The NPR Politics Podcast - John Legend On His Criminal Justice Activism

Episode Date: May 28, 2022

Most people know John Legend as an award-winning actor and musician. But he also has a long record of political activism. He talked to political correspondent Juana Summers about his latest push for criminal justice reform: endorsing progressive candidates in local prosecutor or district attorney's races.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow and political correspondent Juana Summers. Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Juana Summers. I cover politics. And Juana, today we have something different. We have your interview with John Legend. I think a lot of listeners obviously know John Legend as an EGOT-winning musician and performer, or maybe as the husband of Chrissy Teigen. And maybe they've probably seen him campaign for candidates like Joe Biden. But you had an interesting conversation with him about something different that he's doing within the realm of his political activism. And that is his push to support progressive candidates in local prosecutors races. Yeah, that's right. So this is

a part of John Legend's Free America campaign. And his goal with that whole campaign is to re envision and to overhaul the criminal justice system, and people's experiences in it. And his goal with that whole campaign is to re-envision and to overhaul the criminal justice system and people's experiences in it. And he points out that these district attorneys, these local prosecutors play such a huge role in the way that people interface with that system. So he's been on Twitter, he's been endorsing these candidates, and urging people to get involved in these races that frankly, they don't often get a lot of attention. Yeah. And are there any trend lines in the types of candidates that he's backing? Yeah. So the types of candidates that John Legend is drawing attention to are largely women and

people of color. And that's something he says that's incredibly important because, and we should just be frank about this, throughout our history, district attorneys have typically been white and male. And these progressive prosecutors are all running to reform a system that they argue disproportionately punishes and over-incarcerates people of color and people experiencing poverty. In our chat, I asked him how he defines a progressive prosecutor. It's about priorities. It's about making policy decisions within their office to pursue alternatives to incarceration when they have the opportunity to do so. Ask for either lower bail amounts or eliminate the use of cash bail.

Finding alternatives to juvenile incarceration, finding alternatives to incarcerating people with drug and mental health issues makes them more progressive than what we've had in the past. Can you give us just a couple of examples of some of the races that you've zeroed in on this year, some of the progressive prosecutors that you're supporting? Well, you look at someone like Kim Foxx, who we've supported twice, and she's been, you know, reelected in Cook County, which is Chicago. She knows her community so well. She's a black woman and she has seen all sides of our criminal legal system. She's a lawyer, she's a prosecutor, but she also knows family members and community members that have been on the other side of things who've been

locked up. She knows folks who have been survivors and victims of crime. And she knows what it's like to grow up in some of our most challenged communities. Someone with that perspective, someone who has an intimate knowledge of the community that she's serving and that she comes from, they're coming to it with an experience and a level of empathy that I think is really helpful. And I think it enables you to make better decisions that will be holistically more beneficial for the community. I have to imagine in your work and in connecting with activists and prosecutors across the country, you have to hear a lot of personal stories from people about the impacts

of their experiences within this criminal justice system. Is there one or two that sticks out for you that has driven home why this is so important to you? Well, I don't even need to go out and do the activism work to hear stories because I grew up in a family where I had cousins, family members who were locked up. I know what it's like for them to have to come back out of incarceration and try to get a job and the difficulties they face with that, how difficult it is to deal with probation and parole and kind of the extended supervision that they're under. I've dealt with the pain and the experience of cash bail with so many folks. And, you know, just within my family and within my neighborhood and within my community, I've heard and seen enough. And then I kind of heard and saw those things without the broader systemic understanding of why those things were happening as a young person. But the more I read about it, more I understood on a more macro level, the more it motivated me to make a change.

We can't have this conversation without talking a bit about crime rates, which are on the rise in many places across this country. And politically, many opponents of progressive prosecutors, they seek to draw a link between the policies of those prosecutors and rising crime rates. And they're essentially making the point, you know, that these sort of approaches are fostering lawlessness in communities. What do you say to people who say that, who are worried about rising crime? It's just simply not true that you can link having more progressive prosecutors in a community to crime going up.

Crime really did go up during the pandemic and it went up in communities all across the country. Poverty went up, unemployment went up during the pandemic and it went up in communities all across the country. Poverty went up. Unemployment went up during 2020 and 2021. And so a lot of these things were big macro conditions that changed in all of our communities, whether they had a progressive prosecutor or not. We have to understand that that's happening, but we also have to say the solution isn't we need to be more punitive as a society. The solution is we need to work on all these issues that cause despair, that cause poverty, focus on those areas, invest in those areas, and not in a more punitive criminal legal system. And we should just be clear here from a fact-based standpoint that there isn't

any clear evidence that draws a line between increasing crime rates and the political background of a prosecutor in a specific city. The rising crime that's interview with John Legend. We are back. And like we mentioned before, John Legend has been active in democratic politics for a while. He campaigned for President Biden during the 2020 election. In fact, Juana, I got so cold, I could no longer type into my phone at his concert for Joe Biden the night before the election. But you know, we're about a year and a half into the Biden administration, and Biden made a lot of big promises on criminal justice. How does John Legend think he's doing? Yeah, this is something I absolutely wanted to ask him about, especially because the president has spoken highly of New York Mayor Eric Adams and his focus on crime prevention. And pretty recently, he was urging cities and states to use unspent COVID relief money to pay for crime prevention programs and to hire more

officers. I don't agree with that recommendation. I believe that, first of all, COVID has not disappeared. We need to make sure people have access to vaccines. We need to make sure they have access to therapeutics. And we need to make sure we're investing money in taking care of public health. Secondly, we already spend more money on policing in America than any other country spends on their military aside from the United States and China. So if spending the most on policing were the thing, the solution to make us safe, we would already be the safest country in the world. But we're not. So maybe we should consider spending that money on things that

will be more edifying and actually prevent more crime. Things like fighting food insecurity, dealing with people's mental health issues, dealing with people's substance abuse issues, finding other interventions that will make our communities safer and healthier. So Juana, what else from your conversation jumped out to you? You know, the big thing that I kept thinking about when I talked to him is that there's such a clear line between the work that he does as an activist and the work that he does as an entertainer. I asked him about the fact that it seems really intentional that he makes space for certain types of people. Well, when we started

Free America, like I said before, we started with a listening and learning campaign. And the whole point of that was, let's talk to people who are affected by this. Let's talk to people in the communities, people who are literally still in prison and in jail, people who are family members of those folks, people who are survivors and victims of crime. And what we wanted to do was learn from them, but also elevate their voices, actually give them the mic and let them talk about their experiences so that it's not just about me, the celebrity talking about it, but me, a person of influence using my influence to elevate other voices so we can hear directly from them as they're affected by this system more intimately. When you think about the span of your career so far, your advocacy, your activism, who are the models that have shaped your approach? Harry Belafonte, Paul Robeson, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin. Some of them were more visible. Some of them were behind the scenes funding activists and

funding the movement. But all of them knew that they were in a unique position. They were in a unique position of power and influence. And they use that influence to fight for justice and make change and fight for equality. I love how many people he immediately tick iconic musicians that I remember growing up listening to who are household names for many people and who straddled that line just so in such different ways between activism and entertainment. And we know those are two things that often can't be delinked. Right, right. Well, Juana, thank you so much for bringing us this interview with John Legend. It was a great conversation.

Thanks so much. Thanks for letting me do it. That's a wrap for us today. We will be back in your feeds on Monday, Memorial Day, wearing our white Memorial Day or whatever outfits. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. And I'm Juana Summers, and I cover John Legend. No, I cover politics. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.