What happens when a prison sentence ends, but the barriers to belonging, opportunity, and full civic participation remain? In this episode of Democracy on Fire, Kay Brown speaks with Marcus Jackson, founder and executive director of Advocacy Based on Lived Experience (ABLE), about his journey from incarceration to becoming a leading voice for criminal justice reform in Kentucky.

Jackson shares how relationships, advocacy, and lived experience transformed his life—and why people closest to the criminal justice system should have a meaningful role in shaping its future. They discuss voting rights, reentry, rehabilitation, the stigma facing formerly incarcerated people, and the importance of building communities rooted in trust, participation, and shared responsibility.

At its heart, this is a conversation about second chances, civic belonging, and the belief that justice is something we build together.

Justice isn't something like that one group gives another group right.

It's something that we build together.

And we build that together through trust, participation, and shared responsibility.

Welcome to Democracy on Fire.

I'm Kay Brown and I'm glad you're here.

We One of the things that defines our progressive movement is that we value the worth of every person and we strive to leave no one behind.

Sometimes overlooked or forgotten are prisoners and those coming out of prison after completing their sentences.

These folks frequently endure discrimination in housing and employment, social exclusion, and continuing stigma.

Almost 2 million people are now incarcerated in the United States.

As of a couple of years ago, 4 million Americans were banned from voting due to a felony conviction, and that comprised almost 2% of our total adult population.

My guest, Marcus Jackson, is a formerly incarcerated Kentuckian who overcame many obstacles to become the founder and Executive Director of Able Advocacy Based on Lived Experience, and he's also Vice Chair of the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

And he's a native Kentuckian and longtime advocate for criminal justice reform.

Prior to this role, he worked with the ACLU of Kentucky, where he led the organization's voting rights efforts focused on restoring the voting rights of disenfranchised people due to past convictions.

He's working on developing the leadership of individuals impacted by the criminal justice system, empowering and engaging local communities, and reshaping the criminal justice practices and policies at all levels.

So welcome Marcus.

Thank you so much for sharing your insight information.

Thank you for having me.

Really appreciate it.

Tell me a little bit about your life story and how you got to this point.

Interesting.

I grew up in a small town in the western part of Kentucky called Paducah.

So shout out to my people from Paducah, Kentucky.

And like many other people in our community, at the age of 19, I ended up incarcerated.

We can argue semantics, but I was sent to prison for a crime that I did not commit.

But it did not matter because I was still sent to prison and prison changed my life.

It really changed my life forever.

After my release, I quickly learned that simply finishing the sentence is not enough.

There's so many things that I had to try to overcome to just gain my footing and it was a constant struggle which ended up in me recidivating going back to prison.

It was while I was in prison that I started to learn more about advocacy, fighting and speaking up for yourself.

And while incarcerated at Kentucky Maximum Security Prison, I really just went head on.

I help people fight their cases to the Supreme Court of Kentucky successfully and that in itself let me know that sometimes what we go after, when we start dreaming again, how we apply ourselves, how we learn, how we show up can have a tremendous impact.

But unfortunately, it's not.

The carceral system beats you up so bad that it's hard for people to ever see themselves or ever see what's possible for themselves beyond prison.

Advocacy based on lived experience.

Not because Kentucky needed another nonprofit.

It was because I was in the work and I was seeing, like, the gaps and what was missing for our people.

And a lot of that was simply just a place for us to belong, a place for us to be seen, a place for us to be heard, accepted.

And I say it's been.

It's been great.

It's been great for me personally.

And.

And I say re entry because no matter how long I've been out, there's still things that I'm re entering to, things that are different.

So it's been great for me.

It's been great for all our members across the Commonwealth of Kentucky and our leaders within sign of Abel.

So what made the difference for you?

Was it a particular person or how did you get your life turned around?

Yeah, relationships, right?

When you think about what we've been taught as what society has taught us about people that are.

Are incarcerated or battling with addiction, there's the stigma that, like, these are bad people, we should stay away from them.

So it makes us isolate ourselves and we stay away from people and we just go over here.

We try to keep our head down, we try not to be seen, and we just try to make it as best that we can.

But this world, this society, is built on relationships.

You can't do anything in this world alone.

