This soliloquy (transcribed from an off the cuff delivery and thus, informal and conversational) preceded my guest, Louis L. Reed on Joseph Jaffe is not Famous on October 31st, 2022. You can watch it here. Please subscribe to the show here.

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I can't imagine what it must be to have your freedom taken away from you. And thank goodness now for the first time that feels in forever, whether it's due to DNA research, but also to activism, and to brave courageous people that stand up for those that have had their rights, robbed or stripped or taken away from them, there is hope.

The ability to have a second chance - a second chance in life - a second chance to right the wrongs and correct mistakes…and who hasn't made a mistake?

We all make mistakes. We are all flawed. We are all imperfect. Sometimes we make mistakes based on youth, based on impetuosity, based on desperation, but it really kind of sucks when there are different standards - a different bar; a different ability to treat and address one person based on the color of their skin relative to someone else. Take the Jeffrey Dahmer Netflix docudrama and realizing what really was in play at the time, and how he might not have gotten away with what he got away with had his victims all been of a different color. Had there been just an element of and I'm just going to call it what it is. decency, and, justice.

And I have to say at the end of the day, if you believe in justice, and if you fight for justice, then truly, it should be justice for all. If justice is blind, maybe it's time that we open up our eyes, open up our ears, open up our hearts, open up our soul, and advocate not just on behalf of everyone, but specifically for the people that have been disadvantaged.

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Louis delivered an incredible insight into what it must be like growing up with essentially the odds stacked against you…destined to fail. A black and brown male who grows up with an incarcerated father is almost guaranteed to follow suit.

 "…there are people who actually made poor choices. I made a poor choice and I wasn't wrongly imprisoned. The fact of the matter is that I arguably deserve to have been in prison, especially the way that I impacted the lives of people through criminal enterprise. And So I think that how do we get to a place the larger question is, how do we get to a place where we are dispensing justice, inequity, but we're also focused on rehabilitation, we're also focused on fair chance, oftentimes, you hear the term second chance, a lot of people never even got a first chance. You think about me at the age of five years old? What chance did I get, you know, having, in effect been exposed to the school to prison pipeline? This is not an excuse. This is just an understanding. And so how do we give people who have been impacted who are incarcerated? How do we how do we how do we create opportunities for the children of those parents who are incarcerated? And so oftentimes, we focus on an individual who's who's physically incarcerated, but what about the child that's emotionally incarcerated? What about what about that? What about the parents who are supporting their loved one who's incarcerated, and so we have to look at this from a global perspective, and not necessarily just an individual perspective."

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Louis L. Reed is an acclaimed author, social and criminal justice activist, and the former senior director of membership and partnerships for Jay Z's reform Alliance. He served 14 years in federal prison and five years on supervision. Lewis is a licensed and board-certified addiction practitioner. His professional experience includes working as the Director of National organizing and partnerships for dream.org, formerly known as #cut50. There, he led an advocacy for the passage of the historic first step act through the empathy network where he grew the nation's largest bipartisan grassroots advocacy coalition of justice impacted people