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A transformational story with a life prison sentence · Nightmare Success In and Out

• 0:00
  What happens when your worst fear becomes your reality?
• 0:03
  Hi, I'm Brent Cassidy. Welcome to the Nightmare Success
• 0:06
  In and Out podcast, where we explore how to overcome your
• 0:09
  fears and nightmares that set yourself free.
• 0:12
  We're going to be exploring this topic with guys that was in
• 0:14
  Leavenworth with and others who survived their own nightmare.
• 0:19
  These stories can be inspiring, sometimes.
• 0:21
  Sad. There's some humor, but
• 0:24
  hopefully you can come away with a nugget of something that'll
• 0:27
  help you knock down some of the prisons you built up in your own
• 0:30
  mind. All right, welcome back,
• 0:33
  nightmare, success in and out, listeners, where you come to
• 0:36
  hear what happens when your worst fear becomes your reality.
• 0:39
  How do you adapt, survive, overcome, set yourself free?
• 0:43
  And don't forget, it's a big deal.
• 0:45
  If you guys follow subscribe, like, comment.
• 0:49
  It's huge for the show. Well, I have an unbelievable, a
• 0:55
  fascinating, gritty, inspiring story.
• 0:58
  I think I got all the right words in there because I I have
• 1:01
  done over 100 of these interviews.
• 1:04
  I haven't run across this story. This story is something that I'm
• 1:11
  going to read from the Guardian here because I think it's it's
• 1:15
  an incredible story and written about, my guest says.
• 1:20
  That morning, Dicklin had finally been set free from
• 1:25
  Potosi Correctional Center, a men's maximum security prison in
• 1:30
  Missouri. An anonymous teenager When she
• 1:34
  entered, Hicklin was leaving a 42 year old superstar, a title
• 1:39
  given to her by the deputy warden, Jodi Glor who noted her
• 1:43
  ability to change the Missouri Department of Corrections from
• 1:47
  the inside out. After 26 years behind bars,
• 1:52
  Lakeland was leaving prison as the first transgender inmate in
• 1:56
  Missouri to have successfully sued for the right to access
• 1:59
  hormones. She was also leaving behind a
• 2:02
  legacy Unlocked Labs, which I can't wait to talk about because
• 2:05
  that's what she's doing now. She's a both.
• 2:07
  She's Co founder and CTO of Unlocked Labs, which is just an
• 2:10
  incredible organization and that organization which aids
• 2:15
  prisoners to continue their education in prison and give
• 2:18
  better jobs when they get out. But notwithstanding all the good
• 2:23
  she has done, she was still re entering society as a convicted
• 2:29
  murderer. I think it sounds like I just
• 2:33
  read a trailer to a movie that you're going to go sit in a
• 2:38
  movie theater. It's it's that powerful.
• 2:42
  Her story's that powerful. I've read so many different
• 2:44
  things about Jessica and she's brilliant.
• 2:48
  First of all. I mean, I think she was going to
• 2:50
  college when she was 16 years old.
• 2:52
  Before we unpack all that, of course I want to recognize our
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  Tell them Brent from Nightmare Success sent you.
• 3:42
  Jessica, can you hear me? I can hear you.
• 3:48
  So for all of you that don't know because you wouldn't have
• 3:51
  known this, we did this yesterday and Brent Cassidy gets
• 3:57
  going and I just did all the things I just did and I
• 4:00
  introduced Jessica and I can't hear her.
• 4:04
  And one of the things that's really dangerous that I have is
• 4:08
  this sound mixing board, which I don't push a lot of buttons on
• 4:11
  there because I know that I shouldn't.
• 4:14
  Yesterday, I accidentally pushed one, and it was the one that
• 4:18
  knocked out Jessica's audio. And we spent What did we spend,
• 4:21
  Jessica? 45 minutes trying to figure it
• 4:23
  out because you're the, you know, kind of the tech guru, and
• 4:26
  I was the one that messed it up. I hit the button regardless.
• 4:31
  Jessica, hi. Thank you for doing this again.
• 4:34
  Yeah. Well, maybe we'll get it right
• 4:37
  this time. We'll get it right this time or
• 4:39
  we'll get we're we we can hear each other this time.
• 4:42
  Whether we get it right, I don't know.
• 4:43
  But Jessica, I you've been out of prison for two years.
• 4:50
  I know you've you've you've gone around you've you've spoke to a
• 4:53
  lot of different people about your life and and what you're
• 4:57
  doing with unlocked labs and raising money and doing great
• 5:00
  things. But in saying all that it hasn't
• 5:05
  been easy for you and going back to the the hardships that you
• 5:12
  had growing up as a kid. Can you kind of introduce the
• 5:16
  listeners to what you were living through as a kid?
• 5:18
  Because when I was reading this, I was like, Oh my gosh, we're
• 5:21
  the adults in the room. Who's helping this person?
• 5:26
  I think we should probably give a trigger warning if I'm going
• 5:27
  to discuss it too much. But yeah, I, I, I grew up in, in
• 5:34
  a very abusive situation. It's like many of us in this
• 5:37
  country and throughout the world and, you know, broken home and
• 5:44
  physically, sexually, emotionally abusive father and
• 5:47
  stepmother, mom who just didn't have the tools, 'cause she came
• 5:51
  from that same background herself.
• 5:52
  So really, like, unfortunately, very common, you know,
• 5:57
  generational abuse. I came everywhere on all parts
• 6:01
  of my family. That's how we grew up.
• 6:03
  In fact, before this conversation here, I was just
• 6:06
  talking with my brother who 2530 years later, is just now trying
• 6:10
  to do his work because of the things that we grew up in, the
• 6:13
  things we witnessed. You know as as kids that go
• 6:17
  through that type of abuse, Jessica, is it how did the
• 6:20
  siblings react or or help each other through those type of hard
• 6:26
  moments? It's well.
• 6:32
  So I have. I had three siblings.
• 6:34
  I had a older sister. Well, I have an older sister
• 6:37
  who's about six years older. My older brother is about two
• 6:39
  years older and I had a step brother who took his life some
• 6:43
  years back because of not being able to handle what we grew up
• 6:48
  watching. But you know, there's there's 22
• 6:51
  phases. There's the one where you all
• 6:52
  band together to try and save and protect each other.
• 6:54
  You know, my brother got a lot of, a lot of physical abuse
• 6:58
  because he would try and take the beatings for his siblings
• 7:00
  and my sister would be there similarly.
• 7:06
  So we all kind of took our turns trying to defend the others.
• 7:09
  And eventually my sister, you know, was able to get out and
• 7:16
  we, my brother and I ended up with my mom who just wasn't
• 7:20
  capable. And her and her husband at the
• 7:22
  time was also abusive. So you know, you you you tried.
• 7:25
  To do it was each other. Yeah, try to defend each other
• 7:29
  and then you end up trying to save each other's lives in some
• 7:32
  instances and you just hope you survive.
• 7:35
  Well and it seems like that from how this happened that there
• 7:41
  were a couple of different things as an early age, you know
• 7:43
  910 eleven years old that you were looking for an escape and
• 7:46
  and and one of the escapes was drugs.
• 7:50
  So what in your mind? And if you can remember really
• 7:56
  as a kid, what what happened in your mind going in through that
• 7:59
  time period? Yeah, there's a couple.
• 8:02
  Couple very distinct memories, actually.
• 8:04
  But the one is I grew up in a in a House of substance abuse.
• 8:07
  You know, my my mom was, as much as I loved her, she was an
• 8:11
  alcoholic. And so was my step dad.
• 8:12
  And my step mom was because that whole side of the family's
• 8:17
  medical was a pharmaceutical drug abuser, and my dad was the
• 8:21
  only one who wasn't but should have been psychiatrically
• 8:24
  medicated. So I grew up with it.
• 8:26
  This is you grew up seeing that this is how you deal with your
• 8:30
  problems as you medicate them. And then I also, you know, was
• 8:34
  exposed, exposed to drinking and and actually was drinking from
• 8:38
  the before I was a teenager. Because that's again, my family
• 8:42
  said this is how we do things and it's one of the things that
• 8:46
  just grows right like you this feels a little good.
• 8:50
  This makes it feel a little better.
• 8:51
  Then a lot more make it feel a lot better.
• 8:53
  And of course, that's not how it happens, but that's and and one
• 8:57
  of the other things that stands out is it wasn't my first
• 8:59
  choice. Like, there's plenty of Family
• 9:03
  Services records that shows that we went for help.
• 9:05
  And you know, in Kansas, our case was my dad's case and the
• 9:11
  abuse was referred to Family Services.
• 9:13
  And because my dad was on the Family Services board, they
• 9:16
  referred the case right back to him and made him responsible for
• 9:18
  his own family. And so, you know, we tried to
• 9:22
  get help. We tried to be heard.
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  When that didn't happen. The only you know when you
• 9:28
  scream loud enough and nobody cares, then you go inwards and.
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  It had to be so frustrating, Jessica, to to try to be doing
• 9:35
  the right thing, and as kids to try to get that in front of the
• 9:38
  people who you think are responsible and they just turn
• 9:41
  it back and there you are. They tell you keep it quiet.
• 9:45
  And you know, you referenced the fact that I was in college and
• 9:48
  that's just it. I was from the time I was young.
• 9:50
  I grew up watching Doogie Howser for those of us that are old
• 9:52
  enough to. Remember Doogie Howser?
• 9:54
  And that's where I wanted to be. That was, that was my and I
• 9:56
  dedicated myself to doing that. I just wanted to live the right
• 10:01
  life, a good life, and I just couldn't.
• 10:04
  Well, and I think it's so incredible though, Jessica, that
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  usually people that are going through what you went through,
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  that's where their they, their grades suffer they're they're
• 10:17
  flunking out of school. Where is that?
• 10:19
  Was something that you really excelled at in a in an
• 10:22
  environment that wasn't easy to excel with school because you
• 10:27
  would have had all these other things going on it.
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  Comes from two things. The the.
• 10:31
  The one is that was the only place we were safe was.
