loaf, which is also unconstitutional now. So the loaf is a dietary restriction that they give you. It's a chunk of bread and it has cabbage and carrots in it. And they give you like a quarter of a cabbage and they give you a cup of milk. When they can't take any more of your privileges, this is what they would give you.

Six days out the week, on the seventh day, you would get a hot meal, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And then it would go back for 21 days. They would do this six and one, six and one, six and one. And it was at that moment where I really said, I have to change my life. I have to change my life.

I just can't do this. I had a wife. I had family, still. My son was growing up.

He was hearing stories about my so-called notoriety.

And I just didn't want to be that dad. Like. I really was looking at myself and really evaluating, asking myself like, yo, what the fuck are you doing?

I was still smoking a lot of weed at the time. I was drinking on jailhouse hooch. And I was at my worst.

And I had to figure out how to get to my best. So I decided to, when I got out of solitary confinement, I did 42 days on the loaf. I went from being 210 pounds to like 168 in like a matter of seven months. It just deflated me. And when I got out, I made a decision that I was going to walk away.

And I didn't care about what the consequences was. And I said to myself, I've been doing bad for so long, I'm going to try to do something good.

If all else fails, I could always go back to doing bad. But let me try. Let me give it a shot. And I ended up getting into a school program. I got my GED.

I left the gangs alone, which was a benefit for them, because, you know, I was what you call an authoritarian. I was a rule guy. I'm still a rule guy. I like rules. You know, I like rules.

I like structure. I like things to be a certain way. And it was to their advantage to get rid of me anyway. Plus, I knew a lot of the guys who were at the top.

you're doing that? for what reason? Nah, you can't do that. You can't do this. You can't do this.

This is what the rules say.

I could be in a whole other facility. Let's say I'm in Greenhaven, and a guy's in Attica, and they want to do something to him because they feel like he's not sharing his proceeds of drugs that he's bringing into the facility. The rules say you can't do that.

That's his property. That's his belongings. So I was a rule guy, and they just, you know, it was to their advantage to get me out of the way. So when I decided to take a step back, they were like, yes.

And it was to my advantage as well.

And this was in 2005.

And it was time for me to go, and I didn't care. whatever the consequences was. I was fortunate that there weren't any consequences.

But I didn't care what the consequences was. I just walked away.

All of these ideas of change began to take place with me.

Substance abuse. I stopped smoking weed. I stopped smoking cigarettes. I was smoking like 30 cigarettes a day. I mean, I'm literally having chest pains from smoking cigarettes.

And I realized that I wanted to live. And the only way that I was going to be able to live and walk out of prison was to remove myself.

from all of these instances. I've seen so many guys get carried out. I've seen guys dying.

Not just from just being stabbed or with altercations from officers. I've seen guys dying from... One guy I knew, he used to drink so much hooch. His liver failed on him one night. He died in the cell that night.

The morning, when they came to do that count, he was frozen. He was stiff as a log. But these are the things that I was seeing.

and I asked myself, do I want to go out like that?

And I didn't want to go out like that.

You call it a mash, they call it a kicker. Get a plastic bag. You put it in a plastic bag. You let it blow up. It goes through the process, the carbon dioxide process.

I did a whole paper on ethanol when I was in Cornell so that I could learn how the process was.

And it's pretty good stuff, especially if you distill it. But it's bad for you because it has a component in it called methane. And it goes straight to your brain. In the streets, when distillation places or facilities, they distill it, they remove that part of the alcohol, the methane. But in prison, guys just drink it.

It's just like, give a fuck.

Or you make the fruit juice. Same thing, plastic bag, sugar, kicker mash.

when you hear, like going forward,

how Sheldon changed his life and

not just the correspondence courses, but all of these various counseling programs, outreach programs, his connections to the outside world, which he'll talk about, is that the?

impossibly.

And.

why couldn't he be saved as a kid? That's what, what, what I am really trying to sort of put energy towards now. When you asked him earlier, wasn't there counseling in the group home? And, you know,

if you see what this counseling is like, obviously I can't cast aspersions on every counselor in a group home across America, but, you know, I've had people on, on, you know, the podcast with me, and I'm listening to their anger management classes, right? I won't mention who it is, but I'm listening to, like the anger management class that they take. And it's fucking, it's on Zoom. It's run by a guy that can't fucking turn his camera on. And it's like, it is, it's, it's bedlam.