And for me, meeting Desmond Mead was one of the big turning points in my life as far as seeing someone that was directly impacted doing amazing things, things that no one had ever thought was really imaginable.

And how he just.

How he had a belief in me before.

I had, like, a total confidence in myself.

And he opened those doors, helped me walk in, helped me gain my foot, and supported me along the way.

Another thing that changed my life, and this kind of goes back to the incarceration piece, is starting to understand politics differently, right?

Like growing up, being disconnected from politics.

It's Republican, Democrat, that's it.

We don't learn anything other than just two parties, choose between one or the other, Right.

But as we started to grow and as I started to grow and start to learn more, it's really politics.

Is nothing more than, like, who has the authority to make these decisions that's going to affect me every day.

Right.

And then are ordinary people like me going to be able to have a voice in those decisions?

So when I started to believe and see it in that way, it was like, oh, I have something to say and someone should listen to me because I'm close to the problem.

I thought about this, I've lived it, and I know I have a solution how to end this.

That should be a huge part of what our elected officials listen to, to be able to understand how to create the solutions for our everyday existence.

And once that became my truth, it was no looking back.

It was like, you would have to lock me up to shut me up now.

Because it's like, this is what we need.

This is.

This is why this doesn't work, or this is what needs to happen so it can work.

And I see the impact that it's actually having on people's lives every day through my work.

So I'm very fortunate in that way.

What policies are you prioritizing for change?

Of all the things that are wrong with the criminal justice system, which ones are the most significant and where are you focusing your effort to try to make change happen?

Wow.

Across the board.

So.

And this unfortunately, like, we are the only directly impacted led organization in Kentucky that is with a primary focus on civic participation.

That's one.

But also, when we think about how our people serve our time, I think a lot of people misunderstand and think like, you received a sentence, your conviction, you were sentenced to a certain amount of punishment, but the sentence itself is the punishment, not the conditions in which you serve the sentence.

Right.

And it's like, how can we, how can we improve the criminal legal system, these institutions, how can we improve them so that people can actually be properly rehabilitated?

So one of the major issues in Kentucky right now is that we're faced with, we have different levels of life sentences.

We have a 20 to life, a 25 to life, and then we have life without the possibility of parole.

And then, of course, we still have the death penalty currently.

Now, if you go to a jury trial and the jury finds you guilty and sentences you to 20 years to life or 25 to life, that means you're eligible for parole after serving 20 or 25 years, they have a practice where they will serve you out and basically convert your sentence to a life without the possibility of parole.

Had the jury wanted you to serve a life without the possibility of parole sentence, they would have Sentenced you to that.

So figuring that out.

We're also trying to get governor Beshear to start a clemency board that would directly impact the people on that.

We also want to get directly impacted people appointed to the pro board.

There's just so many things that we can recognize as someone that has served time that will give you a better understanding of where a person is at in their lives and something that a lot of people won't think about.

It can be something as simple as this.

When you're.

When you pick up the phone to call a loved one, they tip.

They say your name.

What's your name?

A lot of people will say a nickname, blowing the phone, do anything, but rarely say their full name.

And what I know is the people that are saying their full name, they are really preparing to come home.

They are really focused on getting out, doing what's right, following the rules.

Something as simple as that that is often overlooked by people who are passing judgment down on the incarcerated population.

So that's the importance of having someone directly impacted on the board, because we can look at behaviors, we know how things operate on inside and see if a person is trying to get it right or a person is simply getting caught up in what the prison system is creating.

We're also working to get the governor to clarify his executive order right now around restoration of voting rights, because there's so many issues with that, and then ultimately obtain a constitutional amendment.

A constitutional amendment to.

So that people, at a minimum, have the right to vote restored automatically without them having to do anything else upon completion of sentence.

We hope to get to a day that you never lose the right to vote because people are still being counted for the census, still making up the numbers for the community so that they can even have a representative in that area.

And we are still impacted while we're incarcerated by what's going on in society.

So therefore, I feel like people should truly never lose the right to vote.

You can't erase my citizenship because I was convicted of a crime.

So therefore, don't take away my responsibility as a citizen and my right to vote.

They're all, you know, different in some.

There's a few states where they actually Allow people to vote while incarcerated.