• 10:33
  That school because. You're away from you're away
• 10:35
  from the abusers. And two, there is some, if I
• 10:39
  have any blessing in my life, I have many blessings in my life
• 10:41
  actually. And I still tell people this day
• 10:43
  of a great life. But I've had the blessing of
• 10:46
  good people in my world and at the time I had teachers that
• 10:49
  cared about about being about my success and and actually the
• 10:55
  last year I was in high school the principal tried to call the
• 10:58
  truancy officer on me. My grades went down to absentee
• 11:01
  so because I reached a limit and they were ready to throw me out
• 11:05
  of school. But I had a guidance counselor
• 11:07
  had seen my When you came into school in Missouri, they give
• 11:10
  like the entry ACT for freshmen's just to see what they
• 11:15
  need to teach over the next few years.
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  And I had a guidance counselor said.
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  But wait a minute. She got a 2800 ACT and as a
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  freshman, something doesn't add up.
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  And it was through the assistance of people like that
• 11:25
  that helps helped save me in some ways, as best as they
• 11:31
  could. Yeah.
• 11:32
  Did you because you talk about this that you felt like at some
• 11:37
  point like 11-12 years old that you had you basically had gone
• 11:41
  crazy. You had schizophrenia that that
• 11:45
  were you sharing that with anybody?
• 11:47
  Was that were you sharing it with teachers or were you
• 11:49
  sharing it with because you couldn't really share it with
• 11:50
  your parents because they were kind of out and Neverland?
• 11:55
  That that's a specific reference though, because you know, tied
• 11:59
  up in all of the abuse and everything else before like.
• 12:02
  So there's this thing where like, oh, it's caused it not so
• 12:04
  much. But you know, I'm, I'm a
• 12:06
  transgender woman and I'm sort of stereotypically knew that,
• 12:10
  you know, didn't know the term. Didn't know transgender woman
• 12:12
  knew something wasn't right when I was 5 or 6.
• 12:14
  And so the schizophrenia referenced specifically relates
• 12:17
  to having that sense of being a woman and going well, this isn't
• 12:20
  normal, like this isn't a thing. Especially where I grew up in
• 12:23
  very small city Kansas town, I had no reference.
• 12:25
  And so my natural conclusion was from the Public Library and all
• 12:30
  my research and all my training was that I must be
• 12:32
  schizophrenic. Was it hard for you, Jessica?
• 12:35
  Well, did you get any trouble from kids or anything that that
• 12:38
  did you get picked on or was it really just something you kept
• 12:40
  internally that you were dealing with on your own?
• 12:43
  Oh, it was internal. I was too afraid to let people
• 12:45
  know. I was way too afraid.
• 12:47
  And honestly, you know whenever we moved in with my mother and
• 12:51
  and you know we had a family friend that identified escape.
• 12:57
  And so I I thought I'd found an ally there who I could, I could
• 13:01
  have these conversations about with, about he was about 10
• 13:04
  years older than me. But he ended up using as a as a
• 13:08
  way of sexually assaulting me. Even the the only the first
• 13:12
  person I shared it with was the one that became an.
• 13:15
  User. After my parents.
• 13:16
  So like, it's really it's so my first.
• 13:18
  Well, and I I think it's also interesting, 'cause I I have a
• 13:21
  gay brother and and I think it was his freshman year.
• 13:26
  Yeah, 'cause we were on a vacation trip.
• 13:28
  It was his his freshman year in college.
• 13:32
  And what was so odd about it, Jessica was, is that I he, he's
• 13:37
  my brother. He's only three years younger.
• 13:38
  I mean it's like we weren't like 10 years apart.
• 13:40
  I didn't pick up on any of that. And you know it's it's people
• 13:46
  always say, well how could you not know your brother.
• 13:49
  It just you know. But what happened when I found
• 13:54
  that out it it really kind of connected all the dots.
• 13:57
  You know that. Well, I was so frustrated that
• 14:00
  you know my why doesn't Tyler want to do what I do, you know,
• 14:02
  with this and that and and then it all kind of made sense and
• 14:05
  that we were able to have this totally new understanding.
• 14:10
  But I think it's so much tougher when you're carrying it all
• 14:15
  internal. And I was having this
• 14:17
  conversation with Father Joe, who is a gay priest, and he was
• 14:23
  on the show and and we were kind of comparing it to being an ex
• 14:28
  felon. What do you do with that?
• 14:30
  Do you tell people when you're staying on the sidelines with
• 14:34
  the other parents or in your job or whatever?
• 14:39
  And there's two ways to go with that.
• 14:41
  Also, you can say I don't wanna talk about it or I don't want
• 14:45
  people to know about it, or you can lead with it and that's just
• 14:49
  who you are and that's who people accept.
• 14:51
  I just think it's interesting because at a young age you don't
• 14:54
  have an ability really to reason through all that.
• 14:57
  You're just dealing with this feeling you're.
• 15:00
  Dealing with the fear of somebody finding out typically,
• 15:02
  which was you know, my experience at the time, but but
• 15:06
  I'm happy I live the other way now.
• 15:08
  Yeah well and and so as as things as you got into your
• 15:13
  teenage years Jessica the the the drug the drugs continued but
• 15:18
  you're you're also your life as somebody who was scholarly
• 15:21
  continued but can you lead us into what happened when it
• 15:27
  happened for your nightmare because it it sounds like to me
• 15:31
  that it was it truly was a nightmare blur that and you were
• 15:36
  trying you were trying to help your mom and it just is such a
• 15:43
  it's one of those like stories this can you kind of lead us
• 15:47
  into that. Sure, in some context, a little
• 15:53
  background context before, like closer to the event, amidst all
• 15:57
  of the chaos of my family home was a a terrible kusty battles
• 16:01
  that actually ended in a armed standoff between my parents and
• 16:05
  the police, making us choose who we wanted to live with.
• 16:08
  And so I chose to live with my mom, and shortly thereafter.
• 16:13
  So my dad was battling cancer. What was your age then, Jessica,
• 16:16
  when you chose that made that choice?
• 16:19
  That's the thing I have a hard time with.
• 16:20
  I know that I ended up permanently living with my mom
• 16:22
  when I was 13 after I ran away from with my parents, and so I
• 16:29
  cannot recall when it was. But there's definitely a police
• 16:31
  report on it which actively trying to get.
• 16:36
  But I I do know, like at some point I ended up well in January
• 16:41
  of 93, I ended up living with my 93 and 9293.
• 16:46
  I believe I end up living with my mom because my dad died that
• 16:49
  March or April. He lost his battle for cancer.
• 16:51
  So there was that whole like, I supposed to let my dad, but my
• 16:56
  dad's an abuser. And finally like, so that was
• 17:01
  emotionally, there's a lot of emotional turmoil.
• 17:04
  At the same time, I went to live with my mom, who was living in
• 17:07
  her own abusive relationship. And so from like, out of the
• 17:10
  firing pan, into the fire situation.
• 17:13
  And so I leaned even heavier into drinking and drugs as a way
• 17:17
  of dealing with life. But then we we ended up.
• 17:21
  Were your siblings involved in that too?
• 17:23
  Or was it just you in your world with your people like the drug?
• 17:28
  The drug world is what I mean. They all went through their own
• 17:31
  faces of it. Yeah.
• 17:32
  You know, sister not as deep at all.
• 17:37
  She ended up married with a great family, still to this day,
• 17:41
  married to the same husband. And they're, you know, super
• 17:43
  supportive and it really helped her find some peace in life.
• 17:48
  My brother and I, yeah, we we went through our ups and downs.
• 17:51
  I went the worst. But yeah, we we all struggled
• 17:54
  because that's that's the model we had for dealing with it.
• 17:59
  So we ended up moving into Missouri and I ended up in a
• 18:05
  very strange relationship, whereas somebody was much older
• 18:09
  than me. But it was, it gave me a sense
• 18:11
  of like, this is what I want. I want to go to college, I want
• 18:13
  to build a family. And so I was up doing drugs for
• 18:15
  a little while. But because she was so much
• 18:19
  older than me and had children, there was this threat of Family
• 18:22
  Services taking her kids away and it split us up and that was
• 18:24
  sort of my straw that broke the camel's back.
• 18:26
  I just, like, I saw no hope for my future, even though I was
• 18:30
  continuing to work my way to college.
• 18:33
  And so I got heavily back into drugs at that point.
• 18:35
  It should have been January of 95 rounds, like right around the
• 18:38
  year that this case happened. And so you know, I I was, by the
• 18:43
  time I was, I was an inter and venous amphetamine user before
• 18:47
  that time. So I mean I was deep into drugs
• 18:49
  as a way of coping. And then we're headed into this.
• 18:54
  The end of the school year. My counselor contacts the
• 18:59
  university. We have a conversation.
• 19:01
  I don't even have a GED at this point because in Missouri you
• 19:03
  couldn't drop out of school until you were 16.
• 19:07
  But I ended up dropping out my first or so in March.
• 19:10
  I ended up dropping out because I could, but there was there was
• 19:13
  an agreement with university that when the fall semester came
• 19:15
  around, I would be able to start my my, my fall term.
• 19:20
  I was required to take the G, the first available GED, which
• 19:22
  was two weeks into the semester. Because I didn't have AGD, they
• 19:26
  wouldn't let me live on campus. So I had to stay at home until
• 19:29
  second semester of my freshman year in college.
• 19:32
  And I was required to take him past that GED.
• 19:34
  So all these things play together.
• 19:36
  So I'm trapped at home. The situation is terrible.
• 19:40
  I just want to get out. I see the light of, like, this
• 19:42
  career. I actually was signing up to be
• 19:43
  an actuarial scientist. I calculated.
• 19:46
  I calculated a career, talked to my advisors.
• 19:50
  Math was math and science were my things.
• 19:52
  It's kind of why my geek now. But then my mom comes home one
• 19:56
  day in September and she hands me this piece of paper.
• 20:00
  She says I'm going to jail. What do you mean you're going to
• 20:04
  jail? And then fold it And it's a
• 20:05
  summons from the prosecuting attorney because my mom has
• 20:08
  written $2400 worth of bad checks to the brand new Harrah's
• 20:11
  Casino. So my mom is going to jail for
• 20:16
  you? Know bad checks.
• 20:17
  For bad checks, and like many situations in my younger years,
• 20:23
  I was being asked to be the parent without the place to do
• 20:26
  so. So I I tried to solve that
• 20:27
  problem. At first.
• 20:29
  I tried to take out a a loan. I have no credit.
• 20:32
  I'm a 16 year old kid. 16 year old kid.