There's just people screaming, Hey man, I can't, I can't hear you. What the fuck did you just say? What are you here? Not just the anger and the frustration, but the guy's inability to control the situation, to control the technology, let alone giving out, you know,

actually saved Shelton.

But why aren't, why aren't programs that thought that implementation in his community to save him as a kid? Right, right. And I don't just take cases, you know, at the Perlmutter Center, where I'm the executive director, the Perlmutter Senator for Legal Justice at Cardozo Law School, we get a massive amount of mail and we get a lot of people calling us to help out on cases. To help as many people as we can, but people that I think can succeed or that we could help succeed when they get out. And, you know, on paper, you can see pretty quickly what somebody has done with their time.

You know, I've sat with people in institutions all over the country where I say, what programs are you in? And I feel like an idiot asking because I'd be a fucking puddle on the floor. I asked him many times, how often did you cry? How did you extract yourself from the gang? How did you sleep at night with the noise?

Sheldon told me about this thing called a human harpoon that people make out of magazines and a sharpened toothbrush.

Can you fucking.

The mind fuck on this, they stiffen.

the pages of a magazine with toothpaste, soap, water, let it dry, let it dry so that they could basically work it into a rod. You keep on working the paper between your hands and then you attach with soap, newspaper,

a sharpened toothbrush handle at the end of it. Or what?

All of a sudden you get fucking stabbed with a harpoon. So I'm thinking or have feces thrown on you. So I'm trying to like process all of that and to be able to navigate that hell and come out.

It's hard to listen to.

Yeah, it's hard to process that you were able to have that wherewithal to sit a day in solitary confinement, let alone 42 days.

but, you know, I just.

. I felt like everybody in the world was watching, including my family, because they didn't believe... Up until the point to where I graduated from Cornell, my cousin told me, she said, she said, you know, when you called me and invited me to the graduation, she said, I didn't believe it. I didn't believe nothing you had told me prior for the last 10 years, or anything that you said you did until I saw you at that graduation. So, you know, I had family, I had everybody just kind of just waiting for me to fail.

But I just felt like, I was just determined to succeed. I just had this... I just had this energy in my spirit and I just... And it was the... It was the will to live.

As far as I'm concerned, it was the will to live. I had read... When I was in solitary confinement, I read Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, and one of the things that struck me as being so powerful, he says, if you have a why, if you have a why, then you have a reason to live. And this is a guy who was in a concentration camp during the Holocaust and he found a reason to live. He found a reason, and I'm sitting there in the cell and I'm asking myself, do you have a fucking reason to live?

And I think about my family and.

And that was my reason. And I wanted to beat the system.

And that was my way of beating the system. I'm not gonna let you motherfuckers kill me.

And that was my spirit. And I knew it was only one way for me to accomplish that. So, like I said, I started going to school. I did the correspondence courses. I got...

involved in the Cornell Prison Education Program. I obtained my associate's degree and then I went on to obtain my... my bachelor's in behavioral science from Mercy. But you know, in this process, I'm going through... I'm mentoring other young men.

Now guys are looking at me and saying, hold on, wait a minute, man. This guy is on to something. I got guys on both sides now saying, yo, can you help me? I started working in the law library. I discovered that I had a knack for complicated things.

Case law and.

. I was helping guys and I was actually helping guys get out of prison.

Um.

. And I started running the programs.

And I think that's something.

I was helping guys with their GEDs. I was... I became a tutor in the program. Um... And the rewards that I felt, you know...

It didn't even matter anymore about when I was gonna get out. Right? It was just now about how can I help other people not go through what I went through and wait so long? because I feel like I wish I had somebody that would've came along at an earlier stage and, like he said, don't wait till I fall. Catch me before I fall.

And that's part of my motto now in some of the work that we do at the Queens Defenders, the Alternatives to Incarceration. And this is why I'm so passionate about a lot of the work that I do now. I'm trying to catch these kids before they fall.

I don't want to wait till they're falling.

