Good evening. I'm Mayor the Hussain. Welcome to a very special edition of Deconstructed here in LA, California in front of a live audience at the writer's Guild Theatre.

Today we're talking about an issue of huge importance, literally of life and death, which in the past didn't get that much attention, but thankfully recently has been going up and up the political agenda.

I'm talking of course about criminal justice reform, mass incarceration, police brutality, institutional racism, dealing with a prison system which locks up more people than any other country on earth that incarcerates black men at six times the rate as white men.

And yes, impeachment and Iowa and Iran have dominated the news headlines in recent weeks and the presidential election will undoubtedly occupy our attention for the rest of this year.

But we cannot afford to ignore this huge issue, this festering saw in our midst. So that's what we hear in LA to discuss tonight with two very special guests.

My first guest is an artist and organizer, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and the author of the New York Times Best Seller when they call you a terrorist, a Black Lives Matter memoir.

A native of LA, she's currently leading yes on our a ballot initiative aimed at reforming the LA County Prison System that will be voted on in next month's primary election.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome and make some noise for Patrice Colors.

My next guest really needs no introduction but I'm going to try. He's a world famous multi-award winning artist and musician, Grammys, Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, Tony's, he's won him all.

But he's also an activist, a philanthropist, a founder of Free America, a campaign to transform the US criminal justice system by trying to end mass incarceration.

And one last thing, he was also chosen by People magazine to be the sexiest man alive in November 2019. Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for the legendary John Legend.

Patrice, John, thank you both for joining me on deconstructed. John, let me start with you, your best known of course for your music. A lot of high profile music.

You're my sexiness. Sexiness and music. You pick, you choose. A lot of less sexy but high profile musicians and artists like to throw their weight, their fame, their reputation, their name behind good causes, behind campaigns, charities, philanthropies.

Some of them tend to go for the fashionable stuff, the sexy stuff if you will. What made you get involved with, put your wealth and fame behind this rather what some people might say, unfashionable, unsexy cause of criminal justice for one, going into prisons, helping ex-convicts turn around their lives. How did it all begin?

Well, part of it was through personal connection and I think if you talked to any person of color in this country, all of us have relatives who have been through either the prisoner jail system. All of us have had some level of interaction with the criminal justice system with law enforcement.

We see on a very personal level how it affects our families, our communities. I think a lot of us, and I personally was guilty of this, kind of looked at it more as a personal responsibility issue because I did the right things.

I didn't get caught up in the criminal justice system but I had friends in my community that did. Neighbors of mine that did. Family members of mine that did. And at the time you were thinking, oh, they messed up, they did something wrong and they deserved it.

This is how we punish people for doing something wrong. They deserve to go to prison for whatever the allotted time is that's been legislated by our lawmakers.

We assume that that's how things are just supposed to work. And there's kind of a, almost a fatalism attached to that. But when you realize that it doesn't have to be this way, then you start to think, well, how do we get here?

How do we get off this path and change courses to have a more humane system? So I started reading. I started reading Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, and Brian Stevens's book, Just Mercy, a red other writers who talked about how we got to this place.

I realized after reading that we were the most incarcerated country in the world, I didn't know that. I didn't know that as I was, you know, just going through life being pretty politically engaged and pretty politically aware, getting involved in, you know,

and sending out some of the things that I was going through, and I was going through life, not knowing this. And I wanted to ask her for glory. We wrote this song for Selma. And common and I got up on stage, and I had just been reading Michelle's book, and I got up there and said, in honor of Dr. King and the struggle that he fought for, and that so many people after him and before him, I fought for it.

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