And then in some states it's automatically voting rights are restored when they get out of prison.

California is one of those, but it's really different all around the country.

Do you, do you think people coming out of prison are interested in voting?

Is that something that there's a push and an interest in trying to address that and make sure that those rights are restored?

So, yes, I do believe there, I think there's an interest.

Right.

But I also think there's a lot of people that may not be interested as well, because priorities, housing, you know, employment, all these things can sometimes lead the way.

And then let's not forget about the disconnect where people feel isolated and away from that and like that's not a part of my life.

That's not for me.

And they never truly understand the importance of participation.

Right.

But when you, when I think about that, it's like our neighboring states, like Kentucky, without the executive order, you lose your rights forever.

And the only way that you can get that right back is through executive action.

The governor has to sign an individual partial pardon for that individual.

In Illinois, your rights are automatically restored when you are released from incarceration.

So people on probation and parole have the right to vote.

Ohio touches us, same thing.

Indiana touches Kentucky, same thing.

Virginia, which will hopefully pass the ballot initiative this year to automatically restore voting rights to people upon completion of sentence.

And then West Virginia, same thing.

Tennessee is a little different.

Certain years you had the right to vote, automatically restored.

Other years you didn't.

So it's kind of complicated with Tennessee, but all those states touch Kentucky.

And through our current executive order, Governor Beshear restored voting rights to some people with violent offenses, but no one with an out of state conviction or federal conviction, meaning it left a lot of confusion.

And what we're asking for, what Able is fighting for and hoping that Governor Beshear will clarify, we just believe there should be a clear and equal pathway for people to have their rights restored.

Meaning if you come to Kentucky, you should meet Kentucky standards.

If your rights are restored in Illinois, Kentucky shouldn't take them away, which, that's the current practice.

We take them away, you lose what was already given back to you by the state that you committed the crime in.

And that's just horrible.

And we run into a lot of complications because we have 120 counties in Kentucky, a whole lot of counties for a very few amount of people.

And each county can interpret that the way that they want to.

So in some counties, your rights are being restored.

There's no problems in other counties, we ran into issues where normally with a pardon, you receive a piece of paper that says your crime has been pardoned.

So clerks were looking for that piece of paper with this executive order, which there was never a piece of paper to said that.

Right.

So we just wanted to be clear so that everyone understands clerks, people implemented it.

And we had another situation in Kentucky with the clerk's implementation is we had a gentleman with a federal conviction who was allowed to be placed on the ballot to run for sheriff, only to be contested by the opponent that's.

Well, he's a convicted felon and he's from.

He has a federal conviction to find out he was right.

He shouldn't have never been allowed to be on that ballot.

You know, and it's just like we need to know.

We need it to be clear who is eligible.

And we believe that every citizen should have the right to vote.

That's certainly a goal we worth working for.

Are you.

Do you think it's feasible?

Is it optimistic?

Did you say there is currently a ballot measure that would do that?

So we had to work in opposition of that individual bill.

I mean, greatest intentions in the world.

Just not understanding how things happen in real life.

We try to.

And that's the importance of the live experience.

Right.

We can put the perfect policy on paper.

We can think we cover every gap, everything with this perfect piece of policy.

And then it goes out here into society and then you start seeing flaws.

Because people have experienced a lot differently, like, especially when there's a lot of discretion within the law.

So yeah, we.

We believe that it will change.

We've built a coalition of people who are working strongly and don't want to be confused.

They don't have to actually support restoration of voting rights, but they understand that something is wrong with our system now and that needs to be corrected.

And what's the answer?

And the answer so that there is zero confusion would be to automatically restore voting rights or have citizens never lose the right to vote.

Could that be done at the federal level by Congress now?

They could.

The federal government.

There's a actual bill floating around right now in the federal government where it's trying to allow people to vote in federal elections.

Right.

Because states ultimately hold voting rights.

We.

We're going to get there.

This is the thing.

There's only two states right now, like Kentucky, Kentucky and Iowa.

Virginia took themselves off the board with this ballot initiative, hopefully.

But even in Iowa, the governor in Iowa signed an executive order that automatically restores voting rights to everyone, regardless if it's state or federal or out of state.

The only exclusion is for murder.