And I want to show them that I'm on the way. And I feel like I'm a credible messenger, because when they see me, they know that I came from the same place they come from. Like Josh was saying earlier, there's a difference between being qualified and certified. You could read a hundred books about drug abuse.

But how qualified are you to really tell somebody who's sick on heroin and they're ready to do anything that they can for a bag of dope of what you went through. You can't. And this experience is priceless.

A lot of the young kids that catch the gun charges, we bring them into our program. We help them with job readiness, training, whether it's OSHA training. We help them get their GEDs. We direct them to different programs. Like we got a program called Hood Coding.

And this is also a guy who was previously incarcerated. And he teaches coding to younger kids inside the inner cities in the projects.

They don't have nothing. You know, so we want to be able to try to help them with some type of employment. Right? That's number one. And then we take them through our program.

We have a 36-week 10-point program. It deals with conflict resolution. It deals with knowing your rights. How to have a conversation with an officer. One of the things that I take pride in.

while I was incarcerated, I was also in a theater program. I played Macbeth on a stage.

I also was on the debate team. We debated against Stanford, Harvard, and Yale on the topic of the future of automation. And we crushed them. But one of the things I learned in those arenas is critical thinking and critical analysis. Right?

How do you critically think about a situation? And also, looking back, I realized something about myself is that I did not have a term that I coined called situational cognizance. Right? As a kid, for some reason, I felt like I was not able to see the long-term consequences of my behavior.

It was like a wall there.

And I think a lot of these younger kids are also suffering from the same thing. They don't. And the system sets you up to... The system tricks you because you catch these cases, and what they do is they slap you on the wrist. You catch this gun charge and they say, Oh, no.

We're just going to give you six months. Don't worry about it. What they don't tell you is that gun charges is a pretext now to enhance your sentence when you catch another case. So it's almost like a form of entrapment. Right?

And a lot of these kids don't understand that. They think that these cases that they're catching are just going to disappear. They don't realize that there's a paper trail being established, that's being created. There's a profile being created against you. And when you reach a certain threshold, there's a term that I like to say, they're going to knock your fucking head off.

And you're going to find yourself.

. A lot of these kids find themselves in situations where they get 25 years for an assault.

Scared Straight?

And now I'm more.

. I'm trending toward more hopeful, because Bruce Bryan, who was on the show, is a client advocate at the Queens Defenders. And I don't wear that as a feather in my cap. That was just.

me.

. It was validation that if I get behind this man and give him new life,

do my part in it. Lord knows, there were others. Steve Zeidman at CUNY Law School.

. In all honesty, I'm adamant about to this day, if it wasn't for Josh and Allison Hawk actually going to... And Derek as well. Derek Hamilton speaking to the district attorney. We were at a plateau where they just didn't...

They just was like, nah.

Legal aid was representing Bruce. There was an army of people that all believed that he could make change happen and do positive things when he got out. So now, he's a client advocate at the Queens Defenders, doing this kind of work, trying to explain to judges, this person, don't let them be another Sheldon Johnson. Don't let them be another me or Derek Hamilton. They deserve counseling.

They deserve a second chance. They deserve to help, really be rehabilitated. And then Sheldon comes over and starts working at the Queens Defenders, which is... It's like the, you know, the appointed counsel for people that can't afford an attorney. They're criminal defense lawyers.

So to watch them out there, advocating and trying to change hearts and minds about the community, you have to be on the ground doing it and getting in front of people. And I know I said it before. Look at the... I'm very thoughtful in who I bring with me. Look at this beautiful mind and how he articulates himself and educated himself.

And you want to tell me that this couldn't have happened earlier?

He doesn't need anyone's sympathy and he's not asking for it. It's something I admire quite a bit about him. Whenever anybody, you know, he doesn't want poor Sheldon. You know, how could you have gone through this? And he stops him.

I've seen him do it right in their tracks. Listen, I did what... I just don't know that my life was worth throwing away. But to watch them now on the other side of it, the change that we talked about, that I'm like, how do we change it? How do we do it?

It's starting to happen. Could we use Jeff Bezos to sit down and think through how we can build a community center in East New York? In Harlem? Yeah, we could. The means are out there to do it.

All it takes is one person listening to this episode.

that tells someone that knows someone and then, you know, progress is starting to happen and we can just do it on the ground. But the reason why I mentioned Scared Straight is because, sure, I could go in there and talk to these kids. They're not going to fucking listen to me. Just not. I might be.

certified, but I'm not.

