Locked In with Ian Bick - I Was In Federal Prison for 19 Years — It Was Violence, Politics & Survival | Juma Sampson
Episode Date: March 22, 2026Juma Sampson grew up in the streets of Rochester and got pulled into the hustle at a young age, a path that eventually led to federal charges for drugs and guns. After taking his case to trial and los...ing in federal court, Juma was sentenced to 25 years in the federal prison system. In this episode of Locked In with Ian Bick, he shares what it was really like surviving nearly two decades inside both medium security and penitentiary prisons, navigating violence, prison politics, and the reality of doing serious time. While locked up, Juma began studying the law, eventually representing himself in court and fighting for his own freedom—ultimately getting his sentence reduced and walking out after 19 years behind bars. _____________________________________________ #ianbick #lockedinpodcast #federalprison #prisonstory #prisontalk #prisontime #truecrimepodcast #excon _____________________________________________ Connect with Juma Sampson: Website: www.chaosunlimited.net Book: https://a.co/d/0dHmGKds Instagram: Official.Chaos1 _____________________________________________ Hosted, Executive Produced & Edited By Ian Bick: https://www.instagram.com/ian_bick/?hl=en https://ianbick.com/ _____________________________________________ Shop Locked In Merch: http://www.ianbick.com/shop _____________________________________________ Timestamps: 00:00 Facing 25 Years in Prison — Arrest & Federal Charges 03:39 Growing Up in Rochester — Family & Early Life 07:51 Street Hustling & Learning the Game 13:36 First Arrests & Entering the System 17:18 Chasing Money, Trouble & Bad Decisions 22:39 Federal Case Breakdown — Project Exile & Sentencing 28:26 First Days in Federal Prison — What It’s Like 32:52 Prison Politics, Gangs & Inmate Culture 40:42 Solitary Confinement, Transfers & Survival 46:54 Prison Hustles, Writing & Discipline 53:21 Daily Life in Prison & Inmate Economy 01:00:57 Turning Point — Growth & Self-Development 01:07:56 Law Library, Appeals & Fighting the System 01:13:16 Family, Responsibility & Accountability 01:20:25 Prison Reform, Sentencing & Early Release 01:28:03 Reentry After Prison — Adjusting to Freedom 01:31:01 Life After Prison — Business, Goals & Family 01:36:56 Writing Books & Sharing the Story 01:39:36 Final Thoughts & Lessons Learned Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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They wanted me to cooperate. My son was nine months old when I got arrested on this case.
And my paperwork, they said, we can have you home to your son by dinner time.
Or if not, you won't see him until he finishes college or his first prison sentence.
So I told him, called my lawyer.
Of course, I won't cooperate.
I end up getting 25 years.
Juma Samson started hustling in the streets of Rochester, New York at a young age.
But that lifestyle eventually caught up with him when he was hit with a federal drug and gun case
and sentenced to 25 years in prison after losing.
at trial. What followed was nearly two decades surviving some of the toughest medium security
and penitentiary prisons in the federal system. Where'd you grow up? Rochester, Rochester, New York.
What was your upbringing like? My upbringing wasn't too bad. So I grew up. I was raised. I'm
the youngest of three. My mother was a single mother. My father, he was dear up until that crack
pandemic came. And so my mom worked two jobs just to try to, you know, make sure that we had the
things that we needed. My older brother was, you know, this gave a time and kind of being the street.
So my older brother, he was heavy into the streets. And, yeah. Had the epidemic affect your dad?
Was he a seller or a user? So, yeah, my father started off. He was a he was a hustler. He was a
big hustler, big time hustler. And the pandemic around the 80s, when the, you know,
the crack started coming into play.
It wasn't looked at or viewed the way that we see it now.
Like, we see it now.
It's like, yo, that's crazy.
It's stupid.
It's for losers or whatever.
But when it was fresh in and fresh onto the scene, it wasn't marketed that way.
It was marketed to, you know, like, you know, this is something new, something different, something cool.
A long story short, yeah, he fell to that right there.
And that's what started to strain.
You know, this was when I was younger.
But thankfully now he's he's been clean for over, she's like 17 years now.
How old were you when that happened?
I was young.
I was probably about maybe eight, maybe eight to 10 years old.
How do you think that affected you at that time?
It didn't affect me as much as it probably could have because I didn't know the depth of it, right?
I just know that my pops wasn't there the way he used to be.
but there's other, you know, my bigger brother stepping in the play, he's stepping in a picture.
I got my older sister stepping in the picture.
My mom's stepping up.
So, yeah, I missed it, but I didn't know, you know, like I said, the depths of what it was.
I just know he wasn't.
Now, don't get it wrong, he was definitely, it wasn't like he was just completely absent.
You know, he just wasn't as there as much, you know.
Did you comprehend what was going on?
Did your mom explain things to you?
Yeah, well, I say, yeah, my, my, yeah, my.
My mom, my brother, like, they never held nothing against me.
They never, I mean, excuse me, they never held nothing from me.
They never lied to me, you know, it is what it is.
So, you know, they let me know that, you know, dad going through something right now.
He's kind of, you know, he may not be there for you the way that he used to, but don't trip.
We got you.
So it was more like that.
How are you as a kid, eight, nine, ten-year-old dreamer.
What were you like?
I was a cool kid.
I was, I was a cool kid.
funny, love to have fun, love to be around.
I was a regular kid.
I had a pretty good childhood, you know, from a kid.
As far as what, you know, my family could provide.
I didn't grow up and, you know, it wasn't no abusive.
I mean, it was pretty cool.
So walk us through your teenage years.
What happens next?
So I came, all right, so I got off the porch when I was 12.
So 12 is when I, that's when I started learning more about.
what's going on outside of the home.
This is, at this time, I'm 12.
My brother is, he's 18.
And at this time, you know, that's a whole world of difference.
My brother is, he stepped up to be more of a father figure for me.
So all he could do is teach me what he knew.
At that time, my brother was selling, he was hustling,
and I picked up things from him and, yeah, began to implement it in my life.
So between 12, yeah, but at the age of 12, I started selling weed and it took it from there.
Where do you go from there?
So from there, I just learned, I learned from, it was different than it is now.
See, like the older OGs, like they taught you a little bit.
You know, it was a difference.
You had different, you had different, you had different rules that you had to, you know, you had to abide by.
So, you know, if Miss Maddie walking across the street and she carried her bags,
these are the OG to tell you, yo, go help her, what are you doing?
Or pull your pants up, or, you know, there was different codes.
So I was taught by the older dudes.
And, like, they used to literally, I got pictures.
I'm going to show you some pictures.
I got pictures like with the OGs.
They used to sneak me out and take me to clubs.
And at 12, 13 years old, I used to be up in the clubs and cooling because I absorbed so much from them.
And I had a little bit of maturity to, you know, I wasn't.
It was a little different.
But it was the fun times, man.
In the early 80s, it was different.
When men of respect was able to get in the clubs, whatever they wanted to do in the club,
they wanted to, how did they get a 12-year-old in the club?
I don't know, but they did it.
Do you wish that they didn't guide you down that path, looking back on it?
I'm not going to say that because everything that we went through,
everything that they taught me, everything that I've been through helped me to be the man that I am.
And I'm proud of the man I am.
I love the man I am right now.
So, no, I'm not going to say that.
you can only teach what you know.
And right and wrong is in the eyes of the beholder.
So if you're in a situation where you're dealing with a lot of poverty,
yet you're doing something to put yourself above that poverty.
To you, that's right.
So they're teaching me what they feel is right.
You understand?
If they were to knew something different,
if they would have knew more,
I think they would have taught me more.
But they taught me what I needed to.
No, actually, it carries on to this day.
They taught me how to hustle.
And I'm a hustler.
Did your mom notice that they were taking you out, exposing you to that life?
Sometimes.
Well, when she found out, so she'll find out.
She tried to throw me on punishment.
You know, it's the mom.
She'd do the basic mom thing.
She didn't.
There's not nothing she wanted.
So she had tried.
She sent me one time she had found.
So I'm about maybe 13, 13, 14.
15 years old. So we got a small little front porch with the two chairs on the front. And I end up, I'm coming home from school, but I lost my key. I left my key in the house. So I couldn't get in the house. Now I'm coming from school. I got the pistol on me. I got some work on me. I put it under like the little cushion under the chair and I doze off. When I wake up, my mom comes, what, what are you doing? Oh, I just doze off. She lets me in. I left everything there. She, when I goes upstairs to go take a nap, I wakes up. She kicking my. She kicking my. She's, she kicking my.
my bud, she calls my pop, she calls my brother, so she sends me out to go, basically she kicks
me out to go live with my father.
You got to get him, you got to get him.
So he stays on the east side.
I'm from the west side.
He stays on the east side.
And, yeah, when I went to go stay with him, that opened my eyes up to a whole other different
style of hustling, a different way of streets because I'm from the west side.
I learned it this way.
And now I'm out here on the east side, on Clinton.
I'm learning the way that they move, what they sell, how they hustle, what they talk.
That's how I learned Spanish, actually.
That's how I started learning Spanish over in the clan.
What was different about it?
It was a lot different.
The east side is bigger than the west side.
So on the east side, especially at this time, it was like a market.
It's right.
So it was more money.
It's a lot more money.
It's a bigger Spanish community where I was at, too, on this side of town.
it was a bigger Spanish community.
So a lot of my men, a lot of my friends
was Puerto Ricans.
And they taught me, like I said,
how to move in their area.
You got to move quicker.
You got to know who's who quicker.
You got to be able to get to the cars quicker.
It's a lot going on because it's a lot of traffic.
So if you miss a car that's slowing down looking for something,
somebody else going to snatch them.
Now you lost your money and getting in there.
So, you know, just a little differences.
When's the first time you get into serious trouble as a kid?
My first time I got in a serious trouble was with my right-hand man, rest in peace, foot.
I was just turned 16.
And we just was, my moms went out of town to Florida.
It was Thanksgiving Eve or something, somewhere around there.
And we was just doing young, dumb kid stuff.
And I ended up catching a robbery and assault charge.
Now what happened?
So what happened was it was a dude who came up asking if we had, if we had some weed.