• 20:35
  And my mom's credit's bad, so she can't cosign it, right?
• 20:39
  And so when that didn't work, I tried to, I tried to take money
• 20:42
  out of the college fund. So for whatever the terrible
• 20:45
  situation my father was, he left us all the college fund, which
• 20:47
  is I was kind of paid to go to college.
• 20:50
  And of course the trustee is not going to be at least money for
• 20:52
  my mom's gambling debts. So I turned to what I knew I had
• 20:56
  friends that were into drugs. That's where I got them.
• 20:59
  And so I set up a drug deal to try and save my mom.
• 21:03
  And over the course of probably 4 days, it went from I'm going
• 21:07
  to save my mom to I am going to save my own life.
• 21:10
  There are police reports that show where I I told friends that
• 21:15
  like, I think the guy was supposed to be doing the deal
• 21:17
  that's going to try and kill me. And even after the deal was off
• 21:23
  and we tried to have a conversation, it eventually
• 21:27
  turned into he tried to rob me and pulled a gun on me.
• 21:30
  And as a results I took his life.
• 21:36
  And this was somebody that you knew, right?
• 21:38
  This was not a stranger. Sean was my best friend at that
• 21:44
  time. Your best friend.
• 21:46
  He was the guy I trusted the most.
• 21:49
  It's a weird reference, but for anybody who's ever been in the
• 21:52
  thorough as a drug addiction will understand it.
• 21:54
  Sean was the only person I ever shared needles with.
• 21:57
  You know that was. That's deep.
• 22:01
  And it was his addiction and his friends pushing him.
• 22:05
  There's police reports that show that in the day before this
• 22:07
  happened, his friends were arguing with him, trying to get
• 22:10
  him to rob me, which none of that is an excuse and this
• 22:14
  isn't. This is very important to me.
• 22:16
  I used to teach a victim of the class for 20 years, and not
• 22:18
  because I had to, because I believed in it.
• 22:21
  None of that, none of that background has been as an
• 22:23
  excuse. I shouldn't have been there.
• 22:25
  The decisions were mine. I may have been a kid, but there
• 22:28
  are other ways to deal with things.
• 22:29
  And so I I I don't want anybody to walk through this podcast
• 22:32
  going, oh, well, she's, she's not accountable.
• 22:38
  She blames other people, like, no, those decisions and in that
• 22:41
  moment were mine and it is a thing that I will live with for
• 22:44
  the rest of my life. So Jessica, the I mean the the
• 22:47
  it's such a, you know it's one of those things that you you
• 22:51
  might see on TV but you very rarely have you know somebody
• 22:55
  that is talking to this about it How when this happens to you
• 23:00
  what what immediately are you thinking as far as what happens
• 23:04
  next what what is that world. You turned it.
• 23:09
  It's very, very reactive, you know, because, you know, first
• 23:13
  of all, leading up to it, you know, I think everything's OK
• 23:18
  for just a second. And then the next thing there's
• 23:21
  a gun pointing at you. And so it really is dealing with
• 23:26
  the fact that you're still alive but somebody else is not.
• 23:31
  That's that's all fight or flight at that point.
• 23:33
  You know, you don't, you don't reason.
• 23:36
  And so I actually I fled and even over the next few days it
• 23:40
  was it didn't seem real right. This is never seen.
• 23:45
  How can this ever seem real? Like that's what happened and
• 23:49
  that's what I did. And so I think it probably took
• 23:54
  me really about three years to really fully wrap my head around
• 23:58
  that day. By that time I was.
• 24:01
  I was arrested a week later and certified center.
• 24:05
  I was adults and. So you would have been what, 17
• 24:10
  years old when you went through the 16 years old when you went
• 24:13
  through the the whole. Because I I think one of the
• 24:16
  things that I read is is that you slept for like in the
• 24:21
  juveniles Center for day or. One of the things that that was
• 24:24
  used against me was when they arrested me that I slept like I
• 24:28
  fell asleep in the back of the police car.
• 24:30
  Yeah. And you know.
• 24:32
  Which is also a sense of escape, of shutting down.
• 24:37
  That's the thing. It's it's it bothers me the way
• 24:39
  the kids are treated in our justice system because there was
• 24:41
  no poo in back the layers to figure out one I've been had
• 24:44
  slept in a week. Like literally hadn't slept in a
• 24:46
  week. And to the the relief was from
• 24:55
  the 16 years of my life that ended up to that not not apathy
• 25:00
  or lack of caring. It was, it was giving up, you
• 25:03
  know, It was like, like, OK, it's over.
• 25:07
  And by it I meant life and everything else.
• 25:09
  And there was a sort of resignation in that like.
• 25:13
  So from the time that you got arrested to the time that you
• 25:16
  are standing in front of the judge and they're saying life in
• 25:21
  prison without parole, what what time spans is that?
• 25:25
  For you, 1819 months, it's about a year and a half.
• 25:29
  In fact, I was arrested in September 95.
• 25:34
  I was sentenced in June of 90. Seven.
• 25:38
  So what's the world around you? Your family, your mom, your
• 25:44
  sister and all that? What?
• 25:45
  What? What's the how?
• 25:48
  How is that? I mean, I get there's what I get
• 25:52
  to see and what I what I'm what I'm told about because obviously
• 25:54
  I'm at that time, I'm in jail, so I I don't.
• 25:57
  But they're showing up to visit and making phone calls, and we
• 26:01
  talk. And there was, you know, it's
• 26:04
  always this like, you know, you're going to be OK.
• 26:08
  They're not going to convict you, we're going to help.
• 26:09
  And it's the same thing that happens for everybody.
• 26:13
  Which is funny because I remember there's a very distinct
• 26:16
  memory from this whole process where the jury, when they went
• 26:19
  back in to deliberate, I had enough sense to know.
• 26:24
  I turned around to my family and said, look, they're going to
• 26:28
  convict me. They're going to sentenced me to
• 26:29
  life without parole. But it's going to be OK.
• 26:34
  It's going to be OK We'll we'll keep fighting, my sister told me
• 26:38
  years later. If if I hadn't done that, she
• 26:40
  don't think she could have dealt with it, because hearing it from
• 26:42
  me and seeing that I had hope is the only reason she could have
• 26:46
  it. So you hadn't lost hope.
• 26:49
  That's, you know, one of the things I, I, I like about this
• 26:52
  whole thing that we do here is that, and I think that's why the
• 27:00
  the people, a lot of people come to listen to this show.
• 27:02
  Is that the the the one thing that you can't take away from
• 27:05
  somebody 'cause that might be the only thing they have is
• 27:08
  hope. Once you lose hope, you've
• 27:10
  pretty much, you know, it's like the whole Shawshank thing.
• 27:13
  You get busy living or get busy dying.
• 27:15
  The whole thing about getting busy dying is is you actually
• 27:18
  lost hope. You got sentenced to life in
• 27:20
  prison without parole and you had not lost hope.
• 27:23
  What do you think that was? Yeah, I looked back on that
• 27:28
  time. Yeah, I I never lost hope even
• 27:33
  though I'll clarify in a second. But I honestly think it's a
• 27:39
  little simpler than that. I tell people like I don't know
• 27:42
  how to give up and it just you can't choose your circumstance
• 27:48
  in life generally. I mean, you could influence it
• 27:50
  and you can make choices that have an impact.
• 27:52
  But most of us don't choose where we start, where the
• 27:55
  starting line is. For as in life and and and a lot
• 27:57
  of other things that happened to us, the one choice you do have
• 28:00
  is whether or not you give up. And from the world I came from,
• 28:05
  if I'd made it through all that I wasn't.
• 28:07
  You weren't going to give? Up.
• 28:08
  Give up. No, There's this.
• 28:12
  Yeah, there's a story from when I was 13.
• 28:14
  I I was in rehab, in inpatient rehab, and I got thrown in an
• 28:19
  isolation cell in rehab at 13. And I was sitting there in a
• 28:23
  hospital gown in a metal padded room and safety glass looking
• 28:29
  out on this little dead tree in the middle of winter.
• 28:32
  And I remember telling my sister later on that I identified with
• 28:37
  that tree at that age, all my life and branches and everything
• 28:42
  were dead. But I realized even then I
• 28:48
  didn't give up because I had hope that if if if I can just
• 28:52
  survive till tomorrow, the sun would rise again.
• 28:55
  I do the same thing when I turned 18 and I was going to
• 28:57
  slide about parole. And that's, you know, that's
• 28:59
  today. Let's see what tomorrow brings.
• 29:03
  So you head into prison as a very young person.
• 29:08
  You're James, and you walk into prison as a very young person
• 29:15
  who's thinking no matter what, you haven't lost hope.
• 29:18
  But this is your new world, and it's going to be your world for
• 29:22
  however long you can think about it.
• 29:26
  How did you, or what were you doing as a teenager walking into
• 29:31
  a prison thinking, how am I going to survive this?
• 29:34
  This is something that I know you've been in jail and now
• 29:38
  you're going to prison, which is a different environment.
• 29:40
  Yeah. Well, it's interesting.
• 29:43
  There's there's kind of two phases to getting into prison.
• 29:45
  There's the R&O or the reception and orientation phase.
• 29:48
  In Missouri, they used to do it like you had one prison where
• 29:50
  everybody went before they went off to the real prison, and that
• 29:53
  one didn't really count because it wasn't.
• 29:55
  It's hard to explain, but you know, it's sleeping on bunk beds
• 30:00
  because it's overcrowded and playing basketball during the
• 30:02
  day because they don't want everybody inside the house.
• 30:03
  Like it didn't really register, like prison, prison.
• 30:08
  But then they sent me to Missouri's Death row prison,
• 30:09
  where I did all my time, and that's when I knew I was in
• 30:14
  prison, which is about four to six weeks.
• 30:16
  I'm in there between the two. Well, this is not just any
• 30:18
  prison. You know, I went to a federal
• 30:21
  camp. You went to a maximum security
• 30:24
  prison. Yeah, I mean that that's a
• 30:27
  that's a different world. Like when I went to the halfway
• 30:30
  house, that's the first time I had been around in in a in an
• 30:33
  environment where everybody was put into one place from maximum
• 30:37
  to camp. And Oh yeah, there's a different
• 30:39
  vibe. Yeah, there's a different vibe
• 30:43
  when I get to potosi. My RNO was, I tell people my RNO
• 30:49
  was like basically three sentences.