You know, I go through that talking sometimes, like, you know, to fighters that I manage, right? I do it with Shakur Stevenson. You know, he's like a little brother to me. I love him. Sometimes I feel like he, you know, the message might be better coming from Jay Prince than it is for me, because he's more qualified.

I try to wrap my head around what Shakur went through as a kid and growing up in Newark and the circumstance. but, you know, I think that there is a disconnect and I have to be big enough to recognize that and say, yeah, you know, maybe I'm not the right person, but, you know, you're telling me he's not going to inspire, and they're doing it. They're getting judges to change their mind. They're getting prosecutors to think twice.

he shot at his brother. without going into the details of his case. He has attempted murder charge.

He's working towards his GED and he's in the hood coding program. We also have him in an aggression replacement training program and now the district attorney is considering giving him five years probation. So they went from 15 years and this kid is doing amazing. Like, he's just picking up the codings.

The guy that I spoke to, he said that this kid is just, is like a sponge. He's just soaking it up so fast. But this is just one example of how we kind of level the playing field and create opportunities. I think that key you spoke, that word you spoke about earlier, is so crucial to the context of this conversation. Opportunities, right?

How do we create the opportunities for these kids to be able to provide? Living in New York City? ain't no joke, man. The cost of living is ridiculous.

Um, so how do we create these opportunities? How do we, so now? also, what we're doing is we're going to the schools. We're talking to the teachers. We're talking to the teachers and the principals and we're asking them, we're not even going to wait until you get to the courtroom.

We're asking the teachers and the principals, who, in your classroom, do you think needs help?

Which kids in your classroom are the most, giving you the most trouble? And they give us the names and we go and we talk to them and we try, we're getting them involved in our program. Um, but it's all about opportunity.

Because if you don't see a path out of this, you just see a path towards doing what the other people in your environment are doing. And that's how all human beings react. If you're in a bad environment with a bad group of human beings, the chances of you going down that same path.

And the difference between someone like you saying it versus some.

That's where real help comes from. Real help comes from someone, as you said, who's qualified to do it.

You got the kids who are in communities, and it's just, it's just saturated with gang culture. Language, dress, music, food, everything else. So we're trying to extract them out of these places and say, okay, this is something that you can do differently. We're taking them to different places. We're taking them to HBCU so that they can see what people who look like them look like when they're going to college.

This can be you. This is some of the, take them in the classrooms to meet with the professors. We have a financial literacy course where Chase Bank actually works with us and we teach them how to establish credit, how to open up a checking account, how to open up a savings account and at the end of that particular five week program, we actually take them to the bank and we give them $25 so that they can open up their own bank account, so that they can understand the difference between the money that you obtain from the streets and the money that you get working legitimately is two different kinds of money.

You can't appreciate the money that you get from the streets, but that money that you've been working all week, for eight hours a day, 40 hours a week at the end of the week, and you can see that direct deposit when it goes into your account. You can take that card and you can actually utilize it to withdraw your money out the bank. That's a big difference.

Civic engagement. You know, how can some of these kids feel like they have a voice in their communities when they're not making no decisions in their communities? We go into the rallies. We take them to the rallies out of Albany. Yesterday, they went to a rally.

Last week, we went to a rally about treatment, not jails. How to set up what they call diversion courts for people who have substance abuse problems. Instead of sending them to prison, they need treatment. And the money that they save is clear. It's clear.

When you do the math, the money that you save, it costs almost up to $70,000 to incarcerate one person.

That's what it's like.

take the charge out of their battery. We're trying to pull the plug out of the wall, because, you know, these aren't controversial statistics. And I'm not going to start spewing them, but we incarcerate at a rate that is.

dwarfs, any other Western country. Any other civilized... Anywhere in the world, really. So, in any event, I was doing a relative comparison. So, how do we put those privatized prisons out of business?