So I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got some weed.
So he was like, yo, let me, let me get it.
Something like that.
And I just, we took the money.
I had a gun, took the money, and put out the gun, took the money from the dude.
Just something real, real younger and stupid.
So that was my first time.
We end up, we leave from around there, go around the corner,
and next thing you know, the police gun, the police chase us,
and end up catching us after a while.
So that's how we got the first charge.
Was that your first time ever doing something like that,
or was it just the first time you got caught?
That was the first time I got caught.
Did you enjoy doing that at that age?
Did you think it was cool?
We think we enjoy it, right?
We think we enjoy it because you get that adrenaline rush.
You think you enjoy it because you feel that, you know, that sense.
but is it really?
And remember, the mind is young too.
The mind at that time, 13 is nowhere near fully developed.
So even if I did think that I enjoyed it at that time,
that wouldn't have been the right way to kind of put it.
I would say that it gave me a rush.
You know what I mean?
It gave me a rush, and I didn't know how to categorize that.
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I didn't know what to do with that.
Were you in school still at the time
or did you leave school?
Yeah, no, I was still in school.
I was in school up until the time I got just my second arrest.
So with that charge, I end up getting probation and they end up getting terminated because I did the probation.
My second charge, I used to go out of town and hustle to provide myself while I was at school, right?
So I used to go either on the weekends or during summer.
So it was a small town called Geneva.
And on the summer of my 11th grade year, I go out there to hustle.
I end up catching a cell charge.
I was selling crack.
I ended up catching a cell charge.
It was small.
It was petty.
But the judge sentenced me to a one to three.
So I had to get it.
I was trying to get out because I'm like, I, I pass every grade.
I've been good in school.
And all I got is this one year.
It's not a large amount.
Like, no, we're going to give you a one to three.
So they gave me a one to three with a youthful offender.
adjudication. I came home after 12 months and 17. So when I came home at 17, I already knew at that point
that I'm not going to be a burger flipper. Like it's the McDonald's thing. I got to figure,
I didn't know what, but I knew that I wasn't the type to get a job. So I told my mom,
that was part of my conditions. I told my mom when I came home that I had a job working at a
store because I used to deal with the ARAPs too.
So they had stores.
I used to have them to make me pay checks and all this.
And also, like I said, I told my mom,
that I'm working at the store.
Inside this time, I'm hustling, though.
So in the spot, we had the crock pot.
And the crock pot, we kept the crack pot on.
So you keep the crock pot on.
So if the police run up in the spot, you throw the work in the crack pot,
it'll dissolve it.
So when I come home, I'm smelling like grease.
So mine, like, oh, boy, you smell like chicken.
Yeah, mine, I smell like chicken.
But it wasn't the kind of chicken she was talking about.
She just thought you were working.
She thought I was working.
I was doing different type of work.
I was hustling still.
What was your experience in the youth prison?
I didn't go to youth prison.
I went straight to adult prison.
So even though I was at 16, they sent me to, actually I went to Elmira, and I went to Shot Camp.
I did, I was locked up with 50s.
We did Shot Camp together.
I was in Eagles.
I forgot which group he was.
was in, but we was at around at the same time.
I ended up getting kicked out on my six-month-shot camp,
and I ain't care, though, because I only had a one or three.
So after that six months, it was like maybe nine or ten, nine months into my bid,
so I only had a couple more months and I came home.
How do you think that experience affected your future?
That experience wasn't bad because it taught me discipline.
I learned discipline through shock, but I was still,
I didn't learn my lesson as far as,
as far as how real prison could get.
I didn't get that part.
You know what I mean?
I got shot camp and then I got, I went to, I think,
I went to Gawanda, and then I came home from Gwanda.
So I didn't experience a deeper level of prison,
but it taught me the shot camp aspect taught me discipline
and things like that,
but it wasn't enough to teach me
that life lesson.
So what was your mindset when you came home?
My mindset was still to just, like, how I'm going to figure this out.
I never had the thoughts of being the biggest, the thoughts of being the best, the thoughts of,
I always just wanted to figure it out.
You know what I mean?
I always tried to figure, I was trying to figure things out based on what I had in front of me,
based on what was allowed, you know, to be there,
to be at my access with my situation,
me being a young man in the inner city, you know,
what options do I really have?
You know, do I, can I go to school?
Yeah, I can go to school.
But that school is going to cost money.
It's going to, or if I do get funding to go to school,
it's still going to take years before I can get into the profession.
What am I going to do at the first of the month when these bills is due?
and those were the questions that I was trying to answer.
Deep down, what do you want to do with your life?
Even though you were weighing your options,
you must have had some thought of what you want your career to be or your future?
Yeah, I was going to, when I came home, I was going to open up a car audio electronic store.
So I love systems, I love cars and stuff like that.
So I wanted to open up a car audio electronic store.
My block is Chilin.
I'm from Chalai.
I was going to open it up on that block and I ended up getting arrested again.
What happened?
Yeah, I got arrested again.
This is your third arrest now.
Yeah.
I got arrested a few times.
You just beat a lot of cases.
So, yeah, this time I end up getting arrested again.
I think that might have, I don't remember what the drug charges, shooting charges, something stupid.
But, you know, we always have dreams and hopes, but we don't.
And when I say we, I'm just speaking like the average person in the hood, right?
So if I have a dream and I have hopes, it's beautiful, but I still don't even know about a business plan.
I still don't know about funding.
I don't know how to take this hood money that I got and turn that into the ability to get credit or I don't know.
You know, we don't know these type of things.
So the only thing we could do, if this costs $100,000, we got to try to hustle up $100,000 cash.
and that ain't the way to go because
that makes it harder
to try to do it that way.
Did you think about college or now?
Yeah, yeah.
So, dang, that's enough.
I was going to go to college.
Before I got arrested for the 25-year bid
for my big bit, I was going to go.
I actually took my placement exam and everything.
Yeah, I was going to start college.
I was going to go to MCC, Moro Community College.
What were you going to study?
Business management.
and what was the other one?
Business management.
I can't remember what the other one.
I know business management was my mate,
was the one that I was,
that's what I was really going for.
Was that because of your mom
or you genuinely wanted to go to college?
I always liked the school.
So it was, it was, that was me.
I always liked the school.
I always like to learn.
I always, that's to this day.
I love to learn.
That's one of the things I think that saved me on my,
you know, on my biz
was that I just liked to learn
instead of getting the bullshit, I pick up a book.
So what ends up happening?
Why don't you go to college?
I don't go to college because I got knocked.
I got knocked in June 21st, I got arrested.
June 21st, 2000.
So I got arrested.
I was set up.
So it was a longtime friend of family end up setting me up.
It was a drought in Rochester in 2000.
I ended up getting set up on a drug charge.
and it was originally state.
So I was set up for a few cell charges, 63 grams, which is the 62,
and a couple of other cells of half ounces, whatever,
through the confidential informant.
The feds, when they ran to my house, they found some work in the gun.
I'm at the park when I was made the cell.
Long story short, the feds picked the case up and made it federal.
Now, the feds have what's called Project Exile.
Project Exile is if you meet certain criteria, if you're convicted, if you possess a firearm
and furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, then the feds is allowed to pick the case up from a state.
They said that because the firearm was in proximity to the drugs at the house that they had the reason to pick it up.
Now, what Project Exile does is it gives you much limited.
through your prison sentence and it sends you to prison outside of where you're from so i'm from
ratchezton new york you're not gonna i never did a day in rochester was always in pennsylvania or the prison
federal prisons throughout so um with this case right here i end up getting so they basically i didn't
get a plea so they wanted me to cooperate so it wasn't in my paperwork they said uh we can have you
home my son was nine months old when i got arrested on this case they said we can have you home to
son by the time you finish, I mean, by dinner time, or if not, you won't see him until
he finishes college or his first prison sentence.
This is what they tell me.
So long story short, I told him, you know what I mean, call my lawyer.
Of course, I won't cooperate.
I end up getting 25 years.
How do you make that decision, or do you even take the second to think about it when they're
throwing your son into the mix?
Yeah, you take a second to think about it, right?
I was raised different, right?
And it wasn't an easy decision.
It wasn't an easy decision, but it was the only decision.
You know what I mean?
I was raised when you accept responsibility for what you do wrong, right?
So even though somebody set me up, he was wrong, but the buck has to stop with something.
I'm not going to put your life in danger.
You have a perfectly good life, and because I did so I'm wrong, now I come in.
and upturn your life.
You know what I mean?
I may not have knew how much time I was into,
but I knew what I was into.
I knew what I was doing.
So if I knew that and if I understood that,
then the way that I was raised,
the way that I am, as a man, as a man integrity,
I can accept responsibility for what I do.
I got to do it.
Would you have wanted your son to make the same decision?
I wouldn't want my son to be in a position
to have to make that decision.
Right?
So before you even have to make that,
I'm going to make sure
and I was part of my thing
throughout my whole bed
he won't have to make a decision like that
if I have
it's a horrible sacrifice
I didn't have my father there
for me when
at times when I needed him
right
I always said when I have my son
I was going to be there
but the universe works that way
so even though they took me
I still had to figure out my best ways to be there
so with him
my number one priority is to show him what a stupid mistake it was for me to even get involved in this stuff.
That was just stupid.
And he got that and he get it.
So, yeah.
Now, how are they able to dictate where you're going to go at the court level not being allowed to serve your time in that area?
I thought the Bureau of Prisons is a separate entity from the courts.
So, again, it goes with the way that Project Exile works.
So they call it Project Exile.
And the Exile, of course, is to exile you out.
So, number one, I don't, New York don't have, we don't have federal prisoners.
We don't have prisons anyway.
But that specific, it wasn't a bill.
For a lack of better terms, I'm going to say agreement between the state and the feds.
For that specific agreement, the thing was to, the agreement was to, um, the agreement was to,
give you a much length of your prison sentence
and to sentence you away from home
to exile you out of Rochester.
Now the gun, you weren't home at the time
when they raided your house,
so how did they hit you with the gun?
Yeah, it was a lot of controversy.
It was a lot of bull, right?
