Yusef “Bunchy” Shakur, Shaka Senghor and Chris Wilson are activists, community leaders and businessmen. They are also among the formerly incarcerated.
The three are speaking out about their journey from prison to prosperity and why the American justice system needs to move away from mass incarceration and more toward rehabilitation and reform.
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Their efforts as prison-reform activists are just a small part of the larger movement to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. Today in Washington, D.C., #cut50 is hosting its Bipartisan Summit on Criminal Justice Reform. Crossing party lines, #cut50 seeks to dramatically reduce the United States’ booming prison population, which it calls a “human, social, and financial disaster,” offering new reforms to deal with the incarceration crisis.
While the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population, it houses more than 25 percent of all the world’s prisoners. Shakur, Senghor and Wilson’s stories put a human face on the all-too-tragic tale of men and women whose lives get caught up in the penal system and then fall into a cycle of recidivism and poverty.
Listen to their stories below as they talk about how they were affected by the prison industrial complex.
Chris Wilson
Shaka Senghor
Yusef “Bunchy” Shakur
Straight From 
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