• 30:51
  You know, a lot of time you're going to die here, figure out
• 30:54
  what to do with your life. There's the door.
• 30:56
  And it's really. And I walked into, they used to
• 31:01
  do these level assessments of how much of A risk their danger
• 31:03
  they think you are. And they assess me as a high
• 31:05
  alphabet, like, I oh, you are a predatory inmate.
• 31:07
  And I'm like, what? So so they had to be so weird to
• 31:10
  think of in your mind that they I would refer to you that way.
• 31:14
  Yeah, I didn't. It didn't mean anything to me,
• 31:16
  but they threw me in. That means they threw me in with
• 31:18
  all of the other predatory inmates.
• 31:19
  And so I really, my first day really was literally whenever
• 31:23
  they open these doors, I'm standing there with my shoes
• 31:25
  laced up and you know, it's expect somebody to rush me.
• 31:28
  And it didn't happen that day, but I was sexually assaulted
• 31:33
  three times in my first two years in prison and the the 4th
• 31:37
  time it was going to happen. I tried to defend myself and end
• 31:42
  up in solitary confinement for nine months for an isolation
• 31:44
  cell. So but yeah, that's that's
• 31:47
  whenever I got to Dusty, it was there were no security cameras.
• 31:50
  Most of the guards were corrupt and it was the most one of the
• 31:52
  most violent presence in the state of Missouri.
• 31:53
  And that's where I did my first several years.
• 31:55
  Well, and you wanted to. And if I understand it right,
• 31:58
  Jessica and I might be reading too much into this, but that was
• 32:01
  something that you had almost planned, that you wanted to be
• 32:04
  in solitary to get away from this environment you were in,
• 32:09
  even though the solitary was not something somebody wants to be
• 32:13
  in. No, that's for me.
• 32:15
  I was never because I've seen people who did, you know, 10-15
• 32:19
  years of their life and I was gonna do my entire life in
• 32:21
  solitary. So yeah, people come out looking
• 32:23
  different. Yeah.
• 32:24
  No, it wasn't that. It was just, you know, I was on
• 32:30
  top of all the substance abuse and unresolved trauma and
• 32:33
  everything else. I'm an 18 year old kid on a life
• 32:34
  without parole sentence in Missouri's and the most
• 32:37
  dangerous prison in the state. I had some issues.
• 32:39
  You had some issues to work through for me.
• 32:41
  So. So I was.
• 32:43
  I was, I struggled a lot for my first probably three or four
• 32:46
  years. And actually it was during that
• 32:49
  solitary confinement that I come to realize several things about
• 32:52
  my life. And I was a Buddhist.
• 32:53
  I became a Buddhist. I I had a lot of deep
• 32:57
  introspection time and realized the person I was was not the
• 33:00
  person I wanted to be for the rest of my life.
• 33:01
  And I took vowels and I took them very seriously and my life
• 33:06
  changed about that was 2021. But those first years up to
• 33:08
  that, I was. Was a nightmare?
• 33:10
  Yep. I was not a night person, nice
• 33:12
  person and maybe it was my life. When do you meet?
• 33:18
  Sister Elaine during that nine months in solitary confinement,
• 33:22
  actually there's this little, tiny little nun that used to
• 33:27
  come around and but every two weeks and it's just going to
• 33:30
  stick her face in the little slit of the window and look up.
• 33:33
  And I actually met her very shortly before.
• 33:38
  Like we used to do this meditation here if I started and
• 33:40
  like she came in as a guest once and like, so I know the
• 33:43
  reference but didn't like, really meet.
• 33:46
  I mean that's why she was sat by my doors, like because I was in
• 33:49
  that meditation class and we would talk.
• 33:53
  We would talk 20-30 minutes every time she'd come by and I
• 33:56
  remember just thinking, who is this crazy woman?
• 34:01
  Doesn't she know who I am? Doesn't she know what kind of
• 34:03
  person I am? Why would she spend her time?
• 34:05
  Why would she care? I'm sort of frustrated or angry
• 34:07
  by it and. Why does she care about me?
• 34:10
  Well, the audacity of her compassion, for crying out loud.
• 34:12
  Yes. How dare you.
• 34:14
  Don't you know what the rest of the world thinks?
• 34:16
  And yeah, it's but that became, that became the image of the
• 34:22
  person I wanted to become. You know, if I was going to
• 34:26
  spend the rest of life with my president, doesn't mean I was
• 34:28
  dead and doesn't mean that I couldn't become a good person.
• 34:31
  And years later, a few years later, I had a a spiritual
• 34:34
  advisor actually, who really helped me contextualize it all.
• 34:37
  You know, we were talking about life and about struggles and and
• 34:41
  how you decide what is the right path in life.
• 34:44
  And he looked at me and said, you know, then in any given
• 34:46
  moment, you only ever have two choices just to you can either
• 34:49
  do something good or something bad.
• 34:51
  And he said. Yeah, it was great.
• 34:53
  Well, he why don't I explain is that good is not defined by some
• 34:55
  weird list of of like prescribed good.
• 34:59
  Good means you increase happiness in the world and bad
• 35:02
  means you decrease it. So I need to give it a moment.
• 35:05
  No matter what's going on, you can either choose to increase
• 35:07
  the happiness a little bit or decrease it.
• 35:08
  And those two things are the reason I am the way I am today.
• 35:15
  You know, and it and it. I think it's really fascinating.
• 35:18
  Jessica cause I know that that had to have been somewhat like a
• 35:21
  lifeline for you for somebody like Sister Elaine that that is
• 35:25
  that took the time to listen understand and then you they
• 35:31
  opened up something in you that but a lot of people say that you
• 35:37
  know like I've I'm gonna change it's it's it's really you know
• 35:42
  from this day forward it's day one not one day but you really
• 35:47
  did change I mean you really went from that day and began to
• 35:53
  help and be a person that as the warden the deputy warden said
• 35:59
  became a superstar in an environment that you walk in as
• 36:03
  anonymous and become somebody that is changing lives.
• 36:06
  And I I know what some of that means by being in prison people
• 36:13
  who do good things and help people in prison.
• 36:15
  It's so valued. You know I, I, you know like
• 36:20
  attorneys that help people with their motions and and it maybe
• 36:25
  can actually get them out of prison these these are moments
• 36:28
  and times where you know you find I, I I was I would help
• 36:32
  people with their their goals. You know because I'm business
• 36:36
  that's what I did. But it it it feels very
• 36:39
  fulfilling when you're in an environment that's closed in and
• 36:42
  you're giving something of value.
• 36:43
  That doesn't mean money. It means that you're I'm doing
• 36:47
  this for you because it makes me feel good.
• 36:49
  It's it's a it's it's it's helping my life.
• 36:53
  But from that moment though, I think you took like, I mean I
• 36:57
  know you took the steps of you got very much into the legal law
• 37:01
  of almost being an attorney not licensed.
• 37:06
  But can you kind of walk us through how this transformation
• 37:10
  went on for you as? Fast.
• 37:12
  As fast as I can, yeah. So coming out of that
• 37:18
  experience, and I guess I think it was 2001, 2002, 1001, I can
• 37:22
  look back and and and deciding that I wanted to live a better
• 37:24
  life doesn't mean that, you know, one day you wake up and
• 37:26
  all of a sudden you're a better person.
• 37:28
  Right. It's a process.
• 37:29
  It's a moment to moment process. And so I spend a lot of time is
• 37:34
  studying reflection and meditation and really training
• 37:37
  my brain. You know, brains are brains are
• 37:40
  brains are subject to their own kind of physics.
• 37:42
  They're they're very subject to inertia.
• 37:44
  If you're inclined to be angry, then you lo and behold, you'll
• 37:46
  get more angry unless you do something to change that
• 37:49
  direction. And so I applied, I applied the
• 37:52
  force of compassion and and retraining myself to look at my
• 37:55
  world as as a place I trained myself to learn that we all have
• 38:00
  one. One thing in common is we all
• 38:01
  suffer. Everything on this earth
• 38:03
  suffers, and we all don't want to.
• 38:05
  And if you can see through that lens, it changes.
• 38:09
  I used to write for a blueish publication for a while and
• 38:11
  actually one of my sort of things I'm proud of is I as I'm
• 38:14
  an author in a book that's got like a four by the Dalai Bama
• 38:17
  and supposed in Chinese now too I think.
• 38:21
  But there's the article I wrote was on my Tiger.
• 38:24
  There was a guy trying to extort me, and the way I had dealt with
• 38:27
  that in the past was with force to, you know, I meet force with
• 38:32
  force. And this time through my
• 38:34
  training, I realized to look at him in a different way and
• 38:37
  realized that it was his suffering that caused him to
• 38:39
  make the mistakes that he was making, which was to try force
• 38:43
  me. And it's hard when you're
• 38:47
  staring at a growling, roaring tiger that to to look at them
• 38:52
  with compassion. But when you can see through
• 38:53
  that lens, you realize that force does not have to be the
• 38:56
  first choice. In fact, it should be the very
• 38:58
  last one. And instead of leading with my
• 39:03
  pride and leading with force, I removed myself from the
• 39:06
  situation and ended up resolving yourself.
• 39:12
  Well, we became friends later on.
• 39:13
  But that's the whole thing. It's like you have to retrain
• 39:14
  your brain. You can't change your life if
• 39:16
  you can't change your mind. And then from there it's it's
• 39:20
  everything flows naturally. You just look for what's the
• 39:22
  best good I could do. So whenever I took the first
• 39:24
  job, I I could get coming out of the kitchen.
• 39:26
  Because kitchen was the punishment job every.
• 39:28
  Day. Oh yeah, nobody likes the
• 39:29
  kitchen. I weirdly found myself as a
• 39:32
  paralegal for the folks on death row.
• 39:36
  So in Missouri at the time, Missouri has an integrated death
• 39:39
  row. Like all the deaths, I made
• 39:40
  certain general population. They're not segregated.
• 39:43
  When the Missouri Supreme Court would issue a death warrant,
• 39:46
  which weirdly is a real piece of paper, that is a war for
• 39:49
  somebody to be killed, they would take them on general
• 39:53
  population and put them in protected custody, which removed
• 39:55
  their access to the whole library.