So at the end of the day,
now I was in the park.
The gun was in a spare bedroom.
The spare bedroom,
my son's mother was in a whole other part of the house
when they ran up in the house.
but they needed something.
So what they did was they said that it's constructive possession, basically.
Even though I didn't have the door was closed.
It's a long story short, but I don't want to make it argumentative.
But what they do is they'll make sure that they have enough leverage to see what
breaking point, where your breaking point is at.
What they did for me, they took my youthful offender adjudication.
Now, in the state, if you get a, if you,
you get a conviction and you get a youthful offender that the youthful offender is adjudicated.
That means that the conviction is vacated and it's replaced with adjudication,
meaning that you don't have a felony on your record.
What the feds did with me is because I wouldn't cooperate,
they took my youthful offender adjudication and used it as a prior adult felony conviction.
So that gave them, by them doing that,
that allowed them to give me an 851 enhancement,
which means that it doubled my sentence.
So my mandatory minimum for the drugs went from,
10 years to 20 years because of that enhancement.
And I'm the first person that they ever did this to.
It was United States for the Sanchez.
It was the first time that they ever used this to double a sentence, you know.
But it was just all leverage.
It was just to be used for leverage.
So if there was no gun, how much time do you think you would have got?
Or it would have been a state case to begin with there?
It would have been a state case.
Yeah.
It could have been anything from probation at the most of two to four or something.
Yeah.
And there was no one that could have just claimed the gun, or were they just dead set on it?
It would stick into you?
Yeah, it was just dead set on everything being mine.
Yeah.
So do you go to trial or do they eventually give you a plea?
Yeah, I went to trial.
So I ended up going to trial in 2003, I blew trial.
So I blew trial, I ended up getting 20 years for the drugs, five years for the gun.
How long do these trials last in a case like this?
My trial was about
It wasn't that long
It was about a week
About a week long
Because it wasn't an intricate case
I didn't have a conspiracy
I just got some cell charges
The cell charges that they
Had that directly dealt with the
Confidential informant
They dismissed those
Because they said
Well we got enough
The last cell that you made
Was it is enough drugs
So they got threshold
The feds got thresholds
Five grams or more
It triggers a mandatory minimum
10 grams, excuse me, 50 grams or more triggers a mandatory minimum.
At that time, I was under the old 101 Cracked a Powder Law.
So my mandatory minimum was for, I served a 62 and I think they had another ounce.
It was between 50 and 150 grams.
With that, that threshold right there, the mandatory minimum is supposed to be 10.
But because they gave me my youthful offender, it was 20.
And then they added the gun.
consecutive, which made it 25 years.
So what happens after the trial?
You got found guilty and then do they transport you?
Are you in the county jail or a detention center and then you go to the next prison or what happens?
So after the citizen phase and everything, yeah, we went to, I went to, there was a detention center, Batavia
detention center they sent me there and then they sent me to the first place my first place that i
went to was uh school kill school kill uh and mckeen i mean excuse me wait a minute my bad my first place
i went to was mckeen is mckeen in pennsylvania you've heard of mckeen yeah i've heard of mckeen
what is that a medium it's a medium okay yeah it was a medium so that was the first place i went to
was mckeen um young 23 young still wild um
My mind is not, my mind is not where the transition is going.
So my mind is not even, my mind is still on being while, being young.
So I was still going through a lot of that, going through the process of losing people,
people falling off, you know, stuff like that.
What surprised you the most about the federal system compared to the state?
Because you had already spent time at the state.
Mm-hmm.
What surprised me the most.
There's people from all around the world.
You know what I mean?
There's people from all around the world.
That's what surprised me how many different people from around the world was in one place.
Not just the United States around the world.
The feds, you got people from everywhere.
You see, because you're known by the last three numbers,
upstate New York is 05, or, excuse me, Rochester is 055.
You might see somebody with a 183.
Man, where are you from?
from Salvador, you know what I mean?
And that was different.
What were you thinking going into that sentence after you got the time and, you know, you're in there?
I was thinking it was over, man.
25 years, how do you process that?
Right.
So I was on the earth for 23, on this earth for 23 years at the time.
You sentenced me to do more time in prison than I spent living on this earth.
What the hell is this?
So how do I process that?
How does this work?
You know what I mean?
What do I have to do to survive this week, let alone the 25 years?
You know what I mean?
It's a very, very rough thing to process.
And then you start to look at the people that's in there, the crimes that they have.
Man, it's just a lot of the process.
What do you think kept you going in those first few days?
in weeks and months, was it the fact that you could potentially have an appeal because you
went to trial or was it something else?
As I look back on it, I see it's storm cold resilience.
I'm a dog.
I'm a dog.
I don't give up.
I don't back down.
I don't give up.
I don't quit.
That's just in me.
That's me.
I'm a beast.
I ain't never been knowing to quit.
I ain't never been known to give up.
So when I look back on it, I just see that it was the dog in me that, you know what I mean?
There's times where I wanted to give up where I wanted to, you know, I'm not.
You're gonna rest, but you ain't quitting.
So with me, it was just the resilience I always had,
that, you know, the knowing that I'm gonna make it.
I don't know when, I don't know how, but I'm gonna make it.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna.
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Seasite for details. I'm going to get through this. I'm going to figure this out.
Did you have a plan for how you're going to do your time?
Not at all.
Were you hot-headed and violent or were you more reserved laid back?
I went through all the phases. Started off hot-headed and violent.
realized that it ain't the place.
So my first, when I was in McKean,
they had tobacco.
So they started selling tobacco,
then they stopped selling tobacco.
Tobacco became a high commodity.
So I,
it was somebody who had a bunch of tobacco stash,
like 250 pouches.
Each pouch was like $250.
Man, I'm going to get that.
Now, these dudes was men of respect, right?
These dudes was men
that carried itself, you know, the right way.
I'm young.
And it's just like in the streets.
In the streets, I could be that man that's feared.
I could be that man that have respect.
But if a little kid or a younger person that don't know me and that's thirsty enough
and he see this chain or he's coming for it.
And that's what my mind said, I mean, I ain't trying to hear.
None of that, man.
He got all them pouches up in that room.
I'm going to get it.
So I set up a plan with me and my man's to get him.
we end up getting them, but it costs us,
we end up getting into like a huge brawl,
like eight on eight, you know what I'm saying?
And that end up sending me to the penitentiary.
Right away they bounce you from medium to penitentiary?
Yeah, yeah, from that, from that right there,
that incident that sent me straight to the pen.
All right, so tell us about that brawl, what happened?
So it was crazy.
They found out that I took the tobacco.
so they had formed, they had already put the plan together that they was going to run down on me.
I'm playing cards.
I'm, um, I'm playing, uh, poker.
I ain't really too much tripping.
Like I said, I'm young.
I'm young, hot-headed.
So the one dude just so happened when I'm looking up, I've seen the one dude eyes the way that he went.
So I got up as I got up, I knew it was something as I got up.
I seen his aggression.
And we just popped.
We popped and we fighting.
His man's coming and try to jump in.
My man see all this going in.
They jump in because it started off, like I said,
with they knowing that they was going to do with me not knowing.
So it was one on just me and him fighting.
And then it just spiraled.
Next thing, you know, I got one of my friends
he jumped off the top tier on the next person
and stay over there wild.
It was just crazy.
We fight, so I was, we fight.
I don't know, I would get done fighting.
I told the COE, he got me here and come to say,
take me to the war of the farmer.
Let me get some of the tree.
I was so thirsty.
But yeah, we was wild.
It was, it was stupid.
Now, were you running with a New York car at that point?
Yeah, so Rochester.
So Rochester, in the affairs, it's really ain't too much.
You know, the New York car is New York car.
You got upstate.
You got the city.
We are, you know, we all together.
So I had a lot of friends, and they didn't know what I did.
They just know that I was fighting.
You know what I'm saying?
Now, was that your first time in solitary in Seg?
That's my first time?
Yeah, that might have been.
Nah, because I, well, in the feds, yeah.
That's my first time in solitary in the feds, yeah.
How did you feel about that?
You ain't tripping.
When you first go down, remember, it's going to be a whole bunch of other people that's
going into the hole, too.
So you get to the hole, and then you're talking,
yo, you good?
Yeah, man.
You could.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
You know, that was crazy.
Yo, and then you talk in it.
You just, no matter what, you find a way to adjust.
You know, you find that way to adjust it.
If you have that mentality, right?
Because there's some people who don't have that mentality,
and I've seen literally people hang up in the hole, kill themselves.
You know what I mean?
They didn't have that ability.
So it's not that everyone has it.
Luckily, I had it.
How long were you in the hole for before they transferred you?
For that one, maybe about probably about four, about four or five months.
About four months.
They stretched you out.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And do they give you like a hearing with DHO and all that?
Went through all out.
They gave us the incident reports.
Excuse me, gave us the DHO hearing, gave us the sentence in.
And then after the sent us in is when they put the paperwork in.
So I don't remember how much time I got for that incident.
Just said they gave me 60 days in the box.
But I was already down there for 60 days.
So that's two months.
And then the two months that they give you.
And then after that, they put your paperwork in.
So it's going to be about another month or two months before you get up out of there.
Were you afraid to go to the penitentiary?
Is it fear?
I'm not going to say I was afraid.
Nah, I wasn't afraid.
But I did fear the unknown.
but I wasn't afraid.
I wasn't afraid to where it was anything that would make me,
you know, check in the PC or move in a way that's not befitting to me.
I wasn't that type of afraid.
Were there guys in the shoe already telling you what it was going to be like?
I can't remember too much, but I pretty much guarantee you
that I probably talk to somebody in that because in the hole,
you always ask questions about places you've never been.
So I'm pretty sure I ask questions about, you know, what the pen was like or whatever.
Like when I go to the whole hour, I ask questions about what the low was like or what the camp is like because I never made it.
You know what I mean?
So, yeah.
How long does it take to get to the medium to the pen?
Like once you leave the medium?
For disciplinary reason?
No, for just the transit aspect.
Did they put you through diesel therapy?
Oh, no.
They didn't put me through diesel therapy.
They sent me straight to USP Islandwood.
