What 30 Years of False Imprisonment Taught Bruce Bryan

For everyone to, like, guys started realizing while you were there your story. Like the ward started getting around the green room and it was one of those things where like, what? He just got out three weeks ago, wrongfully accused for 30 years and here he is having a good time. It was a crazy experience to like be sharing the green room with you because you could see everybody, like you became like the celebrity of the green room. You know what I'm saying? Everybody wanted to hear the story, everybody wanted to talk to you, everybody was blown away by it and by the grace that you displayed. Like the fact that you could be wrongfully accused, spend 30 years of your young life in a cage and then come out and just be this wonderful, fun guy having a good time, everyone's laughing, having conversations. It was beautiful. It was beautiful. Look, I'm standing next to him last night, you know, worried most of the night because you know, we had got on a plane and that was his first time flying in over 30 years. There was a lot of stimulation and you know, I could tell you that I'm still in shock even sitting here now that we're sitting next to each other because I spent the last several years visiting him at Sing Sing which is you know, not a great place, Sing Sing Prison in New York but I don't want to throw cold water on anything but you know, there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment last night going on that people didn't see. From you? I think for Bruce, I mean there was one point where we were sitting in the balcony watching Atel and by the way, congratulations on that amazing club. Thank you. Just an amazing, the company mothership is really a dream for the comedians, love it, the crowd was amazing. It was just so awesome to see so congrats on that. Thank you very much. How fun is Dave Atel? He's a master. My side hurts. He's a master. He's a master. We were sitting there and some other folks came in and at some point you know, Bruce kept looking over his shoulder and you know, I realized that he was uncomfortable and he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side, shoulder to shoulder with them. I think I know why you did it. Why did you do it? I think in prison you become accustomed to not wanting people behind you, right? And then I got this scar in prison from behind and so you're always conscious of what's behind you. Of course. No one goes through that experience unscathed, right? You come out with these idiosyncrasies or these quirks that you, these defense mechanisms that you develop while you're incarcerated. You know, you're in an abnormal environment for decades, it's going to have an effect on you psychologically. How old were you when they put you in? I was 23, I just turned 24. And tell us the whole story of what happened. Well, I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide. I think that everyone knew that I didn't do this case at all. Everyone knew I didn't commit the crime. I mean, I literally woke up that afternoon because my girlfriend wanted to change her niece's costume and she also had a taste for chocolate cake. So just imagine waking up to change a costume for Halloween, a child's costume, and then disappearing for the next 29 years of your life, right? And being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor involved in your conviction has a history of misconduct, and it wasn't until some 27, 26 years later, that he finally gets arrested and gets convicted. Former Queens prosecutor, John Scarper, he gets convicted for the very same misconduct that I've been telling them about that he's been doing for decades. So he would just find someone painted on them? Yeah, he would concoct the story of theory as he did in my situation. And he did this just to convict someone? Yeah. Anyone? Yeah. So it wasn't that he was targeting you, it just he just decided it was you? Anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or in drug dealing, it's easier to get someone that has a history of being involved in the streets to put a case on them than it is that someone that doesn't. So once they find out that you have a record, it's easy to say, all right, well, he did this homicide. What kind of a record did you have at the time? I had a drug sale, probably, I say that. So that's enough for him to say, okay, he's a part of a drug crew and, you know, let's arrest him and lock him up. This particular prosecutor, his thing was bribery. He would pay off witnesses. And he ended up not only getting convicted, but went to federal prison for it. He was in some of the worst penitentiaries in New York, from Attica to. I was in Clinton, Great Meadows, Sing Sing, all maximum securities, all maximum security prisons way upstate in some towns that are essentially, you know, a lot of a lot of racism is pervasive in those towns. The prison is the only economic development in that town. So you got brother, cousins, aunts and uncles working in the same prison. So you get into an incident with one officer, you got a problem with the entire system. And that's just how it is when you go deeper upstate, I mean, borderline Canada, you know, Clinton, Danna Mora, Great Meadows and different prisons like that. So in the economy of the area depends upon the prison. It depends upon the prison because there's really nothing there but snow during the winter time and farming. So there's nothing else there. So the prison is the driving force behind the economy. So everyone's there, right? Sibling. So nepotism is, you know, it's prevalent in these prisons. And one of the things that you encounter is that, you know, these prisons, it's not just cold in those areas. The prison is a cold environment and it's up to you to create your own heat. It's a dark environment and somehow you got to find that light, you know, that light within yourself in order to travel, in order to, you know, to do something with