Louis L. Reed’s vision began in federal prison.
While serving 14 years of a 16-year sentence, Reed, REFORM Alliance‘s senior director of Memberships and Partnerships, had a spiritual transformation. He came to look at God as more than the alpha and omega and see Jesus as a reform revolutionary.
“I started looking at Jesus from the perspective of he himself was concerned about criminal justice reform before it was even a thing in our modern-day vernacular,” Reed told rolling out. “When he was crucified, as history would tell it, he invariably put the Roman criminal legal system on trial, because he himself was disproportionately impacted. He was zealously prosecuted and received capital punishment sentence for what we would now consider a misdemeanor offense.”
A mentor also told him “those closest to the problem are also closest to the solution, but are often furthest away from the solution.” It was at that moment, approximately six years ago, Reed knew he wanted to help reform the American justice system, but didn’t know where to start.
He found himself with Cut50 as a national organizer. The group was started by CNN contributor Van Jones and Kim Kardashian West‘s legal mentor Jessica Jackson. Cut50’s primary focus was to pass the First Step Act under the Trump Administration. Trump signed the law in December 2018, in a bi-partisan effort to improve criminal justice outcomes as well as reduce the size of the federal prison population, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
The New York Times called the bill the “most significant legislation” since the 1994 crime bill. The First Step Act has freed more than 20,000 people from federal prison in the past three years, Reed explains.
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