So I went from McKin to USP Islandwood.
Just on the bus, no flight to or anything?
Yep, no, just straight bus.
So we went to USP Islandwood.
That was a whole different thing because in the medium,
you got the fence with the razor wire.
And that pen, you got a wall.
That's it.
You got a wall.
You got razor wire.
You ain't seeing nothing on the other side of that wall.
And when you go through there, now you know it's different.
What was different about it besides the wall on the fence?
The level of respect, everything.
So that's where I learned more about respect.
That's where I learned about, you know, I started to look and see how men moved.
Learn more about the politics in prison.
I'm coming to the pen for doing something that I, you know what I mean, that wasn't the brightest thing to do.
You know what I mean?
So it's time to, and now I'm about.
mid-20s, and so now I started looking at things and people different.
And I was able to be around and see some good men, you know, shout out to Guy Fisher,
shout out the prince.
These dudes was, you know, men that was already into their bid when I came in.
So whether I just seen them and passed in or spoke to them or, you know, I get to see
how they moved.
And that shows a lot, you know, that taught a lot as well.
comes up to you first when you get off the bus and you got one to the pen?
Nobody come up to me.
When you got out the bus, I went to myself.
I mean, I went to my unit.
They tell you what unit you is.
You got your bag.
I mean, you got whatever you got.
They tell you what unit you're in.
So once I got to my unit is where, you know, people must start to approach you or whatever.
And who approached you?
I can't remember.
So I'm pretty sure that it was somebody approached me and asked me where are you from, right?
I'm from Rochester.
With me, it was a lot of different because my name is Juma, right?
So the Muslims think I'm Muslim.
And it's, it's, it's, I was a little while, so the gang members of women, you know what
mean, being there, but I never, I've never been, the whole time I've been in prison, I've never
turned gang member, I never switched religions, I never, I stayed Juma the whole bit.
Why do you think that was?
Because it's all I knew.
I think, and it's not for everybody, but for a lot of times, people, they go to either a gang or a different religion because they're, they need, they're missing something, right?
They need, they need some type of security.
They need some security.
A lot of people get into gangs because they need security.
They don't feel safe.
I've seen, of course, that countless times as well as religion.
And if you don't feel that you can handle this prison bid by yourself, then you need to have 10, 20, 30 people with you.
And unfortunately, some people, yeah, that's why they, that's why they either switch religions, turn gang members.
And it always end up bad because it doesn't happen organically or truthfully.
It doesn't happen because this is what you really want.
You have an ulterior motive for doing it.
So I always see that stuff in the bad.
Do you think that time in solitary
made you settle down a little bit going into the pen
or were you just as wild?
Yeah, it made me settle out a little bit, just a little bit.
But it don't matter because soon as, I mean, at that age, right?
As soon as you get out the hole, you back, you know what I mean?
You back in the mix.
It's not, it wasn't enough to deter anything.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
So being in the hole combined with going to a,
a different place, a more serious place, it helps, you know, you definitely pull your
antennas out and you definitely start to see things different either that or you're just going
to be a knucklehead. So those were the times where I was starting to shape how my bid was going to go.
I didn't know how my bill was going to go, how I was going to be, I didn't know who I was. I
didn't know who I was. I smoked weed every day, all day in the streets. I kept a pistol. I kept
staying in trouble. I didn't have time to learn myself. So now I'm starting to learn who I am.
you know what I mean
and that couple with
you know I learned that I was
that I was pretty good at chess
I learned that I could write
while I was in
in the whole
for that charge going to the pen
is when I started writing
on my first book
so
with that
I was reading a book
and I didn't say the name of the book
because it was an alright book
but with this book
the character
it was a character
and the character in this book
was a killer
but he was one dimensional
like he would stay mad
or
You know, it was just nothing to.
And I'm like, dang, like, my man's, like, we out here in the streets.
We might wild, but we still go to the club.
We joke.
We laugh.
We have fun.
There's still life to people.
And that's what made me start writing on my first book.
Yeah, and that's what it started.
Now, the politics and the pen compared to the medium, what's that like?
Is there different, like, inmate rules?
Yeah, it's more serious.
So everything is extreme independent.
And the pen is extreme because you're dealing with extreme men.
You're dealing with men.
Man, something ain't never going to go home.
I had my man Joker.
He told me one time, he said, yeah, man, I got four life sentences.
My wife got two.
You feel what I'm saying?
I've had people to tell me, yo, show me how much time you got.
Man, I got 25 years.
25 years.
Man, you're all right, man.
What you mean?
I'm right.
Man, I'm here to the sunburnout.
I got letters.
You feel what I'm saying?
So it's a difference when you see that.
when you see that it could be so much worse,
you start looking at your blessings a little different.
It helps split your life in perspective.
Absolutely.
You start realizing that damn you got a future.
And they're telling you that.
When you walk in the yard, I'm walking the yard with some G's,
and they say, yo, listen, kid, you got a future head.
Why would you sit here and be involved in this when you're going to go home one day?
To me, I don't see me going home.
How do I see me going?
I'm 23 years.
I got 25 years.
I'm gonna be an old man
cripple when I go home
and they're saying,
nah, that's not it.
Yeah, when, go on.
No, go on.
No, just gonna say because they've been there.
When you get your first, you know,
paper from your case manager,
does it say how much time
you're looking at off those 25 years?
Yeah.
So you're talking about what's your,
your good time and everything?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like before you lose it from violence
or anything like that.
Yep.
So mine was,
my original release day was 2021,
right i got arrested june 21st 2000 for 25 years i did i would have had to do 21 2021 but i lost all my
good time i lost all my good time except for like a couple months so my release date was 2025
and then i had 10 years supervised release which uh would have made my official off date 2035 so even
going into prison you know before you got into the fights and lost your good time you're still looking at 21
20 years.
Yeah, at the very least, I had 21 years.
I was going in without getting in no trouble, right?
My release was 2021.
That's hard to process.
Man, that's quick.
Now imagine this.
So you got DHO, right?
I remember one time I went to DHO for a shot.
And whatever the shot was, this man took six months of good time.
So six months is 180.
days of earned a good time.
That took me eight years to earn that good time.
He took eight years of earned good time away in one swipe.
I'm taking six months a good time.
So for those whole eight years that I spent in jail,
trying to do the right thing and getting a good time,
he took it away in one swipe.
That's what it makes you say,
fuck it.
Fuck that, fuck you.
Now, you know what I mean?
That a turn.
I've seen that turn people.
Give us an example.
where he took so much good time from a person
and they didn't have anything else to look forward to,
now they're going to wild out.
Right?
Now I'm going to do what I got to do because there's nothing.
What else you're going to do?
You're going to sit me back in the hole?
You're going to put me in jail under the jail?
You're going to build it.
There's nothing else you can do.
So once you start to be so malicious
to where you start taking away,
the one thing that the one thing that every prisoner want is freedom.
So when you start pulling away from them freedom days, just because you have that ability to do that, you know, that.
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What do you think is the most popular age in these pens while you were there?
Like what makes up the majority of the group age-wise?
I'm going to say, that's hard.
It's kind of, I would say two ranges between the 20s and 30s and older.
Right.
So it's a mixture.
Now are the older guys not getting in trouble?
Well, the older dudes is the ones that's been there for so long, right?
They're not getting as much trouble.
They've been there for so long.
The younger dudes is the one that's getting in trouble.
And then you got different places like D.C.
D.C. they pick up every charge.
So, and these new laws or whatever you want to put that, they implement in the feds,
they allow them people, they allow them charges to become federal easily, easier.
So now you got dudes that's just coming in there with a gun.
Before in the feds, you know, you got to get a recall.
You need to do something, a crime against the federal government or interstate commerce.
Now it's as simple as you having a gun that you didn't buy, a legal gun.
fell in the possession of a firearm, the feds, in certain states, the feds have a right
to pick it up, right?
So you got kids coming in 21 years old with a gun charge.
He ain't never had nothing.
So, yeah, it messes it up.
Do you feel, looking back on it now that those early days in prison went by fast or dragged
out?
It just went, right?
So I can't say it went faster or it went slow.
It just went.
Those days I wish that it would have went faster.
There's days that I beg for these days weeks ago.
And then some days where I'm like, dang, I go to bed already.
So it just went.
You know what I mean?
How long do you stay at Allenwood for?
Three years.
Two and a half years.
Why do you leave Allenwood?
So I was able to get my points back down.
So if you stay out of trouble for 12 months, you get your points.
down. I was out of trouble for the most part,
but not all the time. But I stayed there for two and a half years. I got my points down.
I went back to a medium. And that's where I went to,
that's when I went to McKeon.
Was it hard readjusting to a median?
Yeah, it was. And I didn't realize it. My mind had became conditioned to the ways of
penituary. No nonsense. Now I'm not, now I'm no nonsense.
You know what I mean? And I'm, I'm, I'm,
I'm militant.
I'm going to shoes to prison.
I mean, to the shower with my shoes on.
And I got, you know what I mean?
The things that I've learned from this place that kept these men alive is what I took
because I want to be alive.
I want to stay alive.
You know what I mean?
I want to leave out of these doors.
So I took these things with me and began to just.
Remember, prison is an artificial environment.
Nothing real about it.
There's nothing real about it.
So whatever means that you have to.
used to survive, that's what you have to use.
And for each person is different.
You know what I mean?
For me, my survival is to make sure that I keep myself, that I protect myself.
You know what I mean?
If that anything happened, then I'm more in the offense than I'm on the defense.
So, yeah.
How do guys feel when you're leaving the pen to go to a medium?
Because I'm sure guys find out, right?
Yeah.
So I think that that's more like on the type of person.
in the U.S. too. Like with me, they was happy. I was a younger dude. So I had a friend,
shout to my man Flex. He was the best friend in case of Detroit. He was a writer. And he
used to always tell me, like, man, like, you got to get out of here. I don't care where you
go. Get out of here. Because once you get out of here, you're going to go to a place that got
just a little more freedom. And you're going to find ways to make it work.
And then when you get out of here, you're going to go.
And then one day you're going to go home.
He was never going home.
And his whole thing was get out of this place, get out of this penitentiary.
