Just the heads up. This episode contains a reference to suicide.

Man, let me tell you, drug addiction will take you from places you don't want to go.

Because of my addiction to drugs, I've been in and out of the chairs and eventually present.

Desmond Meade is 53 years old. For more than a decade, he's cycled in and out of the criminal

justice system, mostly on felony drug charges. In 2004, he was released, but the cycle started

all over again.

I was homeless. I was hooked on crack cocaine. I was unemployed recently released from

prison. The only thing I owned was the clothes on my back. I was ready to check out. I didn't

have any self-esteem. I didn't see any light at the end of the tunnel. It was sad because

I knew that my parents didn't raise me to be in that position. But there I was.

One day, in August 2005, Desmond walked up to a set of railroad tracks.

But God had other plans and I ended up crossing those tracks and I walked about a couple

blocks further and checked myself into drug treatment. They put me in a four-month inpatient

in-house treatment program. I successfully completed that and after doing that, I moved

into a homeless shelter. That's when Desmond turned his life around. Stopped using drugs,

went to school, and eventually graduated from law school. But there was something that,

no matter how hard he worked, he still couldn't do. It's something that's basic to our democracy.

He couldn't vote. Nothing speaks more of the citizenship than being able to vote.

The sentencing project, a criminal justice think tank, estimates that more than 6 million

American citizens nationwide could not vote in the 2016 presidential election because

they had been convicted of a felony.

The laws vary state by state. Many states automatically restore voting rights to felons after

...