Meek Mill and Jay-Z Partner with Ivy League for Criminal Justice Reform

Grammy-nominated artist Meek Mill, real name Robert Leameek Williams, is no stranger to the criminal justice system. He was sentenced to prison when he was just 19 years old. In 2017 he declared After an alleged airport altercation, he was sentenced to up to four years in prison for violating his probation and riding a dirt bike in New York while filming a music video.

After a difficult legal battle, Williams was finally released in 2018. said“I am blessed to have the resources to combat this injustice, but I understand that many people of color across the country do not have that luxury, and my platform We plan to shed light on these issues using

Williams stayed true to his word. He founded a non-profit organization REFORM Alliance, a year later, with Sean “Jay-Z” Carter, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, and other notable leaders in entertainment, business and philanthropy.the organization is Created “Replacing America’s criminal justice system with a restorative approach that enables people to reintegrate into society with dignity, create meaningful avenues of work, and feel ready to succeed.”

This August, the REFORM Alliance partnered with Columbia University to fund research into incarceration and its effects. REFORM’s newly formed research and implementation arm provided a grant to the Columbia Justice Lab. Mission “To fundamentally rethink judicial policy through actionable research, community-centered policy development, and sustained engagement of diverse constituents.” Since little academic research has been done on probation and parole, REFORM brings together experts in the field to explore how these two topics are inherently related beyond incarceration. would like to investigate.

Partnerships make releasing specials easier problem A series of articles in an academic journal (Annual Proceedings of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences), “From Oversight to Opportunity: Rethinking Probation and Parole also assesses the opportunities available to legislators and other practice-based stakeholders to improve the justice system.

This compendium reveals the hard and unambiguous data. Eight million people live in poverty due to access to the justice system. “

Teresa Hodge, a Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and a leading criminal justice reform activist, wrote one of her papers, “Moving from Awareness to Urgent Action: A Call for Related Data and a Human-Centered Reentry Approach.” is the author of A victim of the criminal justice system herself, she previously spent 70 months in prison.

Hodge told ESSENCE:

“Through this collaboration,” says Hodge. In particular, these scholarly articles also pave a clear path toward meaningful changes in parole and probation policies. We still have a long way to go, but the partnership between the REFORM Alliance and the Columbia Justice Lab challenges our country to do better and is an important step in the right direction. “