And for a long time, like I said, I didn't understand even that.
He understood that more than me, you know.
What's your mindset when you get back to the medium?
So when I get back to the medium, it was just, like I said,
just carrying the things that I learned from the penitentiary.
and that's it just to make sure nobody play with me.
Nothing, nothing major.
My mind ain't on, you know, too much on the future.
It's just this what it is.
Yeah, I'm just adjusting to my environment.
You know what I mean?
So my mind, yeah, my mindset was just basically at the end of the day
was just make sure you are, you know, you stand on who you are.
What would a typical day be like for you at that point?
Typical day wouldn't be bad.
At that law library, you know, at that time just coming in, fresh in, I always worked.
I was heavy in and working out, law library, and on my book, writing.
You know, I try to stay in my lane, stay doing my thing.
Now, I'm a hustling.
So I always hustle.
No matter where I went to, any, the penitentiary, medium, every single place, you know,
Juma for either I had a blackjack table, poker table.
I saw white lightning.
I actually learned how to make white lightning from an Aryanation do in the pen.
Yeah, can you explain how to make that?
So white lightning is, so you got two different types of drinks.
You got Hooch, which is made out of either fruits and sugar and water, or you can actually
use potatoes, sugar and water.
And people actually drink it.
like one quart was $10.
So you get a quarter of this juice, this wine.
It's nasty.
But it gets drunk for $10.
Or the top tier is white lightning.
White lightning looked like this.
It looks like, it looks just like sarat.
So it tastes like it.
So what happened was I used to, like I said, I was making hooch, selling hoops.
That was my hustle in the pen.
I was in myself, some tobacco I came.
So I bought a pouch of tobacco, right?
So I met myself bagging up the tobacco, and I hear, boom, some rumble.
It's the cell next door to mine.
I'm like, what the fuck?
Damn, police come and I'm finished.
You know what I mean?
I'm going to be finished.
So I goes outside and I stands outside of their door.
I didn't look in his door, but I stood outside their door and I leaned my, like, my foot,
the base of my foot against his door and prop myself up like I'm just chilling against a wall,
but I'm chilling their door.
the reason I did that because I didn't want
they fight to spew outside
if one of them spiel outside the police come in
we all finish right so
boom I'm standing back there like I'm just chilling
they fight and get it on once it stopped
I just leave go back to myself
sit down finish bagging on tobacco
so a couple minutes later
I get a knock on the door
so see the white dude come
he comes in he says yo
not for nothing man but
why you can't why you why you went to
my door
I said, I didn't want y'all fight to spiel off.
Y'all fight spew out.
I gave him the story.
Now, I'm finished.
I'm back in the back.
He said, yo, I appreciate that, bro.
I said, man, no problem.
He said, I know you make, you make that hooch, right?
He said, yeah.
He said, you want to learn how to make lightning?
Hell yeah.
He said, bet.
Next time, before you do it, he gave me a list.
He told me how to make my hooch.
And he said, when this is done, you let me know.
Long story short, we didn't have light switches.
we had just the square where the light switches used to be,
and they had a plate over there.
But we could jimmy it, open it up, and get to the wires.
Long story short, he taught me how to make, like, we in there,
we in there got my door sealed up with tape.
It's sweaty, hot as hell.
We ain't got no shirt on, black dude,
Arian Nation dude, and we in there work and make it white lightning.
And, yeah, he taught me that.
So that's how I learned how to make white lightning.
But what's the actual process?
How are you doing it?
Oh, so the process, my bad, the process,
Once you make the hooch, you let that ferment for about six days.
Just say you use, damn, you use about, what I used to use?
Three pounds of sugar for every gallon, right?
Now you let that ferment.
Once that ferment is going to make an alcoholic, the hooch.
You take the actual hooch and now you're going to distill that.
So what we used to do is you take the hooch, you put it in some garbage bags.
You put a stinger inside of the hooch.
You take a tube, put that inside the bag with the stinger and the hooch.
Once the alcohol vapor is going to go through that tube and into a bag, a cooler
bag, because you're going to put that where it's ice at.
The alcohol is trying to find a cooler spot.
So it leads through the tube to go find the cooler spot.
And so the only thing that the water, the liquid stays here, the alcohol vapor is going
inside.
So in this second bag, you're going to have a bag of pure alcohol.
And the white lightning is what
You would see the Mexicans
Like boiling it down and stuff
I'd see guys like that doing that
Boiling it?
Yeah, that's
Putting in like the honey
The honey bars
Yeah, the honey jars
Yeah
Right, so when they boil it
That's what you're doing
The stinger is you put it
Into the bag of the hooch, right?
And that boils.
When you boil that
It releases the alcohol vapors
Into the air
And it's captured it into the tube
And goes into a cooler spot
It's searching for a cooler spot
So that's when they was boiling it
That's what they were doing
And it's like crystal clear.
Clear, just like this.
Look just like this.
So I would sell a bottle of this right here.
This is, I think, $120?
And it's basically Baca?
Yeah.
That's crazy.
And you know what's great?
I'm going to see you some pictures.
So I actually started making the moonshine out in the streets.
It's called Levels.
So I partnered with a friend when I first came home and opened up a bar.
And I started making the levels.
I'm going to show you some pictures.
It went crazy.
Now, people that are civilians, they are always asking me, well, like, how do people actually make the money, you know, in commissary?
But then how do they turn that commissary into money on their books?
Can you explain that process for back then?
Yeah, sell stamps.
So in prison, you have your own, you have your own form of currency.
Currency comes in a form of stamps.
So the steps may not even have real value, right?
So it might be a stamp that's just a really rough shape,
but it still has value in general.
So jail, you use stamps as currency.
Each stamp is worth 25 cents.
So once you save a bunch of stamps, you got,
it's 20 stamps and one book.
So if I want to sell you 20 books and the books is going for $5 a book,
that's $100, right?
So you need stamps.
If you need stamps, I tell you,
send me $100 to my account.
or out in the streets and I give you 25 books.
So that's cool because you're going to need,
you need, like I said, it's count.
Stamps is, it's currency.
So if you need to buy an onion and pepper for your soup,
or if you need to buy a new t-shirt or whatever you need,
you're going to use the stamps to buy it.
You want to purchase stamps with your cash
so that you can buy things throughout prison.
You feel what I'm saying?
And I just knew people who buy stamps.
People who have tickets, football tickets,
they need a bunch of stamps.
So if I got 500 books, I sell them 500 books of stamps.
Now I got the money, put in my account.
Yeah, so I play dice a lot in prison, and I'd buy, you play with stamps.
You were shooting dice?
Yeah.
What kind of dice you're shooting?
Four, five, six.
Yeah, howdy-ah.
Do you play?
I'm gonna break you when it's over with.
All right, let's play.
I was playing with Matt the other day.
He lost 300 bucks to me.
Oh, yes.
Let me sure I got me a couple dollars.
I'm not got me a couple hundred dollars.
Yeah, we're going.
I'm going to get you.
I don't think so, man.
I'm good at the dices, man.
pop you in it.
All right, we'll play.
That's what I would do.
Dude, that got me through when I was at Fort Dix.
When I first got there, it's like the hood out there.
Yeah.
Stay in those little, like the prayer rooms or the little card rooms.
I'd sit in there till six o'clock in the morning.
But when I'd run out of stamps, I'd send, say, you know, 500 bucks to someone and you
gain a few extra books.
Right.
Because they want to discount it.
Yep.
And you have stamps that are, like, from the 80s.
People are just hoarding them.
And the macros, you can always tell a new mackerel versus an old mackerel.
Squishy.
Yeah, it's just like, it's liquid.
Yeah.
That's the grossest thing.
If one of those things opened up and it gets on your fingers.
It's horrible.
Stinked it up.
Yeah, man.
That's right.
Dice was, that's where I learned, man.
I was the only white boy in there playing.
Soon Dice.
Yeah.
I used to always want to get the four dick so bad.
It was one time, they told me, listen, if you just stay out of trouble for five months,
we're going to take.
Wherever you want to go.
Wherever you want to go.
We got, man, that fifth month I got in trouble.
This was at the medium?
This was the medium.
So what did you get in trouble for this time?
I used to get in trouble for.
So for the most part, I would get in trouble for not abiding by the rules.
So at this time, and when I say the rules, I mean rules that's in place to keep you submissive,
to keep you, you know, at bay, basically.
So at this time, I was into, you know, heavily in the writing of my book.
So I had met a friend from India.
He became my mentor, a guy named Akil.
So he became my mentor.
And I actually, all right.
So when I finished my first book, I had sent it out to a few different companies to get signed, right?
They sent me the contracts, and I wasn't really feeling it.
So at the end of the day, I decided to create my own company.
So what I formulated my company through prison, getting the paperwork snuck in, like one piece of letter by the time, sending it, writing it, send it out.
Once they got wind to it that I was starting an actual company, that's when the problems came.
So now they give me a shot for running a business.
I end up beating that shot because I found out that it wasn't actually running.
The shot is more for like people got stores.
side of the prison and stuff like that.
And then I kept going.
And once I kept going, now they're taking my stuff,
just sending me to the hole for small stuff.
I mean, little petty stuff.
And, yeah, so once they kept putting me in a hole for it,
they basically realized that I wasn't going to stop anyway.
And now, as I kept going,
now you've got to see what I'm saying,
good job, Samson.
You know what I mean?
Every now or then you're through,
because they know how much bullshit they put me through
just for me to do what I'm doing.
I'm doing something that's better in myself.
You know what I mean?
But y'all want to take my paperwork.
Y'all want to stop my mail from coming in and things like that.
And then you got some regular sales that see it and just say,
nah, man, he's like he really doing something different.
And, you know, they just throw you a little, man.
Fuck them.
Keep going.
What was your support system outside?
It was good.
So my mom held me down my whole bed.
My pops held me down.
I met my fiancé while in prison.
I met her in 2011.
And from 2011 since she's holding me down.
So my support system was pretty cool.
So when did they send you out of the medium again?
Or you just kept getting in trouble and never made it to a low?
I never made it.
So they kept you at that medium the whole time.
That's where I went home from.