• 39:57
  I mean, so it's my job to go over to the folks who are within
• 40:00
  30 days of of being put to death and find out what their legal
• 40:04
  needs are and go back to the library.
• 40:06
  Find them, bring them back, help them do research, which was the
• 40:11
  first service work I really felt like I've done in my life.
• 40:15
  I can't imagine, Jessica, that you're you're dealing with
• 40:17
  somebody that is is looking at death.
• 40:20
  Very few people know a date of their death, and you were
• 40:25
  dealing with some. You were dealing with somebody
• 40:28
  that was dealing with that and trying to help them with your
• 40:32
  brain, which is fascinating. I've known, so I've known 83
• 40:38
  people that like personally new hung out with played handball
• 40:41
  with 83 people execute by state in Missouri, soon to be 85.
• 40:46
  The next two are people that were friends.
• 40:49
  So yeah, I. But that was kind of my training
• 40:53
  ground for the you know, like, OK, you want to live this new in
• 40:55
  life. It's not easy.
• 40:58
  Like like suffering is easy. It's gaining.
• 41:02
  Suffering is easy. Taking another path wasn't never
• 41:06
  wrong. I'm not.
• 41:08
  I'm going to pretend like I was the world's best paralegal at
• 41:10
  the time. But I sure the hell tried.
• 41:11
  And shortly after that I got, I got involved in Hospice.
• 41:15
  We're getting Hospice for several years and started
• 41:16
  teaching GED math. And so just tried to look around
• 41:20
  me and say what is the greatest suffering that I can have the
• 41:22
  most impact on reducing and it's but still that's my day-to-day.
• 41:26
  I don't I don't wake up in the morning and go I want to make a
• 41:30
  successful Unlock Labs. I want to grow a big business
• 41:33
  like people. People do that.
• 41:34
  Like that's a that's a thing and.
• 41:35
  That's true. That's true.
• 41:37
  Absolutely. I wake up and say what is the
• 41:40
  best thing I can do today to reduce suffering in the world?
• 41:43
  And it seems like this may be it.
• 41:45
  And the day that that seems like that's not it, then I will
• 41:48
  evaluate what I should do next. But that's the process.
• 41:51
  So the crazy thing, but the crazy thing is, Jessica, is you
• 41:55
  more or less become like a savant on coding and and.
• 42:02
  There is no but. But I'm just saying, there's no
• 42:05
  Internet, There's no there. You can't do things in prison.
• 42:09
  And you start reading like I saw this thing on YouTube, you you
• 42:14
  got out the stack of books. It was about as tall as a, you
• 42:17
  know, a fifth grader. And you taught yourself this.
• 42:22
  A lot of technology, A lot of technology.
• 42:25
  I mean, what were you, what were you thinking?
• 42:28
  I mean, you just thought I'll just read all these books and
• 42:31
  oh, by the way, I understand it all.
• 42:34
  Same principle, I mean I'll show you how this happens.
• 42:36
  So we go from I'm doing paralegal work and being able
• 42:43
  to, I started to put a script and says I'm I'm doing these two
• 42:46
  things in Hospice and stuff. And then for some reason the
• 42:49
  governor decided that there's no sense in spending money on GD
• 42:52
  education and maximum security prisons in Missouri.
• 42:55
  You're not going home, you know any education.
• 42:57
  And so there was this void left. I was teaching a meditation
• 43:00
  group at the time too and Sister Elaine and I were Co
• 43:03
  facilitating actually. And then so there's this gap of
• 43:07
  education and we showed up in meditation Group One day and we
• 43:12
  just had a conversation and said you know we've been doing this
• 43:14
  meditation thing for a while but it seems like a lot of folks
• 43:17
  here have some experience. What if we just shut down this
• 43:20
  group and became volunteer GED instructors.
• 43:22
  Let's do that And and we didn't we we shut down the meditation
• 43:26
  group and several of us went on to to be instructors at the same
• 43:30
  time we were also me and my Co founder were teaching impact of
• 43:36
  Crime and victims class which was.
• 43:39
  Impact of crime and victims. Yeah, we.
• 43:41
  Said the course. Well, we were the instructors,
• 43:44
  we were the facilitators. We we created the curriculum.
• 43:46
  My Co founder did way more of the correction creation than I
• 43:49
  did. But we we partnered with parents
• 43:51
  that murder children and we did. This became the de facto way
• 43:56
  that folks were taught about victim empathy in the state of
• 43:58
  Missouri, which gained us. I mean it was one of the most
• 44:03
  impactful, but that led in us to doing restorative justice work.
• 44:08
  So you have where educators, we're doing restorative justice
• 44:10
  work and we're teaching victim empathy.
• 44:11
  And you put those things together, we decided, well, wait
• 44:16
  a minute, what if we can start educating people that can't get
• 44:20
  to the classroom? Like how do you do that?
• 44:23
  And one of our guys that was with us was facilitators used to
• 44:26
  be in information disinformation for the Air Force so had some
• 44:29
  signal routing experience. And he and I sat down, had this
• 44:32
  conversation about what about this learn by satellite model.
• 44:35
  If you've been around since the 90s, you remember to learn by
• 44:37
  satellite. If not, you'd think I'm crazy.
• 44:38
  I have no idea what I'm talking about.
• 44:40
  But we talked to the administration said, like, look,
• 44:43
  we do restore justice. Let us start a restorative
• 44:45
  justice television station in the prison where we can pump
• 44:48
  restorative justice information and education through the cable
• 44:50
  system. They said yes, weirdly.
• 44:55
  Did it surprise you that that, I mean, or or were they really
• 44:58
  kind of following along your your path at that time, Jessica
• 45:01
  and thinking, hmm, Jessica's we were starting to get there.
• 45:05
  Yeah, we weren't there yet. We were starting to get there.
• 45:07
  Like, there's all kinds of RJ stories.
• 45:10
  I can tell you about how we got RJ up and going through like we
• 45:13
  did in anyway. They let us take and put a
• 45:17
  computer in a room and run a PowerPoint loop through the
• 45:19
  cable system that had information about restorative
• 45:23
  activities you get involved in. And we grew that into seven
• 45:28
  channels eventually and an entire, like, camera studio.
• 45:31
  And so I got to access to technology I could learn.
• 45:35
  I could get back into tech. And so with that access and then
• 45:39
  again. How many people is this being
• 45:40
  broadcast out to? Where's it going?
• 45:43
  800 the institution SO500 GP though eventually we replicated
• 45:48
  the television step to four other prisons in Missouri.
• 45:50
  So they were five in total that we were that we're accessing
• 45:53
  like this, this. We built the package and
• 45:55
  everything else to to do it. But that brings together things
• 45:59
  like I want to educate. I'm also the person that gathers
• 46:02
  all the reentry resource guide for folks.
• 46:04
  I'm never going home, but I can help make sure you go home and
• 46:07
  have access to technology. And then so I had a real drive
• 46:12
  to educate folks that that that's the thing that really
• 46:15
  resonated with me about how I should live my life.
• 46:17
  That filled you up. Education.
• 46:19
  Educating people. If I couldn't go home myself,
• 46:24
  the next best thing I can do is prepare others to go home.
• 46:26
  And to me, education, Education is agency.
• 46:28
  I mean, that's why I was in college at 16.
• 46:29
  It's like education is gives you choice in life.
• 46:32
  And so all those things come together a nice little meld.
• 46:36
  And then the walls were changing, changing as well at
• 46:41
  the same time. And so I started to have
• 46:42
  perspective on what is the best way we can grow this process of
• 46:46
  educating people beyond just broadcasting.
• 46:50
  Then in the in the search for broadcast content, one day I I
• 46:54
  got to see Khan Academy. That kind of was tiny Khan
• 46:57
  Academy. Yeah, back when it was like 2000
• 46:59
  videos. You could download the whole
• 47:00
  thing and begin to imagine what would happen if you had a Khan
• 47:05
  Academy for prisons. Like what would that, what would
• 47:07
  that be? So you take that factor.
• 47:11
  And then I also wanted people to get credentialing.
• 47:15
  And then I'd seen on PBS this thing called Watch Code, which
• 47:18
  is a nonprofit organization in Saint Louis that does technology
• 47:21
  training for non traditional people from non traditionally.
• 47:24
  Yeah, they are in apprenticeships.
• 47:25
  And so I my friend that was sending me all my information
• 47:32
  helped me learn. I had him reach out like, hey,
• 47:35
  the wild thing, I need to learn to code, want to learn to code.
• 47:38
  I had taught myself enough coding to build a prototype,
• 47:40
  like a really ugly prototype that had shown administration
• 47:43
  about like, hey, this is Khan Academy for Prisons and they're
• 47:45
  like, great, let's do that. OK, I can't do that.
• 47:51
  I could do this. And so that was part of the
• 47:53
  reach out. And my Co founder is the one
• 47:56
  that responded to that e-mail. This is Jesus.
• 48:00
  Eight years ago now, nine years ago, we worked together to start
• 48:04
  a coding program. She we work for the
• 48:06
  administration. They provided the the coding
• 48:08
  curriculum. I offlined it.
• 48:10
  I read a lot of books. I read a lot of books.
• 48:13
  I've. If if you guys want to look on
• 48:15
  YouTube, there's a two or two or three minute thing where
• 48:19
  Jessica's, they're kind of following her around in prison,
• 48:22
  but she gets out all these books, and I'm not exaggerating,
• 48:25
  They're, you know, three or four feet high.
• 48:27
  They're real huge and they're thick.
• 48:30
  It's not like, it's not like 100 books.
• 48:32
  There's like these huge books that have like they've.
• 48:35
  Got some pages of piece exactly. But it was just, it was
• 48:39
  necessity. Like I wondered to do this good
• 48:41
  thing and to do this good thing, I had to do this other thing,
• 48:43
  which is read all these books in it.
• 48:45
  So it wasn't. I didn't sit down going, I'm
• 48:46
  going to be a programmer because I'm going to be the best
• 48:49
  programmer in the world. It's like, no, if I'm going to
• 48:51
  run a television station, if I'm going to be a system engineer
• 48:53
  for a television station and I'm going to build education
• 48:55
  software, I got to learn how to do it.
• 48:57
  And so it really was just day in, day out.
• 49:00
  You get up and you say, well this is the thing I have to do
• 49:03
  if I'm going to do that, good thing, so.
