Hello and welcome to another episode of I Way with Jimmy Ligemail. I hope you're well and I hope

you're ready because this is a fucking bonkers chat. My guest is so impressive that I was left in

shock for a few hours after talking to him because his story is not only really inspiring but it's

deeply deeply humbling what he's been able to do with so much trauma, just decades of trauma,

how he's been able to turn them into social justice work and advocacy. It's very rare that anyone

is ever able to be able to pull themselves back from truly the depths of hell and then go on

to be able to try to save others and the work that he's doing is potentially going to change

millions and millions and millions of people's lives. His name is Jesse Crimes, he's a Philadelphia

based artist, curator, advocate and the co-founder of Right of Return USA. Now in 2009, after a dramatic

childhood that left him on the kind of wrong side of the tracks, he ended up dealing drugs and

going to jail. He breaks down to me in this episode, the whole US justice system because I had a

lot of questions, I only know the kind of most dramatized version from the movies. He tells me what

it's really like in jail, not just literally, but also from an emotional point of view. He explains

to me the struggles of inmates and how the system is truly designed not to rehabilitate but to

completely break and destroy and dehumanize those who live within those bars, how much like

animals they are treated. And it's such an important story to hear about because the media goes

out of its way to encourage us to not think about these people, to discard them from our minds,

to not really care about what happens to them afterwards and how difficult it is for them to

rehabilitate themselves and rejoin society. He goes into all of that and he's such a great

communicator and it really painted a picture for me that I'd never heard before. Now while he was

in prison, the only thing that was able to kind of keep his mind straight and help him deal with

that horrific circumstance was art, something he'd loved doing as a child. He would use this art

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