I stayed in that medium.
So you're there a long time then?
Yeah, since 2000.
from 2008 I left the pen to 2019 when I got a media release.
Wow, 11 years.
11 years.
That's a long time.
You probably see a lot of people come and go, changes, staff.
Yeah, that was one of them.
Like my thing with people that come and go, when you come back, I really got too much to
save you know what I mean?
Because I'm fighting my ass off to get out there.
Every day I'm going out at a lot library and I'm doing paperwork and I'm sending this and I'm doing this and I'm dreaming to go home and you go out there and you fuck it up that quick, we're not the same.
Oh, so you would see a lot of people come back.
Yeah, yeah.
And when I see him back, I tell, no, like, we ain't the same.
You know who I thought you was.
You dig it what I'm saying?
So I don't, I didn't take that shit lightly because I wanted to go home.
At what point in your bid do you realize that you're not going to go back to selling drugs or crime and it's not the play.
in life.
Shit, when I started seeing what other people time was, so white collar cry,
I mean people, yo, my man, what's your charge?
Oh, I got fraud and, you know, for $1.6 million.
Or how much time you got?
You really want to know, yeah.
Two years, man.
Two years, I got 25 years for, I'm never selling drugs again.
That's it.
I don't need no more drugs.
This is not the future that I need.
I don't want this.
This is not the job I'm supposed to have.
I need, no, no, no.
I need to learn something different.
So once I realize that, like, you willing to, I got 25 years for the amount of drugs that I got charged with is less than my monthly bills.
The judge knew that at that time, right?
He knew this is a, we talk about $2,000 or $3,000.
The judge knew that he spent that in a month.
I ain't, I'm a kid in the streets.
Now as a grown man responsibility, that's monthly bills.
Right?
So you sentenced me to 25 years.
You sentenced me to do all that time in prison.
You made the taxpayers pay over almost $800,000
keeping me in jail for that.
So all that let me know is bigger than me.
And if this game is so much bigger than me,
if it's that much bigger than me,
I don't need to be playing this game
because this ain't the game
and I need to be playing
because I'm a pawning this game.
So at that point I realized
like something
something else got to get.
When do you realize
that there's an opportunity
to fight your case
and go home?
I've been fighting my case
since day one.
All my motions I filed myself,
pro se,
I've been fighting these,
I've been fighting them
since they said guilty
since I went through
three different lawyers
on my case
because they all tried
to give me to cooperate.
The last lawyer I went to trial with, he wasn't competent enough.
I didn't feel.
He didn't raise the issues that I asked him to raise.
And that's what made me realize, like, there's nobody going to fight for you like you.
Don't nobody wants you to come home like you want to come home.
They beat you in a game.
You don't know how to play.
Using language, you don't know.
You got to learn it.
So that's when I had to get in there and create new friends.
My new friends was the dudes in the law library.
I still hustled.
You could trust them, though?
Well, trust who?
The people in the law library to show you the right way.
Yeah.
So, man, that law library is a bad motherfucking in prison, right?
So you got men that's trying to get the fuck out.
And, man, I learned something.
And everybody ain't the type that when I learn something, I'm a hoarding.
Some people are like, yo, bro, I learned this.
Check this out.
You know what I mean?
And once you...
I feel once you get to a certain point in prison,
you don't want to see nobody in prison
that don't deserve to be in there.
If you're not, you know,
I don't deal with hot people,
I don't deal with child molesters,
rapists.
You're a rapist, your child molested, you're hot.
There's no love for you, no mercy for you,
nothing to that.
Anything inside of that, man,
if it's a man fighting to come home,
then I want them to get home.
You know what I mean?
and do the right thing than I wanted to.
So you got people in prison like that.
They've seen a young dude in there with a lot of time, and they taught me.
I remember the first dude who taught me what shepherding was,
which is basically finding looking up a case and finding cases that's similar to yours in your circuit.
So I never knew with that.
They taught me, you know, prisoners just taught me how to go in there and find a case,
F2D, F3D, you know, going to these books and look.
and when they changed to computers,
it was the prisoners who taught me
how to use these things, you know?
So, nah, I learned, man,
I learned everything through the prison.
The ones who helped me captive
and teach me shit.
They ain't, the fuck they did.
They didn't this shit for me.
They ain't want me to win at now one point.
It was, I mean, don't get me right,
there was a few, there was a few correctional officers
who was, you know, that was,
there was official, they saw that, you know,
I was official, and they wanted the best
for a dude like me,
because they saw the fighting struggle.
But for the most part,
nah, I was what they didn't want.
I'm fighting for freedom.
I'm making money.
I'm writing books.
I'm teaching classes.
And nah, what's you doing?
So, because prison is about recidivism.
They want high recidivism
because it's generational jobs.
They wife worked there.
The kid is going to work there.
They got the job from their uncle.
So the more people that come back,
the more that they're going to ensure their employment is there.
And now you got a dude who,
They don't look like he's coming back.
We got to at least, we got to, we got to,
nah, we got to do something
at least fuck his mental up.
So they used to do all kinds of stuff
to try to play mental games with you
and break you mentally and all that.
I'm a bad motherfucker.
What do you think it takes to actually self-represent yourself
from within prison?
Believing in yourself, knowing who you are.
Once I knew who I was, I always believe in myself.
And with that pretty much it.
I don't think that it's not a tough criteria.
It ain't none of that.
As you know, you know, you can have, man,
old men who would do their bid with no problem,
young men who would do they bid with no problem,
old men who do they bill with a lot of problems,
young men who would do their bills with a lot of problems.
It's about how they carry themselves.
You know what I mean?
Do you think it helped speed up time
and kept you out of trouble those years?
Because you're constantly waiting
for the next motion to come in.
you're responding to it, you don't want to get put in the shoe and have to, it's probably
harder to fight a case from within the shoe.
Yeah.
But I did it plenty times.
Had to fight in the shoe.
That's, they ain't nothing going to say.
Once it's go time, if it's something that's got to happen, I don't even, you can't think
about it.
I can't think about my girl.
I can't think about my son.
I got to go.
I got to respond to the issue because it could cost me my life.
You know what I'm saying?
If I'm not proactive, I handle it.
an issue that come my way,
nah, he's going to handle it next.
And I'm not leaving, I'm not about to get scarred
in this place. I'm not about to lose.
So there's been plenty of times
where I've been, you know, in a situation
where I had to move at that moment
regardless of what the outcome may be.
But it don't mean you move reckless, right?
It don't mean you move.
I stopped moving reckless.
And when I stopped moving reckless
is when I started actually meeting better,
people in prison because you got really good men in prison and um when you dealing with just say if
it's a good person that's in prison right this person may be able to help me but if he constantly
see me dealing with this clown over there or arguing with this fool over there why would he want to
help me because i must have something in common with the clown or the fool that i'm dealing with
but if you see that you constantly trying to do things the better he's always always right and
working when he's speaking to someone he's always you know um looking at him with eye contact or
That gets attention as well.
And that happens.
So, yeah, I take care of yourself.
Now, when you're sitting in prison, say it's like year 10 and you're watching your son grow older,
are you ever thinking yourself, man, I wish I took that deal, I'd be home by now?
I never wished I would have rid it.
I never wish I would have.
This is my clothing line.
This is, I drew this in prison.
I drew this.
This was drawn before I put in it.
So this is moving silence.
Right. I don't want as much as I may hurt. Man, Jesus put itself on the cross and went through days of torture. I can handle this. Because I ain't that much torture. They feed me every day. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's bad and it's horrible. Man, I'm still working on creating the best relationship I can with my son. Right? And my mother and my father and my fiance. I'm still working on that.
So it wasn't that, I don't want to say it to seem light.
It was, man, one of the most impactful decisions that I made.
But the one thing that I can always, I have my integrity.
I can look in the mirror.
I can shave every day.
That means that I'm cool with the man that I'm looking back at.
My son don't have to look in fear.
Your daddy was a strongman.
Your dad made a bad decision, but he stopped it right there.
and then he came and made a lot of great decisions after that.
So I don't have sympathy for the rats, man.
I'm just be honest.
If you got yourself in trouble and you knowingly put someone else in trouble to get yourself out,
you're a coward.
That's coward move to me.
And especially if you ain't even, like the coward who set me up and do nothing with his life.
I could have been out there and been a millionaire.
You ain't even do nothing with your life.
You're a bum.
So for you to sacrifice a good man for your coward life
and you ain't do nothing what that's even worse.
Did you ever tell your son about that deal
while you're sitting in there?
Yeah, I tell my son, everything.
There's nothing my son don't know about me.
What was that conversation like?
Just a real conversation.
My son is very intelligent, very absorbent.
So I've had conversations with him
from everything from drugs to guns to,
to, you know, being set up by someone that you trust,
all these type of things.
It's not, I guess it came because I know so much about it,
I have to tell it to him in a way,
knowing that he don't know a lot about the street life.
But with my son, he knows a lot, but he's not involved
in the street life at all.
And for, but my son knows respect, my son knows integrity.
So I can speak to him and make him.
make him relate through those things right there.
As a man of integrity,
the first thing you're not going to do
is put yourself in a vulnerable position.
Don't make a dumb decision
to have you in a position like that.
You know what I mean? As a man of respect,
you don't have to deal with certain people.
You deal with people that you respect,
people that you admire, people that admire you.
These type of things.
That's what I break down to them.
And I'm even in the story that time.
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I tell them how I messed up in it, you know, where I went wrong.
Do you think if the government eliminated the cooperating aspect, there would be less crime?
Yeah, but there are other things that have to be implemented.
Because if people think that they could commit a crime and then just snitch on someone else, that kind of fuels it, too.
That's right.
It need to be other things implemented in it, right?
So there should be, if I was president, number one, ain't no, all that heavy, the heavy,
telling to get yourself to reduce sentence and stuff,
that stuff is out the window.
You got your charge, you got your cry, right?
And then certain things, I don't know,
certain things, you should be more,
not to be too much off subject,
but certain things just go hard.
Like, the rapist, right?
Caste them.
If you castrate one dude that raped the person,
guess what's going to happen?
What do you think is going to happen with the crime rate?