So that's uniform.

It's better than what we have because we have a chart that you have to basically ask a person numerous questions.

It depends on that person being totally honest with you before you can even start to assess.

And, and another thing that makes it so challenging in Kentucky is because people say violent offenders.

And you notice when I started the conversation, I said some nonviolent offenses.

So basically they weren't a non violent offender when they served their time.

So it's just too much confusion around what we have currently in Kentucky.

What are the arguments that people use who oppose restoration of voting rights?

Why?

What do they say the reason is we shouldn't do that?

I've heard them all doing this work.

I've heard them all.

So I think the most bothering someone to me is that some people don't deserve the right back to vote.

Like they just don't deserve it.

They did something so heinous that they do not deserve the right to vote.

My problem with that is that after you've been incarcerated, you are not the same person that committed that crime.

You are not.

And what's the point in having the so called rehabilitation piece added in there if we don't trust that the system is actually rehabilitating people?

Right.

You can't have it both ways.

If, if I establish programs and I have this period of incarceration, you do that and you do everything that you're supposed to do, then I'm going to move the goal post in the finish line on you to make you want to do some more.

That's just.

That doesn't feel right.

So we've also heard the deterrence factor, which to me that is by far the furthest thing from that could ever be the truth.

It will stop people from committing crimes.

It will stop people from Further committing crimes like, no, I don't think many people thought about losing the right to vote when they did what they did, right?

But we're slowly changing minds with our storytelling, our narrative change, because once it's done, it's done in our book.

Once the crime is done, I'm on my pathway back.

And one thing that they really need to consider and are starting to consider is this, that isolation.

When people are in isolation, they're more likely to harm our communities.

But as people become connected to communities, see themselves as part of the communities, feel like they belong in their communities, have ownership in their communities, they don't want to destroy it.

And I can say that through personal experience.

When you feel like I'm capable, I'm here.

I can do better every day.

I'm motivated to do better.

I never want to return back to criminal behavior.

How can allies or people that are concerned help?

Is it a change of attitude, an openness, a willingness?

What.

What do you ask of people that would like to be helpful?

I have a laundry list.

Okay.

No, not really.

So the first thing, first thing, listen.

Just listen.

I mean, we, we need, we don't need people to speak for us as much as we need people to listen to us, right?

Just to listen, learn, you know, help us create opportunities for our voices to be heard, you know?

Second, you got to think about the stigma, right?

That stigma, those stories, those horror stories to be told.

And just remember that people are more than the worst thing they've ever done.

They're capable of so much more.

I think.

Third, support organizations led by directly impacted people.

I mean, when I say people that are closest to the problem are closest to the solution.

There is a caveat that we believe in that part of our work with able.

We also believe that lived experience is not enough.

We have to have lived experience with accountability to be true leaders.

And there's a healing that comes with that.

Because I can't make decisions from, from a state of trauma because it's only going to harm people.

I have to heal.

I have to start healing from that trauma.

And then finally, like, vote, vote.

Participate in our communities.

Like, get to know your neighbors.

I. I don't.

As we tell our people, when we talk about civic participation, most people minds go straight to voting.

And it's like, that's a piece of it.

How am I being a good neighbor?

How am I supporting the people in my community?

What am I giving and what am I putting out there to show a young person or anyone that there's something possible there's something greater for us if we just work together and do it right.

Now.

I know this sounds so cliche.

Ish, right?

But we, we know because we've experienced it.

Like justice.

Justice isn't something like that one group gives another group right.

It's something that we build together.

And we build that together through trust, participation, and shared responsibility.

And that's how we're going to get and have the communities that we truly deserve.

Because at able, we understand and we know that the more good people you have in your community, the better your community is going to be.

Well, there's certainly a lot that needs to be done and reformed.

And I thank you, Marcus, for the work that you're doing to bring this to public attention and to help lift people up.

Our next opportunity to bend the arc of history toward justice is coming up here shortly in the midterm elections.

We need a landslide of votes for change, which will overcome attempts by Trump and his sycophants to suppress voting.

We're going to leave it there for today, but I hope you'll join us again on Democracy on Fire.

You can find us on United America Network or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks so much for being here, Marcus.

Thank you for having me.