Jessica Jackson: An Unexpected Hero

I know what it’s like to feel hopeless and powerless. I’m serving a 30-year federal prison sentence for a low-level, nonviolent offense: I made misrepresentations to three high-net-worth investors who lost a combined $106,000. I’ve spent long stints in solitary confinement. I’ve spent time at brutal, volatile maximum-security U.S. penitentiaries where extreme violence and extended lockdowns are part of daily life, like traffic in a big city. (When locked down, prisoners are confined to 10 X 5 cage, with a toilet and two steel bunks. A bologna sandwich and an apple are crammed through a slot in the door three times a day. And prisoners are allowed showers once a week. The lockdowns can last anywhere between a couple of days to months.)

Holidays and birthdays come and go. Family members die. Friends move on and get married and advance in their careers. So, for someone serving decades in federal prison or even life (there is no parole in the federal system), the reality can be overwhelming. People in prison are isolated and incredibly vulnerable.

But there is a woman who steps in and gives the voiceless a voice and power to the powerless. Her name is Jessica Jackson, and her story is truly inspirational.

Jessica Jackson is a human rights attorney who began her career representing death row inmates in their appeals. In 2019 she earned the American Constitution Society Fearless Advocate Award and the Alexander Law Prize from Santa Clara University. 

Jackson has also worked on several mass incarceration policy changes, including the FIRST STEP Act, which passed in Congress in 2018. This bill, which allows prisoners to earn an earlier release, has been one of the most significant pieces of criminal justice reform legislation in years. Even President Trump praised the bill during his 2019 State of the Union address, saying it would give “nonviolent offenders the chance to re-enter society as productive, law-abiding citizens.”

This is by no means a complete list of Jackson’s accomplishments. But when you look at them, you have to admit they’re not half bad for a high school dropout.  You heard that correctly. Jessica’s path to being one of the most effective legal advocates in the nation is highly unconventional.

Tears in a Courthouse Bathroom

At 22 years of age, Jackson found herself holding her 2-month-old baby, sobbing in a courthouse bathroom in the state of Georgia. Some of the tears were because her baby was refusing to nurse. However, most of the tears were because her husband had just been hauled away by a bailiff after having been sentenced to six years in jail on a nonviolent burglary charge.

Jackson didn’t have a job or even a high school diploma. She didn’t even know how she would drive her husband’s truck to get her and her baby home that day. 

Suddenly a single mother with no real plans or options, Jackson soon felt her fear turn to anger. Her family had been ripped apart by a criminal justice system that refused to see her husband as a human being who had made a mistake. 

“I knew he was a good dad, a good son, an employer, a great employee with a hard work ethic,” she has said. “He’d made a bad decision, but there was so much good in him as well. I think whenever you have a loved one who’s incarcerated, and you see what happens, you see how all those good things about them are just kind of thrown away, and instead, they’re put inside of a prison.” 

For Jackson, this experience ignited her desire to work on criminal justice reform. But first, she’d have to go back to school.

An Uphill Battle

Jackson and her baby moved in with Jackson’s mother. Soon after, Jackson announced to her mother that she would become a lawyer, much to her mother’s disbelief. Remember, Jackson didn’t even have her high school diploma at the time. 

But the fire had been lit, and Jackson was determined to do something to ensure no other family would be torn apart because of a broken criminal justice system. However, the shift from “lost young mother and wife” to “powerful change-maker” did not come easily. Or quickly.

“I don’t think I realized what an uphill battle it was going to be until I was already in the thick of it,” Jackson has said. “But then I was already doing it — and I wasn’t about to quit.”

Jackson graduated from the University of South Florida and then law school at Santa Clara University School of Law in just six years. After passing the bar exam, Jackson worked as a human rights attorney, representing California death row inmates in their appeals.

Meeting with the inmates and their families, Jackson realized just how many lives were being thrown away into the system instead of getting the help they needed to address the underlying reasons of why they committed a crime.

The Plan for Change Scribbled on a Napkin

Jackson was able to take a major step toward her ultimate goal of implementing criminal justice reform thanks to a chance meeting with Van Jones, a political commentator with CNN who had worked in the Obama White House.