• 49:06
  So Jessica, when you do this and you've reached out launch code
• 49:10
  for, for those who don't know Mckelvey and and Jack Dorsey who
• 49:15
  created Twitter, they came back in and and I think one of the
• 49:19
  reasons why it was is because they're from Saint Louis and
• 49:22
  they went to California because they didn't think they had the
• 49:24
  brain trust in Saint Louis to do what they wanted to do.
• 49:27
  So they they want to come back and create that.
• 49:29
  And so with this connection to launch code, when did you
• 49:34
  realize that you were gonna have unlocked labs and and unlocked
• 49:38
  lab was gonna be working with people from the outside to the
• 49:42
  inside to creating the inside to work on the outside?
• 49:46
  There's a really interesting way to put that.
• 49:47
  You're also right. See, that's just it.
• 49:50
  There's there's this like, this is a grand plan.
• 49:53
  It's like, no, it's not. That's what happens whenever you
• 49:55
  wake up every day and ask the two questions.
• 49:57
  So it started with, well, let's get this coding programs because
• 50:01
  I need to learn to code, wait a minute, we can teach other
• 50:03
  people to code. And we started doing that and
• 50:04
  that's the first thing we did. And then the pandemic happened
• 50:06
  right as we launched our we did our first pilots and then the
• 50:09
  pandemic happened. So we got shut down and until
• 50:11
  like 2019 and then when we came. Back up was it?
• 50:16
  I was one to know too, Jessica. Was it easy to because you've
• 50:21
  been doing other like you were educating?
• 50:23
  Was it easy to transition over to the Hey, What do you think
• 50:27
  about coding everybody? I had a track record.
• 50:34
  I had a 20 year track record by then, right?
• 50:36
  Like I was. And honestly, I had been.
• 50:40
  I had also been through my first civil rights lawsuit at the end
• 50:43
  too. So there was kind of a
• 50:44
  combination of like respect, understanding, and the people
• 50:47
  who would normally want to sabotage, they didn't want to
• 50:50
  necessarily tangle with me, which is weird.
• 50:53
  I don't like saying that, but it's there's some truth to it.
• 50:56
  So basically I had to respect that.
• 50:57
  People understand I was trying to do something right?
• 50:59
  So when I proposed it, it didn't.
• 51:00
  We had some conversations, but at the end of the day, it's
• 51:02
  like, OK, you can try this. And so I I taught myself the
• 51:06
  curriculum and then I I taught a whole other class of people with
• 51:08
  curriculum. They became my first instructors
• 51:12
  when we come out of Pandemic. And then there were
• 51:16
  conversations about for profit tablet providers and education
• 51:19
  systems in the space and how terrible they were.
• 51:22
  You know, there's a Washington University in Saint Louis was
• 51:25
  running a prison education program and they were compelled
• 51:27
  to use this this tablet learning platform.
• 51:30
  They just hate it. And just so happens, my Co
• 51:32
  founder and one of the professors from Washington got
• 51:33
  the conversation. About.
• 51:34
  And interestingly enough, I've had a couple of those people
• 51:36
  who've graduated from that program, the Jim Brock and some
• 51:41
  other people that actually were in that program and went through
• 51:44
  it and graduated in the ceremony.
• 51:47
  Yeah, it's. So you worked on that though.
• 51:51
  Yeah. So we no, go ahead.
• 51:56
  And I I was the people that became a part of that was the
• 52:01
  Mellon Foundation. You're you're with Wash.
• 52:03
  I mean, this this is gigantic stuff going on inside the
• 52:07
  prison. Yeah.
• 52:09
  So to to kind of get there the relevant detail and then kind of
• 52:12
  get there real quicker was I ended up taking that original
• 52:16
  platform and using it to build the platform that we teach
• 52:18
  coding with because we didn't have Internet access.
• 52:20
  And then so the conversation was, well, what if we can take
• 52:23
  this thing that was built on the inside by Jess and her, you
• 52:27
  know, other other instructors and grow it out to do college
• 52:30
  horses. And that became a conversation
• 52:33
  between the DOC and Mellon Foundation and Wash U and lo and
• 52:37
  behold, probably five months before I I.
• 52:40
  So right around the time I was going up for my poll hearing,
• 52:43
  actually we got the melanogram. And then from the time I had my
• 52:47
  Prolia until the time I went home, it's like 6 months.
• 52:49
  And Mellon is like one of the, I think I make probably the
• 52:52
  biggest $8.1 billion. Oh, they're It's just a gigantic
• 52:57
  foundation. The they're very good people
• 52:59
  over there though I've I've had chances to sit down their
• 53:01
  offices now and and like talk to folks but they they were our
• 53:05
  first supporter and so before I came home we actually we had an
• 53:09
  inside dev shop we had we you know we were we were teaching
• 53:13
  coding it had been expanded and when I walked out the door and
• 53:16
  walked into this project of like let's take these folks who are
• 53:20
  just as impacted and and going through our coding program and
• 53:23
  put them to work building this education technology for like a
• 53:26
  open source public infrastructure so everybody has
• 53:29
  that access and yeah so that's that's really.
• 53:32
  It's so cool. Organic though.
• 53:34
  It's so cool. Jessica and and the people that
• 53:36
  are doing this are just as impacted help.
• 53:38
  I mean it did the whole thing you know connects dots and then
• 53:42
  these people are able to go out and and create jobs or get jobs
• 53:47
  that are meaningful that it's almost you know that's one of
• 53:49
  the things that you and I were talking about the other day.
• 53:51
  Statistics are just crazy bad for getting into re entry and
• 53:55
  getting jobs. With this type of job being
• 53:58
  somebody can write code that's that's something that you can
• 54:00
  almost breakthrough the barrier and and people will take that
• 54:04
  chance on you. I don't want to skirt, I don't
• 54:07
  want to skirt over this whole thing of you going to the
• 54:09
  Missouri Supreme Court, by the way, that that was a huge thing
• 54:14
  and changed a lot of people's lives because you were the
• 54:16
  pioneer of that. Federal Court.
• 54:21
  What? What's your recollection of that
• 54:25
  time period and how you were working through that?
• 54:31
  Because you were 20 years into prison.
• 54:33
  Is that correct? Yeah, I was in 2015 is when I
• 54:37
  first started my journey. So there's a whole, like
• 54:39
  internal process. I'll skip over for now because.
• 54:41
  But 2015 is when I first started the transition process, which I
• 54:48
  don't want to let this slip by because you know, for those of
• 54:51
  you who are not from Missouri may not realize like Missouri's
• 54:52
  going through a really hard time with trans rights right now.
• 54:56
  And there's this tendency to say all people in authority of
• 55:01
  Missouri are terrible. But remember all these things
• 55:05
  that we built which involved you know DOC officials and even
• 55:09
  government officials were built. As I was going through my
• 55:13
  transition process, I filed for a change of name in 2015 and
• 55:17
  shortly thereafter was referred for hormones and was denied and
• 55:20
  then went to federal courts. So I wasn't even Missouri's here
• 55:23
  in court case we went to, we went to the federal District
• 55:25
  Court and fought the state of a right for me to access hormones.
• 55:29
  And now by 2018, which is right as we're really trying to lean
• 55:33
  into doing all this stuff with the DOCI started taking hormones
• 55:38
  and shortly thereafter I stood the state of Kansas.
• 55:40
  We changed my all of my birth certificate and everything else.
• 55:43
  So I'm literally in Missouri's maximum security male prison as
• 55:47
  legally Jessica James Hicklin, female taking hormones.
• 55:52
  That was an adventure. I bet it was an adventure in it.
• 55:55
  And I what also was the environment with you in a men's
• 56:01
  prison and you're transitioning? It's.
• 56:06
  Completely atypical, I will say that before I explain this,
• 56:09
  because the normal experience is terrible and I still advocate
• 56:13
  for housing by by acquired gender.
• 56:16
  But for me, because I had 20 years of not only working with
• 56:20
  administration but also working with the people who live next
• 56:23
  next to me, like you're trying to go home and trying to help
• 56:25
  you find. Them.
• 56:26
  They're trying to help them, right?
• 56:29
  I lived in the honour dorm and general population for my last
• 56:33
  20 years in prison and not a thing changed when I
• 56:36
  transitioned. I was, you know I was as
• 56:42
  respected and if somebody's even more effects the weird way to
• 56:46
  reference. The reason I asked that, the
• 56:48
  reason I asked that, Jessica, is because there's a lot of
• 56:50
  different people when, you know, you enter the in the world of
• 56:53
  prison. I met some incredible people
• 56:56
  that I would have never have met.
• 56:59
  And I think that the whole thing, you know, because the
• 57:01
  transgender topic is, is on the top of of everything that's
• 57:07
  going on right now and in in the world that we live in.
• 57:11
  And I think that the one of the experiences I came out with is
• 57:16
  coming, going to prison was is that don't always try to
• 57:20
  understand the story, don't listen to what somebody said.
• 57:23
  And I think that that goes to the transgender issue too, is
• 57:26
  that if everybody was communicating and understanding
• 57:30
  each other of how we get to where everybody wants to get to,
• 57:35
  then you don't have these sides so divided as much as just the
• 57:39
  communication of understanding. I and I think in prison, the
• 57:42
  reason I ask you that question is in prison you had the ability
• 57:46
  to because you were confined to be Jessica and to be who you are
• 57:52
  and you were respected and you were a part of the general
• 57:57
  population that people just like everybody else.
• 58:00
  You were just everybody else. Somehow, someway, we've got to
• 58:04
  get to that point in in in our, and I don't know exactly what
• 58:08
  the answer is to that, but you know, it's almost like you only
• 58:13
  need to confine everybody to be able to talk to each other.
• 58:17
  Until you figure this out, no. I tell people that whenever it
• 58:20
  finally becomes irrelevant is when it will.
• 58:21
  When we'll be there. Meaning I don't show up in
• 58:24
  spaces going hi I'm a transgender CTO of a of a non
• 58:29
  probably like why if it's not it's what I how I live my life
• 58:33
  is is is not relevant to how you live your life other than how
• 58:36
  can we work together and so and and that's really like on the
• 58:40
  day-to-day and tosi while I'm doing the things I'm doing and
• 58:43
  we're going to be people. It wasn't like we started off
• 58:45
  the conversation like oh hi I'm I'm trans now let's have a
• 58:48
  conversation. It just wasn't relevant to the
• 58:50
  people living on me like you're doing you and you know you comb
• 58:54
  your how you want to and you put on the clothes you want to.