You know, we have to start on the ground. And for... You know, it's almost like a rallying cry to myself, because we get a lot of.

not a rallying cry to myself, but the way I got from being a little less intimidated by the mountain to climb was taking a step back, really after the last episode and saying, well, what have we done and how have we changed things? Listen, I wasn't born a civil rights lawyer that was working on innocence cases. I have a trial strategy company called DRC. We do focus groups, mock trials on big cases, right? Try to unfold the thinking of jurors in a jurisdiction where the case is going to be tried.

And we make demonstrative aides and we are alleged experts in jury selection. And that became a platform. I said, how can we use this as a platform now that I'm operating the Perlmutter Center as well? So, just being in the boxing industry, speaking to the Jay-Z's team at Roc Nation and Jay-Z and his mom, how can we do this? And we, he has something called the Sean Carter Foundation.

It's a remarkable, it flies way under the radar. Have you ever heard of it?

it's kind of remarkable that people know it because of his name and they've heard it, but no one really knows like what it does. They take children from, really from all over the country. A lot of them are in the tri-state area that have difficult circumstances. A lot of them come from single family households and they, they, not, they're not just mentoring them from high school, but they are trying to do some of the things that Sheldon talked about. They do a college tour.

It's run by a woman named Donya Diaz and really Gloria Carter and a woman named Miss Archer. And I, I saw what they were doing and I said, if we took these kids and created a fellowship program where we pay their last year of college.

and publicity. Her name is Jayla Madry. She, she made a presentation to me the other day. I was fucking blown away that this girl was, she was passionate about marketing, not advertising, marketing, and she works at my consulting firm, and she made a presentation to me. you know, that had a level of detail and ideas about how we can become, you know,

increase our awareness, and I, I was just thinking to myself, you know, alright, so this is the change that we're making happen, and it was just an idea that I had. I didn't actually think.

that Jay-Z and his mom and Donya would go for it. so I was reluctant to pitch them the idea and just being able to say well, what do you have to lose by, you know, putting it out there? and they have been remarkably supportive. Um, so I think that, like there's a lot of people that want to help. Yeah.

You know, Sheldon and I were talking about it before we came and we all, we often think like how can listeners help? There is not, if you have an idea like I had, just try to put the next foot in front of the foot that's behind you and just keep walking forward and don't be afraid to ask. There is not a public defender's office in this country. There is not a civic engagement organization that if you call them and say I want to volunteer or I'm interested in helping, that will turn you away. You just have to say alright, I could sit here and talk about it and, you know,

I'm going to turn a blind eye. I'm going to act like it doesn't exist until it hits home and then sometime, when it hits home, it's too late.

something to happen to somebody for them to become an advocate, right? I mean, Michael J. Fox wasn't a Parkinson's advocate until it happened for, but that's great that he decided to do that. Remarkable. But I think that Sheldon makes a great point, right?

We're a society of,

we're a society that likes to sit back and complain.

but for whatever reason, maybe this balances me out at an airport when a flight gets canceled, even if it's hopefully my flight, not hopefully, but I get a better view of it if it's my flight, to watch people stand up and, and, you know, get frustrated, berate, raise their voice at, at the airport, at the fucking ticket attendant.

It's inconvenient, or come up with an idea. I mean, trust me. I'm an average guy of average intelligence that just, I think I have like more tenacity. So I don't, if I can help make some of this stuff happen, other people can make it happen. And I, I, Sheldon, asked me, should I go to law school before we came here?

And I said, I can't, I, I changed my mind. by the way. I might have an opinion now, but I told them, like most of the lawyers, that I find that are most effective aren't the smartest. Um, they're not, um,

the savviest. They possess something that most lawyers don't, which is common sense and street smarts. And they marry that with what they learned in school. And they're able to sort of that perfect stew, I think, is what leads to a successful advocate, counselor, attorney, whatever you are. And oftentimes there's so much of an emphasis placed on your grades.

and what score did you get and how much of that really ends up fucking mattering? at the end of the day. It matters. But does it matter to the degree, to the degree we place an emphasis on it in our society? I'm not sure, but my, my whole thing is rather than, like, be intimidated by the problem, I think it, it's recognizing that it exists.

Just decide one discrete thing you want to do to try to help make a change happen. And then, you know, again, just try to get some forward momentum, and you'd be surprised at the buy-in that you get. I think that that's why this platform is so important, because it, it allows people to start sharing ideas, reaching out to us, and we're taking them up on it. I've told you before, we've been contacted by, you know, a major law firm, Greenberg Trorig, and, you know, a really awesome attorney that's working on the case of Pierre Rushing, this guy, Jordan Grotzinger, who's, just, he was a corporate attorney. Had nothing to do with this kind of work.