Over breakfast one morning, they scribbled plans for an initiative that would aim to cut the prison population in half, and #cut50 was born. They knew their goal would not be easy to reach. They had both seen the recent report put out by the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy center, that had found with the status quo, it would take 75 years to cut the U.S. prison population in half. 

“To me, cutting the jail and prison population in half would still leave a much too large system, but it would force us to think differently and to fight differently,” Jones said. So, that’s precisely what he and Jackson set out to do with #cut50. “It probably would have died on that napkin,” Jones added. “But Jessica is just a force of nature.”

Challenging the Status Quo One Personal Story at a Time

The idea behind #cut50 was to both decrease the number of people incarcerated each year and also reduce the stigma and isolation that affects those touched by the criminal justice system. Jackson and her team wanted to create a platform where the general public could hear personal stories from individuals and families who have experienced prison first-hand. Only through personal stories can the rest of us truly grasp that punishment and justice are not the same things.

For decades in this country, a false narrative has been used to put the fear of God into citizens. This fear would abate when politicians would run their campaigns on “tough on crime” laws, promising to lock up dangerous criminals and throw away the key. 

But this style of criminal justice has only caused prison populations to balloon over the past 35 years. And as more and more research suggests that punitive policies create worse outcomes on crime rates – not better – lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are beginning to question the status quo.

In addition to Jackson sharing her own story, many members of the #cut50 team can speak first-hand about life in prison. 

Michael Mendoza started as a Policy Associate at #cut50 and now helps lead the organization as National Director. And that is fairly miraculous because Mendoza came very close to spending his entire life in prison.

At 16 years old, Mendoza was tried as an adult and convicted of second-degree murder after participating in a ride-along with a gang that ended in the death of a rival gang member. While Mendoza was not the one that pulled the trigger, he was sentenced to 15 years to life anyway.

After spending 17 years behind bars, Mendoza was released under California legislation, Senate Bill 260, which aimed to help people who went to jail as juveniles start over. Since his release, Mendoza has gotten a degree and is working hard to help others get the second chance at life he was given.

Mendoza is one of many working within #cut50 who are sharing their stories, hoping to impact the general populace and the lawmakers in D.C. So far, their efforts have been paying off. In 2018, the prison population in this country hit a nine-year low, according to a report from the Vera Institute of Justice. 

But there is still much work to be done. As of this writing, roughly 2.3 million people are still behind bars. That’s why along with sharing personal stories, Jackson and her team at #cut50 are also focusing their efforts on partnering with both grassroots organizations across the political spectrum and big-platform advocates to (hopefully) transcend divisive politics happening inside the beltway. So far, they have been busy supporting the Safe, Accountable, Fair and Effective, or SAFE, Justice Act sponsored by Congressmen Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) and Bobby Scott (D-Va.), as well as the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act co-authored by a bipartisan group of senators led by Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). 

In addition to sponsoring the FIRST STEP ACT, Jackson and her team are also behind #cut50’s Dignity for Incarcerated Women legislation, which aims to provide women with better treatment while behind bars.

Moving forward, how do Jackson and #cut50 plan on combating mass incarceration?

Jackson and her team are focusing on changing the system. They want to see resources freed up and reallocated into education instead of incarceration. She wants to see more education, employment, and housing. Jackson also plans to continue her efforts to have laws changed so that people are diverted from ever going into the system in the first place.

At the end of the day, what Jackson really wants is to have inmates seen as human beings, something that never happened with her now ex-husband. “We want to make sure that people who are incarcerated are treated with dignity and respect and given a real chance at rehabilitation while incarcerated, and that when they’re re-entering society, they’re not having to fight an uphill battle that’s almost impossible every single day just to get their life back on track and to be able to succeed.”

Like MiAngel Cody, Brittany K. Barnett, Amy Povah, Mark Osler, Rachel Barkow, Brian Stevenson, Amber Baylor, and Kim Kardashian, Jessica is on my dream team—a group of remarkable people who selflessly devote their lives to unwinding years of injustice as well as to changing the status quo. Jessica is unicorn special.