• 58:56
  What the Hell's that got to do with us talking about this case
• 58:59
  law over here? And when we get to that point
• 59:01
  where we start letting each other live our own lives and
• 59:04
  realize it doesn't really affect us, then we'll be there.
• 59:07
  Not before then. Yeah.
• 59:08
  And it'll it's it's a long path, but I think the more and then
• 59:11
  having conversations like this I think helps too, is that just to
• 59:16
  understand, you know, to to hear a story but when you when you
• 59:21
  went all the way up to the Missouri Supreme Court and you
• 59:25
  won, it had to feel fantastic, right?
• 59:30
  You're in prison and you went all the way out to the Missouri
• 59:34
  Supreme Court. Yeah, I'm trying to think
• 59:39
  There's many actors like to talk about this, but obviously it's
• 59:42
  deeply personal for me. And I remember being on the
• 59:46
  phone with my attorney when we got the the order back in, she
• 59:48
  was looking on Pacer and we were, she was like, put in an
• 59:53
  amazing amount of time that the Lambda Legal folks like, lived
• 59:57
  and breathed this fight. And she like, refreshes like,
• 1:00:02
  wait a minute, wait a minute. And then started reading this to
• 1:00:05
  me over the phone on a Friday at like 4:30 in the afternoon.
• 1:00:10
  I lost it. I did.
• 1:00:12
  I just lost it and I was so elated but at the same time just
• 1:00:16
  just can't be real and and but yeah there was.
• 1:00:21
  It goes back to a theme you started on earlier hope right?
• 1:00:27
  And it restored my faith and my and hope.
• 1:00:30
  Like if you just hope for a better tomorrow and you work
• 1:00:34
  towards that better tomorrow, that better tomorrow will show
• 1:00:37
  up. And that really was that was one
• 1:00:41
  of those moments for me where it restored not just the hope for
• 1:00:43
  that situation, but for life in general.
• 1:00:45
  Oh yeah. And I mean with your hope you
• 1:00:47
  you you you infuse it with action and and I think that's
• 1:00:51
  one of the things that people it's not easy and you go through
• 1:00:56
  everybody goes through like you said everybody suffers.
• 1:00:58
  But the the getting back up thing is is the the action part
• 1:01:02
  that you don't you know have in your hope is the the key.
• 1:01:07
  But being able to take action because you know you had three
• 1:01:09
  or four years there that you weren't didn't know how to deal
• 1:01:12
  with what had happened to you and then you woke up and then
• 1:01:15
  you became who you are now Jessica.
• 1:01:17
  And I just think it's I think it's amazing.
• 1:01:21
  And so you you also had a law change that would give you the
• 1:01:27
  opportunity to have a parole hearing.
• 1:01:29
  Am I correct about that? I was part of the litigation.
• 1:01:32
  I'm that that's there's some clarifiers there.
• 1:01:35
  But yeah, I was in Missouri. The case that determines how
• 1:01:38
  that pro hearing goes is my case.
• 1:01:40
  Take Linda Schmidt. So.
• 1:01:42
  But I if anybody knows the juvenile life without parole
• 1:01:46
  argument, no, it's very short. It started with Christopher
• 1:01:49
  Simmons or Rupert Simmons which was the United States decided
• 1:01:52
  whether or not we should kill juveniles anymore.
• 1:01:55
  That case happened in 2005. I remember that case because
• 1:02:00
  Christopher Simmons was my cellie.
• 1:02:01
  When that case happened, I remember they took him, they
• 1:02:03
  caught him up one morning and read him his death warrant in
• 1:02:05
  front of the cell and took him off to the place where I would
• 1:02:08
  go to barely to work and two weeks later was Roper versus
• 1:02:11
  Simmons. During that whole time period, I
• 1:02:15
  used to read his case law and then like we would.
• 1:02:18
  And that's what I did. Like like you know what can we
• 1:02:20
  do to help your attorneys, which you know had really good
• 1:02:22
  attorneys at the time. And from there, it went on to,
• 1:02:25
  you know, the work of Brian Stevenson, who did amazing work
• 1:02:27
  for us and Gran versus Florida and Miller versus Alabama.
• 1:02:31
  And so there was federal law going on and I was definitely
• 1:02:35
  part of trying to be. I've litigated in the US Supreme
• 1:02:38
  Court I think 8 times at this point.
• 1:02:41
  So I was always filing, but I didn't get the Montgomery versus
• 1:02:46
  Alabama ruling. That was another state and this
• 1:02:49
  US Supreme Court. But it was through those
• 1:02:53
  arguments, everything else that I got Hickman versus Smith,
• 1:02:55
  Missouri Supreme Court, which yes contributed to.
• 1:02:59
  Also I will say in the Garth of Justice Center is the one that
• 1:03:02
  won in Missouri. First they won at the federal
• 1:03:04
  level to get us those parole hearings and then it was
• 1:03:09
  overturned recently and. Now, well, and and Jessica, you
• 1:03:12
  had some incredible people that spoke on your behalf at that
• 1:03:15
  parole hearing, which I'm sure had a gigantic impact and it
• 1:03:20
  probably made you feel incredible that those people did
• 1:03:24
  that for you. My parole hearing was surreal,
• 1:03:27
  I'll be honest. There was the people who spoke
• 1:03:30
  on my side, sister Elaine being one of them, my Co founder being
• 1:03:34
  another at this point and ACLU attorney being the 3rd.
• 1:03:38
  But the surreal part was the exchange, the conversation,
• 1:03:41
  because there was three parole board members and three of us on
• 1:03:44
  my side. And to sum up one of the
• 1:03:48
  statements one of made says, you know, this guy had been, he was
• 1:03:51
  on the panel, been quiet. The whole hearing pipes up at
• 1:03:54
  the end says you know this is how people should spend their
• 1:03:57
  time. Now how you spent your time is
• 1:04:00
  how people should spend their time.
• 1:04:01
  Good luck and two weeks later I found I was going home.
• 1:04:05
  Which is kind of what we're trying to do.
• 1:04:07
  You just brushed 2 weeks later. I was going home.
• 1:04:12
  I was supposed to be in prison the rest of my life without
• 1:04:14
  parole. And then two weeks later, I'm
• 1:04:16
  going home. Where is that?
• 1:04:17
  Oh, it was. There was.
• 1:04:18
  Yeah, it was. It was very stressful because we
• 1:04:20
  did. We fought down to the so I
• 1:04:22
  pissed off quite a few attorney generals sister and turn
• 1:04:24
  generals in the litigation process to get to that point.
• 1:04:26
  But you know. Yeah, you fought.
• 1:04:29
  And going back to the hope part, you know you never gave up and
• 1:04:34
  that's that's why you're sitting here is you never gave up and
• 1:04:38
  you're here let's go to let's go to talk about what you're doing
• 1:04:42
  now just because it's not like you just came home and tried to
• 1:04:48
  figure things out which is is by the way statistically one of the
• 1:04:53
  things that's the toughest thing is to get out and try to find a
• 1:04:55
  job you actually were working Unlocked Labs on the inside
• 1:04:59
  transitioned yourself to the outside into re entry and became
• 1:05:05
  the Co founder which you already were and the CTO for unlocked
• 1:05:09
  labs tell tell us what you are. What's your life's like today
• 1:05:15
  after 26 years, by the way? I just don't want to roll over
• 1:05:17
  the fact 26 years you get out and there's this great story in
• 1:05:21
  the garden. You know you're going to get.
• 1:05:23
  You know where do we go. And you were like let's get
• 1:05:25
  something to eat and chaos for the rest of the day or whatever
• 1:05:28
  it was that I. You know that the the idea that
• 1:05:31
  you were in for 26 years and your mom becomes just the
• 1:05:35
  greatest advocate mom for you and she's turned her whole life
• 1:05:38
  around. Your sister and everybody's, you
• 1:05:40
  know here you are. It's it's and and you you're
• 1:05:43
  this respected superstar leaving this as.
• 1:05:46
  It's like I wanted to read that in the beginning this anonymous
• 1:05:49
  kid that comes in and you walk out is creating this internal
• 1:05:53
  change within the prison system. Not just that prison, the prison
• 1:05:57
  system. And then you're out.
• 1:06:00
  Boom. You know, wow, 26 years you are
• 1:06:04
  out. What what's Jessica?
• 1:06:06
  What's going on in your head? Actually, it's funny.
• 1:06:10
  I just now kind of look down at the clock on my computer and I
• 1:06:12
  said, oh, years ago because it was Martin Luther King a
• 1:06:16
  weekend. Yes, I got out of prison, so
• 1:06:21
  yeah. Which is weird, by the way.
• 1:06:23
  I went into prison on January 14th and you got out on January
• 1:06:26
  14th, yes? I.
• 1:06:28
  Did to connect. So I'm obviously being
• 1:06:33
  reflective right now, like, oh jeez, that was two years ago.
• 1:06:36
  But the chaos that I was planned was I had a whole spreadsheet of
• 1:06:39
  things I needed to get done, like into the DMV.
• 1:06:41
  You get my ID, you get my I need.
• 1:06:44
  Like I had a list and actually my, my, I had good family there
• 1:06:49
  and a good friend. And the friend said, how about
• 1:06:52
  we stop for breakfast? Sounds like a good idea so.
• 1:06:57
  So about 30 minutes out of prison, we stop and we go into
• 1:06:59
  Panera. And that's when I really had the
• 1:07:04
  sense of old women in prison, because I walk into a Panera and
• 1:07:08
  I look and I have options of what I want to eat for
• 1:07:11
  breakfast, which is not a thing In prison, not so much.
• 1:07:15
  I was. So I've only had three sent
• 1:07:18
  three times. This had a sense of being
• 1:07:19
  overwhelmed since I've been home.
• 1:07:20
  And that was the first one I looked around and like I I was
• 1:07:24
  frozen. It's.
• 1:07:25
  Kind of sensory overload. Yes, I can.
• 1:07:27
  Just the options and stuff. Like, yeah, I have cheese, egg,
• 1:07:30
  biscuit. Yep, that's great.