Listened to the podcast. He's a passionate, passionate, ambitious advocate.

And, and he's gonna get justice one of these days for Pierre Rushing. We've, we've tried to help apply pressure through this show by having people reach out to the DA.

and, and write letters on his behalf. And it's, it's, you know, has it worked? yet? It's working. We're gonna get there at some point.

So, you know, that's my objective, you know, with continuing to do these stories, because you're right. The,

the privatization of prisons and the industrial prison complex, that, is that a solvable problem? I'm not sure. I think it's, I think that it's too much of a giant to slay. unless we start pulling the electrodes, not the Neuralink electrodes, pulling the electrodes out of the sockets and taking energy out of it as much as we can until they're like, well, we don't have any fucking.

And if, and if you, sometimes if you, if you break the right piece in the watch, the whole, the whole watch ceases to, to, to keep time. And it's just, you know, it's just a poor excuse, for, it's like putting a band-aid on, on a gunshot wound, you know, for, for, for the government to allow these corporations to privatize and say, okay, okay, it's not our problem anymore. We're going to pass the buck and, and let somebody else deal with it. Now you have these corporations who, they really don't, they really don't care about, you know, about civil rights and humanity and, and cruel and unusual punishment and due process. They don't care about none of this stuff.

That's a fact.

Right.

so the goods are prisoners produced wind up in the supply chains of a dizzying array of products found in most American kitchens, from Frosted Flakes, cereals, ballpark hot dogs to gold medal flour, Coca-Cola, and Riceland rice. They're on the shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi, and Whole Foods. Some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison label. Wild.

And it just continues today, like 13th Center Hour, 17th Center Hour, 19th Center Hour. During the pandemic, Great Meadows Correctional Facility had these guys working 24 hours a day, making hand sanitizers in mass.

writing. His short stories, most of them are rooted in some sort of truth. Rita Hayworth in the Shawshank Redemption was a short story that he wrote that ended up getting made. I think it was part of Apt Pupil or one of his books of short stories. And you remember in the Shawshank Redemption where they had this precise thing.

where it was, they came up with this idea, you know, the warden came up with an idea for a work program where they were profiting. That was true back then. He was basing that on something that was happening in the Northeast back then. So, you know, the notion that this is still happening shouldn't be that shocking. It's just like, what is our news cycle.

pay attention to? You know, and you know, and how do you, how do you make sure that this kind of stuff doesn't keep happening? My idea is you need people on the ground that are working on policy and reform. So at the Perlmutter Center for Legal Justice at Cardozo, we have a policy advisor. Her name is Sarah Chu, who knows forensics.

She's a scientist and, like one of the more respected, in my mind, the most respected reform advocate about how we stop using junk science like bite marks, and, you know,

Sarah came to work with me. Rebecca Brown is a great one that are working boots on the ground and trying to change and educate. really. I mean, how much does your local representative or a state senator really know about how dangerous it could be to draw conclusions about the directionality of how blood hits drywall versus how it hits lucite. How bite marks leave an indentation on someone's skin.

You could, I, could, a qualified, certified, actually, strike qualified, a certified odontologist, totally, total horseshit, could take one of these skulls and make the same case that the bite marks left on someone's leg came from this set of teeth, Sheldon's teeth, your teeth, or my teeth, and convince four juries four times, 100% of the time,

The scientific method that you learn in grade school, you could apply it to any of them and they would all fail the test.

at this time? There's a case of a guy named Emmanuel Fair in Seattle where he was implicated in a murder because he was at a party on Halloween. when this girl got murdered. He ended up getting, you know, sitting in prison for, I think, seven or eight years before he finally got acquitted. So this report should have turned forensic science on its head and no one gives a fuck.

Bite mark evidence.

So, I mean, you know, look, we could sit, I could sit and bang my head against the wall about it. Or I could, you know, just keep on speaking up when you're in front of a judge. How often, Sheldon, do you hear from an attorney, well, I don't want to piss off the judge?