The shocking statistics behind wrongful conviction
Andrew Yang Podcast
Andrew Yang & Audacy
4.8 • 3.2K Ratings
🗓️ 17 December 2020
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 1993, music executive Jason Flom stumbled upon a news article about Steven Lennon, a young man serving fifteen years to life for drug possession. Steven’s story inspired Jason to become a lifelong advocate for criminal justice reform. In this episode, Jason and Andrew unpack the societal and economic costs of our criminal justice system.
Watch this conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/z-o_p9G1BWw
Follow Jason Flom: https://www.instagram.com/itsjasonflom | https://twitter.com/itsjasonflom
Follow Humanity Forward: https://twitter.com/HumanityForward | https://movehumanityforward.com
Follow Andrew Yang: https://instagram.com/andrewyang | https://twitter.com/AndrewYang
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | you know, in New York like Reikers Island, it costs around $200,000 a year to keep somebody locked up. |
| 0:09.9 | Now, if it's per person, yeah, you know what the four seasons cost in New York City? |
| 0:17.3 | A rich Carlton? About six, seven hundred dollars a night. I mean, some people will say, well, |
| 0:21.6 | another part of the country may not be as expensive. Okay, let's take a different number. Let's take |
| 0:25.3 | a number like $50,000 a year. You say, okay, well, in parts of the Midwest or here or there, the cost |
| 0:31.6 | is, you know, is less for various different reasons. We don't have to get into the cost of locking |
| 0:37.1 | somebody. Okay, 50. So that's the cost. You can put them in a holiday in for that, right? That |
| 0:40.9 | makes down to about $140 a night. There was a story that a new Hampshire corrections officer |
| 0:46.4 | who said to me while I was on the trail when I was running. He said, we should pay people to stay |
| 0:51.5 | out of jail because we are think so much on them when they're behind bars. And this is some |
| 0:57.1 | work done to system and just saw saw where the money was going every day. And he said this to me, |
| 1:03.6 | like the trail, like even someone who's part of the system was like, yeah, we should we should be |
| 1:07.5 | sent to the holiday in is what he was suggesting because, you know, like we're doing it wrong. |
| 1:23.4 | It is my pleasure to welcome to Yang speaks, the founder of love, |
| 1:39.9 | a media, one of the founding board members of the innocence project and the host of the |
| 1:45.2 | wrongful conviction podcast, which speaks for itself. Mr. Jason flam, welcome Jason to Yang speaks. |
| 1:52.1 | Thank you. Thank you. I am honored actually to be here and I don't say that lightly. I am a big |
| 1:58.2 | fan of your work and super excited to speak with you today. And yeah, let's go man. I'm psyched. |
| 2:05.1 | I'm a fan of your work, a super fan. I feel like you're one of the reasons why the vast majority |
| 2:10.3 | of Americans are waking up to the reality of how messed up our criminal justice system is. |
| 2:16.6 | And you just joined the board of the Frederick Douglass project that is helping to make |
| 2:21.2 | that case. You've been in this, I want to say for decades, you started going down this path |
... |
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