• 1:07:32
  And then they hand me this little the puck, the vibrating
• 1:07:35
  puck ticket. And I I look at my friends, I'm
• 1:07:38
  like, is this like a coffee folder?
• 1:07:40
  This is where you put the coffee mug.
• 1:07:42
  What is this? You know, take it back to the
• 1:07:44
  table to vibrate. So, so there was that.
• 1:07:47
  And so there was this sense of like, like, odd.
• 1:07:50
  This is, this is like probably like the Wright brothers when
• 1:07:52
  they first got off the ground, like, oh God, it's fine, it's
• 1:07:54
  working. And then I'm sitting at the
• 1:07:56
  table and my sister goes to the bathroom and her phone rings and
• 1:08:00
  I look down and I say it's my brother-in-law.
• 1:08:02
  So I pick. I remember I went in 1995, There
• 1:08:05
  were no smartphones. I reached over, pick up the
• 1:08:06
  phone, answer the phone, start talking to my brother-in-law.
• 1:08:10
  Because I had had, no matter how much crap I got for this, I had
• 1:08:13
  a phone, a cell phone manual that I had a chance to read
• 1:08:15
  before I come home. So I knew how to answer the
• 1:08:17
  thing and so when I can pick up the phone and start talking to
• 1:08:20
  my brother-in-law and when we're done hanging up and like hand
• 1:08:22
  her phone back, I'm like OK, I got this.
• 1:08:25
  But we're going to be OK. It was all right moment.
• 1:08:27
  Yeah we'll be all right. And then I've just been doing
• 1:08:30
  one day at a time ever since I I came home on a Friday walked
• 1:08:33
  into work on Tuesday morning as they actually that's was really
• 1:08:37
  my first official day as a as an employee of unlock labs and wash
• 1:08:40
  you at the time I was doing because the grant.
• 1:08:43
  So I actually was a programmer and Programmer Analyst Juan for
• 1:08:49
  Washington University and the C2 of Unlocked Labs the day I
• 1:08:52
  walked out the door, which is still surreal to this day.
• 1:08:55
  It's crazy. And tell us like what?
• 1:08:59
  What's your thoughts on Unlocked labs?
• 1:09:01
  What's what's your what in your your brilliant brain that you
• 1:09:05
  have, what's going on in your immediate future?
• 1:09:10
  About the time it was just like we had this idea, like we wanted
• 1:09:13
  to build education, technology, but and like a really
• 1:09:16
  rudimentary prototype built by people.
• 1:09:18
  I haven't seen the Internet in 20 years, 25 years.
• 1:09:21
  There's 3-4, there's four employees.
• 1:09:25
  I've been like labs at the time. And it was just like, we're
• 1:09:28
  going to do this great thing. How the hell are we going to do
• 1:09:32
  this great thing? And so, you know, it's it's the
• 1:09:35
  whole first year was this, I mean, I've been through so many
• 1:09:38
  accelerated programs, executive coaching, fundraising, learning
• 1:09:42
  to do the things, hiring teams, developing the software myself
• 1:09:45
  in the early days. It's just been growing it.
• 1:09:48
  I mean, we're 1314 people now. And how many people are part of
• 1:09:55
  it like that, are inside the prisons that are, you're right,
• 1:09:59
  reaching through? Roughly 5000 people use our
• 1:10:02
  education system. We've graduated think a lot of
• 1:10:05
  returning people have been through our coding program now.
• 1:10:09
  So we have like both those things that we're doing now we
• 1:10:11
  employ, so 14 people are working for Unlock Labs now. 70% of them
• 1:10:16
  are just as impacted, like they went through a recording
• 1:10:18
  program, came out with us now and so yeah, we were in a in two
• 1:10:22
  years. We're in an amazing space and
• 1:10:24
  the future looks amazing, but we stay at a time and it.
• 1:10:28
  Kind of. And I think the other thing too,
• 1:10:29
  Jessica that that you know we're, we were talking about it
• 1:10:32
  the adobo platform that's in the state prisons, it's not in the
• 1:10:34
  federal prisons. I think we're up to this.
• 1:10:37
  This program goes into 300 prisons of the people who have
• 1:10:40
  the tablets but I think something I I got personal
• 1:10:46
  experience with you on. So you and I were having a call
• 1:10:49
  and we're working on something I hope is going to be an
• 1:10:51
  incredible thing that we're going to put an umbrella over
• 1:10:53
  the United States and connect all the people that are doing
• 1:10:56
  good things for re entry to to be able to access.
• 1:10:59
  So it was I could see how your brain worked when we got we're
• 1:11:04
  on this this zoom call because you just you just immediately I
• 1:11:09
  said OK, this needs to be done we're gonna do this And then you
• 1:11:12
  put a Google doc together and you said OK all of a sudden I
• 1:11:15
  had a homework assignment and your your action is I can see
• 1:11:21
  how people are drawn to that because a lot of people talk
• 1:11:25
  about stuff cuz it's easy. You know you just talk about hey
• 1:11:29
  what about this and but what if we did this one thing that I
• 1:11:32
  noticed about you you you talked for a little bit and then you
• 1:11:35
  were all of a sudden you're filling out a Google doc and
• 1:11:39
  we're and we're putting this in action and I think that being in
• 1:11:43
  a in the environment you were in a prison had to inspire people
• 1:11:47
  that we're just not gonna talk about it.
• 1:11:48
  We're gonna do it and and by doing it that feels different.
• 1:11:53
  It's you're taking a step. And it may be the wrong one, but
• 1:11:57
  at least you're taking one and you're taking one of that.
• 1:11:59
  Yeah, that's a yeah. I was home 13 days when I went
• 1:12:03
  on my first fundraiser trip. That's incredible.
• 1:12:07
  Drove to New York City because I didn't have my ID figured out
• 1:12:09
  yet with a my Co founder. And by like 1718 days out of
• 1:12:14
  prison, I was standing in the JM Kaplan buildings in the in the
• 1:12:17
  in the Grape Room for For less if they've ever been there,
• 1:12:21
  looking down on the streets of New York, going.
• 1:12:24
  Wow. Taking a step, yeah.
• 1:12:26
  You just taking a step steps. And.
• 1:12:29
  When I reached out to you, you were over in Europe.
• 1:12:31
  Somewhere, somewhere, somewhere. Switzerland.
• 1:12:34
  I think So, yeah. It's been interesting two years,
• 1:12:37
  but it just you wake up every morning, ask yourself what's the
• 1:12:43
  greatest good you can do today and do it.
• 1:12:46
  That's well, there's no other. I was going to ask you what's
• 1:12:48
  your biggest take away is through this whole experience.
• 1:12:51
  You might have just said it. Yeah, really is that's, you
• 1:12:54
  know, I don't always get it right.
• 1:12:55
  I don't know everything. I'm certainly going to screw up,
• 1:13:00
  but I'm going to wake up again tomorrow and say what is the
• 1:13:02
  best good I could do in the world today?
• 1:13:04
  And I'm going to do it and. And it just happens to affect
• 1:13:08
  people's lives in a in a positive way.
• 1:13:10
  And that's, you know, I I just, I think I hope so many different
• 1:13:16
  people listen to this show on this episode because there were
• 1:13:20
  so many times, Jessica. I mean, you can almost point to
• 1:13:24
  it when you read that. What is it?
• 1:13:27
  The Guardian story, the there's so many points in that I just
• 1:13:32
  kept reading and thinking, oh, well, this isn't going to work
• 1:13:35
  out. Oh no, this is this is not going
• 1:13:38
  to happen. And then you just kept getting
• 1:13:40
  through it and then all of a sudden you're out and you're
• 1:13:44
  this unlocked Labs person that's changing people's lives from the
• 1:13:48
  inside out to the outside. So it's it's just, I love it,
• 1:13:53
  love what you're doing. I appreciate that you're a voice
• 1:13:57
  and a strong voice for what you believe in and and we need more
• 1:14:01
  of that. We need more Jessica Hickland's.
• 1:14:04
  Well, I think I would say if I had one good take away that I
• 1:14:06
  really hope people understand is that I I didn't do it alone.
• 1:14:10
  You know, that's the and to your point about, you know, us coming
• 1:14:14
  across the aisles or whatever those aisles may be like, if we
• 1:14:18
  are going to truly end suffering in this world, we got to put all
• 1:14:21
  that crap away and just work together.
• 1:14:23
  So that's really the secret of my success is I have good intent
• 1:14:26
  and I take good action, but I do it with.
• 1:14:29
  Good people. That's powerful.
• 1:14:33
  That's a good way to end it. If people want to get a hold of
• 1:14:35
  you, Jessica, they can go to the website Unlocked Labs right?
• 1:14:40
  Unlocked its.org.org. You can reach out to me by
• 1:14:44
  e-mail if you want as well. It's just jessica@unlocklabs.org
• 1:14:48
  and. I'll put that in show notes too
• 1:14:53
  and for anybody who's wanting to read a book out there, I still
• 1:14:57
  got one going. I still got it's still on Amazon
• 1:15:00
  you can go to Barnes and Noble Nightmare success.
• 1:15:02
  It's easy to get to you can go just tap on that button.
• 1:15:07
  I love the reviews everybody that puts the the show on
• 1:15:12
  steroids and and we're getting a lot of reviews here lately So
• 1:15:14
  it's it's fantastic and I really appreciate.
• 1:15:21
  Jessica you being on today and sharing your story.
• 1:15:24
  People who want to go to my website.
• 1:15:26
  It's Brent. Cassie dot Oh well who's that?
• 1:15:28
  That's my Co host. Rosie.
• 1:15:30
  Rosie what a is Schnauzer. For those on YouTube you'll be
• 1:15:34
  able to see Rosie Schnauzer mix. Oh that's fantastic.
• 1:15:37
  I grew up with a Schnauzer for 15 years when I was from a baby
• 1:15:41
  to a freshman in high school. Brent cassie.com Go to that.
• 1:15:47
  If you want to find out more about me, it's with the Ty not a
• 1:15:50
  DY. And as I used to say when I was
• 1:15:53
  writing my emails back and forth from Leavenworth, stay strong.
• 1:15:56
  I'll do the same. Jessica Hicklin, you are a
• 1:15:59
  superstar. Thanks for being on here today.
• 1:16:03
  Diamer Success in and out.