It's going to severely lower.
Ooh, it's going to go down.
Ain't nothing to talk about.
And then let him out of jail.
You got to do one year in jail,
and you're about to get your joint cut off.
He got to go out back out into that world.
You ain't got to do no lot of time going out there.
That's going to have, man, ain't nobody.
I guarantee you the world going to be so much safer.
I think what's crazy is they give you 25 years,
but then the average sex offender has like a five-year sentence in prison.
In the feds, I'm sure you've seen it.
Most of them have a five-year sentence.
They have to do something even crazier to get, like, that 10 to 15.
But the average is about five-year.
years. Man, I've seen one of the craziest things I've seen. I've seen a dude coming to jail,
right, and he killed three generations. It was the grandmother, the son, and the daughter in the car.
He got drunk, got in the car, crashed head onto them and killed three generations. And he got out
before I went to trial. Yeah, the man's daughter thing is fucked. It makes no sense. None. I said,
wow and the only victims of my crime is my family I was feeding I was feeding my family
I was providing for my family I didn't use the what I was I was this was the way I
this was the the the way that I did that I chose to provide my family was it right no
but was it out here was it deserving it did I deserve 25 years for that no I mean did
anyone die in the case you're saying not at all no so like I said only victims of my
crime was my family, but it's bigger than that, and I didn't know.
I didn't know about the war on drugs.
I didn't know about, you know, them having to meet their quotas for the mandatory
members and things.
I didn't know.
But here's what doesn't make sense.
You could sell drugs to someone and that person dies and you could get 20 to 25 years,
but you could get drunk, get in a car, and kill someone and get two years.
And get two years.
It doesn't make sense.
That's the same effect.
That's right.
But it goes in because the major difference is,
You're talking about drugs, alcohol.
Drugs is illegal.
Alcohol is actually pays the lobbies.
You know what I mean?
It fuels America.
So it's two totally different things,
which is why we know how bad alcohol is on us.
We know the effects that they cause on us,
but they won't, that's why, not to get up there,
but that's why they, alcohol is that world right now with cannabis.
Because cannabis is eating in the alcohol money.
Yeah, alcohol sales are down.
Yeah, alcohol sales down.
So it's all politics.
And that's what killed me.
I was a pawn in that game, man.
An unwilling pawn in that dumbass game.
So tell us how you got out of prison early.
What did that look like?
So in 2011, Barack Obama passed what's called the Fair Sentencing Act.
The Fair Sentencing Act is a bill that reduced the cracker powder ratio.
So to give you context, the old cracker, the feds had a,
of law is the crack to powder ratio
regarding sentencing.
If you get one gram of crack
is equal to 100 grams of powder.
So,
if you get caught with one kilo
of crack,
I mean,
of,
of,
powder,
it's equivalent to
10 grams of crack.
So one kilo, 10 grams.
Or is it 100 grams?
100 to 1.
1 kilo 10 grams.
Right?
Yeah.
So the law was severely different between the amount of time you give for crack versus the amount of time you give for powder.
The way that they got this was because it was a basketball player named Lynn Bias.
Lynn Bias had died from a drug overdose.
So Congress takes that and some other little research they did and said that crack was 100 times more dangerous than powder.
So now we're going to make it 100 to 1 as far as citizen side note Len Bytes didn't even die from crack
He didn't know about overdose from crack He overdosed from cocaine
So this will create a hundred to one law
So because I got arrested with about 70 grams that made my drug offense 10 years
Then the youthful offender 20 years and then the gun 25 years
So this law was in effect for years in 2011 Obama administration changed that law saying that it was racially
discriminatory that it affected minorities at a disproportionate rate. So they reduced it from
100 to 1 to 15 to 1. Now, under that rule, it would have made me up for a media release in 2011.
The problem is the Obama administration didn't make it retroactive. So because it didn't go
retroactive, meaning it only applied for people from that date of law passed forward, not from the
time passed before. So I languished in prison for another nine years. In 2019, December
2018, the Trump administration passed, they passed a bill to make the law retroactive.
That puts me up, it makes me eligible for a media release, but you still got to file your motion.
So I had to file a motion with the judge and show why I'm, why I should be released.
You know, my programs, me teaching classes, my punishment, this and that.
And three months later, I came home.
So I filed in December 2000.
No, the law passed in December 2018.
I filed my motion in January 2019.
I came home March 2019.
Does the government object to that?
Yeah.
Wow, they still try to fight it after all that time.
Still try to fight it.
And now, is it the same judge as your initial case?
Yep.
Wow, all those years later.
All those years, he's still there.
That's really interesting.
It is.
So now what are they saying to fight it?
What's some of the language they're using?
They just basically used in my prison history, right?
So the fact that I had numerous write-ups and, okay, and my argument was, yeah, I had numerous
writers, but let's not forget what we had.
We're in prison.
You're in a place where, you know, things are going to happen.
But the positive things, I had over 40 certificates of completion.
I got over, I've taught over five different subjects of classes.
I've published several novels.
I've stopped killing this.
I got document and stuff where I stopped people from getting killed.
And I saved lies.
One dude almost died in the cell.
You know, it was too many other good things.
So bottom line of the judge ain't even have a problem letting me out.
Do you see some people like at the same amount of time that just jack off their whole sentence
and don't try to strive?
They don't program.
They don't do anything because they give up hope.
And, you know, when that opportunity like yours comes along, they're not prepared for it.
Yeah, that happens a lot.
It becomes their reality, right?
When prison becomes your world, your reality, then you move according to that place.
That's what I call institutionalized.
So there's no technical definition to institutionalization if you look it up, right?
But my definition is when a person in prison holds the matters of prison to be more important than the matters out of the world.
So basically, like in prison, you remember how his chair is right here.
His spot is right here.
He got the phone.
Those things become important.
If you put your chair with that person's chair, he going to want to kill you because that's his spot.
That's his claim.
That means that that matter is more important than some stuff out in the streets.
My thing is to keep my family first.
My business is going.
My business that I'm working on in prison, my son.
Those are the things that's going to stay important.
I'm not going to have none of this.
I don't go fuck about that chair that mark.
Yeah, I have my chair that I have my spot.
But if you're sitting in, I'm not going to while out.
Don't disrespect me.
Don't disrespect my stuff.
But don't, I don't, I'm not gonna hold no extreme value
to anything that prison gave me because I don't want it.
So you released randomly one day after 19 years inside.
How does the prison prepare you for that?
For the release?
For the release.
Yeah, you get the call or the motion passes that you're to be released immediately.
What are they doing to help you?
Nothing.
Prison is not a correctional system, right?
It's not there to correct you.
It's there to house you.
You have people that has a job
and they're going to do what they need to do
within the parameters of their job to keep that job.
You might catch a straggler that's a good person
and want the best for you and do some extra stuff,
but don't expect, or if anyone thinks that prison is a place
for full rehabilitation,
that's not what it's built for.
That's not going to happen.
These correctional officers don't even get,
or not just the correctional officers,
employments for the Bureau of Prisons.
They don't even go through any type of mental health evaluation.
You don't know what type of mental position
that these people are in.
And then you send them in to deal with dudes
who do have mental issues,
dudes who do have stress issues.
They're not competent on how to handle these things
So you're putting that in there and you're telling you're giving them a position to say you are the leader over them.
Your job.
And these persons never been in that before.
So that right there creates a whole, you know, the ability for people to have fucked up mindsets.
For people to say, fuck it.
If they don't have that strong mentality, the next best thing to say is fuck it.
Do you go to a halfway house or no?
No, I can go straight home.
Any supervised release or?
Yeah, I had 10 years.
they reduced my
supervised my superpower release
from 10 years to 8 years.
And so are you still on it now?
No, I beat that.
I got off for that in three years.
Okay, good.
I beat that in three.
I mean, even that is excessive.
You know, they give you an excessive sentence
and then they give you 10 years too,
which you could get jammed up
for the silliest thing and go back as well.
Exactly.
And that's how it was.
Excuse me.
So my probation officer,
when I met my probation officer,
he's like, how you doing?
Well, go through the formalities.
I said, man, I'm doing good.
I wrote a book in.
jail. I got another book that I wrote. I'm about to release that soon. Oh, yeah, that's good.
I'm going to pissing this cup right here. If you violate this right here, you go to jail.
If you do this, you're going to jail. That was it. I'm like, damn. You know, he's serious.
Okay, hold on a minute. So it showed me that just like prison, you're not going to be able to
rely on the staff to get what you need. Prove them. Prove them wrong. Prove that you could do it.
And that's what happened. I started to prove it. And now, let me. Let me.
Let me rewind you.
I already knew I was having 10 years of probation, post-release supervision, right?
That was part of my sentence.
While in prison, when I, at that time, I thought I was doing the full 25.
I was already preparing for my release of probation.
So I was in a law library and studying early termination of probation.
In 2017, I had my motion already ready for getting off of probation in 2025 and beyond.
Do you find that probation officers are equipped to deal with someone that has served that much time inside?
Not most of them. I mean, 90% of them, I'm younger than my probation. I mean, older than my probation officer.
This dude younger than me. How can you know about that? You know what I mean?
He doesn't have the life experience you do. You don't have it, right? So even the learned experience is different than life experience.
So the things that they taught you in school about how to deal with a parolee or a person.
that ain't going to be nothing with hands up.
So the one thing that you want to do,
which is for most people that has a position of authority,
you want to try to use your position of authority as basically,
you're going to use that over my head.
You're going to use your position.
When anything goes left or go right,
it goes back to your position authority
or how you can do this or how you can do that against me
or how you can tighten up these rules
or how you can.
That's how it goes.
So what I realized is you just got accepted.
You ain't there to help me, man.
You ain't really there.
You ain't really trying to see me win.
And that's cool.
I'm not tripping.
I've been through that.
The streets ain't expect me to win.
You got a dude that was known for selling drugs
for hustling the robin dudes.
He'd come home, what you think he's going to be on.
So they didn't expect me to win, but I had to show him.
Nah, I'm a little bit different.
So even my probation officer, he might not expect,
but I showed him. I bust his
ass too. I got off in three years. I whipped
their ass. I beat him. I beat
him. It took me up about three years.