your life more meaningful, you know what I mean? And it's difficult. It's not easy. You watch guys, you know, guys you talk to today and, you know, tomorrow they're swinging from the light, they're dead, right? Yesterday they were fine. You know, the next morning you wake up, they've hung themselves, you know? And these are the things that you encounter day in and day out and you still have to maintain a sense of humanity, right? You got to become, you could either do two things. You could become bitter or you could become better. I chose the latter because one of the things I did earlier in my incarceration was make a conscious decision to not serve time but to have time serve me. I made up my mind that if you were going to have me incarcerated for a crime I did not commit then I was going to take this time and use that cell as if it was an office. I was going to use that school building as if it was a university and every chance I had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection and do the things that I needed to do to protect my soul, I was going to do it. And I made it my business to do so and I started delving into material that I probably would never have read, you know, being a free man. I started reading everything from philosophy books to, you know, very few novels but I tend to learn from the experiences of others. So autobiographies became my thing, you know, from Quincy Jones to Miles Davis and just continuously studying, right, and then studying the system and what drives the system and why it has become what it is, you know, from education to, you know, to the whole system of why educational system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's going to be caught up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade, right, based on your reading level. They can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop. These are things that most people don't know, right, like 50% of the incarcerated people in New York State or probably in the country are living with dyslexia. So then, so they're unable to learn, you know, the basics of education like reading and these guys go home and they commit crimes over and over again because they were never corrected. And these same systems that were built on the premise of rehabilitation are draconian in that they do nothing but, you know, steal a person's humanity and allow them to become or look that as nothing more than a number. You got to wake up six o'clock in the morning and sometimes when they're coming around they're asking you your name and they're not asking your name, they're asking you, you know, your numbers, what cell location you're in. They're not calling you Mr. Brian, they're calling you 60 cell, right, and a lot of people begin to internalize that and lose their sense of self. And so I remain guarded and try to maintain a sense of humanity through my meditation, right, through fasting every now and then and just through deep introspection and reflection. For me, that was the hard part. The easy part was education and learning. The hard part was introspection and fighting a system, right, not just a prosecutor or a court but fighting a system that was premised on, you know, oppression, right, that was premised on it's a business, a prison industrial complex. You got cheap labor, you know, the 13th Amendment says you're allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime, you see. And so, you know, in a system like that you have to find a way, you got to find it within yourself too, to rise above the fray. Did you meet anyone else inside that showed you this path? Yes. Early on in my incarceration there was a group of guys called the Resurrection Study Group and it was founded by a guy named Eddie Ellis who has since passed on. And what the Resurrection Study Group did was they developed this program called the Non-traditional Approach to Social and Criminal Justice and it helped them understand why the vast majority of incarcerated people in New York State came from, at that time they came from seven basic neighborhoods, right? And these were neighborhoods that were all impoverished, that were all plagued with what we call crime-genitive factors from, you know, substance abuse to dilapidated housing to you know, just poverty, right? And so you see violence. And what I've come to realize is that poverty is violence. So wherever there's poverty you're going to see violence because poverty itself is violence. And so these neighborhoods you begin to learn and study and you begin to see that this is not by accident. You know these prisons were built for a purpose. There's a saying, they say you build it they're going to come. That's the same thing with prisons. You build them they're going to come. Similar to the 1994 crime bill that was signed by Bill Clinton and offered, co-authored by our now President Joe Biden and incarcerated more people across the country than any other time, right? They perpetuated the three strikes you're out. You had guys who stole a slice of pizza, third strike, he gets 25 to life. We're looking at cases now where guys, it took $200, he'd been in jail for 20 years. Some guys sentenced 70 years for armed robbery. Like all of these things come under the 1994 crime bill. When you begin to see it as a system that was designed to do certain things, it's a wake up call for you. And you begin to say hold on man, I fell for the trap. It's time for me to begin taking a different route and begin to educate myself more. And so the resurrection study group, these guys steered me in that direction. They steered me in that direction and I began to learn from another gentleman that was a part of it by the name of Dr. Gary Mendez who also died. And he had a program called the National Trust for the development of African American men. And what it did was help us restore those values that we strayed away from. So this is what got me on the right path early in my incarceration.