Y'all wanted me to have eight years. I did
three. I showed you that I did not need
to be supervised. There was no need for you
to supervise me. You know what I mean?
And that's calculated.
So you can't, if a
person of authority in any position
comes to help you, man, look at that
as an extreme blessing. But don't
count on it in order for you to survive
or in order for you to pass or succeed.
Don't count on that.
Calm on yourself.
Was there anything that was extremely difficult to acclimate or adjust to when you got home after that much time inside?
Man, coming home was fun as fuck.
Hell, yeah.
So when I first came home, when I first got out of jail, my girl came to pick me up in the car.
So she came to pick me up in the car.
We get in the truck, a rental car.
So I get in the rental car.
Jump in there.
We're driving.
I'm like, I'm trying to be tough.
She's going fast.
Baby.
You know, me in a bit, slow this motherfucker down a little bit.
He said,
you know we only doing 35, right?
I'm like, oh shit.
So I realized for 20 years,
the fastest I did was three miles an hour
when I jog.
Now I get in this car, I feel like I'm whiplash like this,
and we're doing 35.
So that was one thing.
Know what I do now?
So for my job, you got PTO,
just paid time off.
I'll be calling that shit
good time.
So little stuff, just little stuff, man.
It's the same earning thing.
Like when I was at Whole Foods, you get
for every, you know, 30 days you work
or whatever, you get a couple days
or something like that.
It's the same concept.
You see what I'm saying?
So what the fuck are the good time?
But learning.
So when I got, when I got knocked,
we had pages.
Now I come home and it's all this technology.
And it would be,
it would be kind of like too much for some people
but for me man I love this shit
I love AI
I love I do all for my
business
for chaos I do all my graphic design
and I do all my
my um I do everything
and it's because I like to learn this stuff
man I love
all the I mean I don't know how to put
I didn't even expect to be out
to be able to do this stuff so to
to get the chance to learn how to
work this stuff and what a time to be in like AI is a bad motherfucker so yeah I don't I don't
look at it nothing is discouraging man I look at it as opportunity you know what I mean a lot of my
friends even they a lot of people they don't understand like my ambitionist I mean I got the ambition
like a one-year-old pit bull I'm a serial entrepreneur I told you that I had two hours of sleep but
I'm I'm ready I'm like nah I'm I'm I'm gear for this
I'm blessed to be on, I'm blessed to be out,
and I'm going to take advantage of every day that's popping.
You know what I'm saying?
Every day that's available to me,
I'm going to take full advantage of that shit.
How have you been able to rebuild in the past seven years
to make up for the 19 you were away for?
It ain't been easy.
The best thing is learning who I am and having patience.
Patience is a bad motherfucker.
And in the process, right, enjoy life and do what you meant to do.
So my thing is,
I was in a false environment for almost two decades.
When I, now that I'm out in this environment, I'm going to have fun.
I'm going to enjoy myself.
I'm going to smile.
I'm going to do things.
And it's hard.
Like me, I feel like I'm unbreakable, right?
I've been in situations from employment to where people try to break me out here.
And I laugh at it.
You have no clue of what I've been through.
There's no way you can do it.
It ain't stop.
Just stop.
You might as well stop now.
It ain't going to happen.
So that strength and that resilience as it carries on.
And then my, you know, my attitude towards it.
I didn't come home bitter.
I ain't come home angry.
I didn't come home dejected.
I ain't come back saying that dudes owe me money.
I ain't come back on none of that stuff.
I came home saying that I got to make this happen.
You know, you got some real dudes that showed me some love when I came home.
And even dudes that offered me, right?
And I told those, listen, I appreciate that.
If I need you, I'm going to double back to you.
But let me see if I still got it.
Let me see if I still got this hustle.
And I knew I had it.
I came home.
At the end of the day, I knew I was coming home between, I'd say, about 60 days before I came home.
Within that 60 days, I made $13,000 and I came home with that, bro.
I didn't need nothing from nobody.
I made my own money from prison within that amount of time.
You understand what I'm saying?
So I knew, I knew what my ability always been, because I all.
always in any picture you see and anybody you talk to, I wasn't, I never need it.
I wasn't the biggest, baddest dude in prison, but I was always, I made my, you know, stuff
happened.
I always had exclusive kicks, and so I knew how to hustle.
I knew how to make stuff happen.
Now that I come out here, it's just another test to see if I could do it.
And I did it.
What happened to your parents?
They're still both alive and kicking and talking junk.
Wow.
Yeah, they, they super.
So they got to see the success after and all?
Yeah, man, I've taken them to some awards shows and different presentations.
And it's just a world to them, you know, when they see, you know, they came and see me in prison with that tan uniform.
And they knew my dreams and my hopes and they always believe.
But now that I come home and they're seeing it and they seeing, you know, being in movies and being, I'm writing, producing my books and my clothes and, you know, going and traveling.
And they loving it.
What would you tell your teenage self before you ever start hustling in the streets?
Well, if you could sit across from him today and have a really strong sit-down conversation with him.
I tell my teenage self, just keep going, man.
Keep going.
Even if you don't see no darkness on that tunnel, if you keep stepping, bro, that light going to shine.
It's going to shine.
Just keep pushing.
You got this.
Everything else, because I wouldn't tell myself too much.
Because every, as crazy as it may sound like,
I'm glad I've been through everything I went through.
You feel what I'm saying?
Because this is what you see.
This is what you see at the end of it, right?
So everything I went through,
either you can't get broken or you want.
I wasn't able to get broke.
I made it do some really fucked up shit.
And being able to make it through that.
And every day and still get up and look and it's still opportunity.
Man, no, you good.
So if you look at a katana, you have heard of a katana?
Yeah, the sword.
The sword.
So the sword is made of high stream still, right?
But what does that katana go through?
It go through heat, right?
Extreme amount of heat, extreme pressure from the hammer hitting it,
the anvil being on the other end.
So it goes through all that pain and punishment,
but at the end you get a beautiful sword.
So that's how I look at me.
You know what I'm saying?
I've been through all the pain and punishment,
but look at what it's making,
You can look at what it's created.
It created a bad motherfucker.
So, yeah, man.
I'll just tell him, keep going, can't?
You got it.
Tell everyone about the books, the merch.
The sweaters are dope.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
So while in prison, I created my publisher company.
So I wrote my book.
I wrote my first book.
My publisher company is called Chaos Publishing.
Chaos is an acronym for creating history amongst our society.
I was sitting there.
I went to row me up a little joint in jail.
So, you know, the joints down there's small, like a little piece of little joint, a little pin joint.
But that was hot.
So they had the BET Awards.
So I'm sitting there and I'm watching the BET Awards because I was thinking about what I'm going to call my publishing company because I was excited.
I'm in prison, right?
And I'm about to start a publishing company.
That doesn't happen.
Now, you got people who wrote books in prison.
You got people who got their books published in prison.
But I don't, me personally, I don't know anyone who actually formulated their corporation in prison, right?
and then published a book under the corporation
that they published in prison.
So that's the point I'm at in prison now.
I got my coming boss now.
You see what I'm saying?
So I don't publish my book,
when I'm a call is coming.
And then something just came to
I was high as hell, chaos.
Boom, got it, ran upstairs, wrote it down,
and then I just started working on it.
I missed the whole BETD damn show.
I'm working on the acronym
and creating history of society.
So long story short,
and through prison, of course,
I taught people how to write books.
I taught people self-publishing this
and things like that.
So I wrote my first,
well, my first book is trust and betrayal.
My second book, I end up meeting a good dude, man.
Good dude by the name of Beanie Siegel,
the rapper for him,
former Rockefeller rapper, great dude.
He came to prison and we ended up, you know,
kicking and getting real close.
So we wrote a book together.
That book right there is loyalty and deceit.
This book right here,
You could go to my website
www.causunlimited.net.
And order this book right here.
We wrote this book,
Wow, Locked up,
went through hell with this joke
and we get this book done.
But this book is fire.
When I say, man,
if y'all think beans could rap,
this book is fire.
This book is fire.
So we got that book.
We got my book, Condom.
So Condum is fire.
And get your minds out of gutter.
Yeah, I did 20 years,
but I ain't writing no freaky taut.
hells to y'all. So this joint right here is it's like a young adult novel. It's two best friends
whose parents got locked up and they vowed to never get into the streets. So they became
really good at basketball. One went to a top level, one went to a D level. One had a crush
on the other's cousin and they grew up and the cousin ended up getting married to a lawyer and
things got different. So you have to read it to find out what all happened, but it's dope and it's
fire.
My blast with this right here.
I just finished this book.
This book will be released.
When this podcast is released,
I want you all to go to chaosunlimited.net.
And matter of fact,
is it all right?
Can we create a locked-in bundle?
Yeah, whatever you want to do.
All right, so we got some exclusives for y'all.
When y'all go on to the website,
y'all go in, we're going to have a tab called the locked-in bundle.
Y'all click on that.
Y'all go see my new drops.
Y'all know I put out that flame.
Everything limited.
everything exclusive.
This ain't no guilty
and this got the tags.
This is the real quality.
So we're going to do a locked-in bundle
with a hoodie in a book
or a sweatsuit in the book.
And you click on that,
you're going to get a discount.
That's thanks to your man,
Ian Big right here.
So this book, my bad,
this book is the entrepreneurial mindset of a felon.
How to Think Outside of the Box
that's meant to keep you in.
So I wrote this book for,
this is not just a book for prisoners, right?
This is a book for anybody
that's going through anything
in the working field,
in the industry, if your boss is trying to constrict the rules on you, if you're trying to get
to a higher position and don't know how, if you want to think outside the box inside of any
work-related field or in prison, this is the book that you want to read right here.
This is not no self-help book.
I don't look at it self-help.
It's a manual.
It's a training manual.
Make you a machine.
Awesome.
Well, Jim and I appreciate you coming on the show today, man.
This is great.
Man, it was absolutely a pleasure.
I appreciate it, man.
I appreciate the love.
Man, let's get out here and shoot some dice.
He's trying to do it.
He's going to take all my buddy.
We're going to get it.
