At 17 years old, the fate of Jarrett Adams fell into the hands of an all-white jury that sentenced him to prison for a crime he did not commit. However, there were other plans for him.
Today, a pioneering lawyer, Adams has not only survived the system, but he also works tirelessly to fight it from within for many others who have found themselves in similar circumstances.
At one point, with a spirit of defeat, Adams accepted what had culminated in his life. He even went as far as putting a halt to the already limited contact between him and his loved ones on the outside. But thanks to his mother and aunts, who never gave up on him, Adams had a change in perspective.
The moment when it all changed for him
“It was a visit one day,” Adams told Blavity. “It was a maximum security/not super-max prison, and I was seeing my arguments for why I deserved to have the conviction reversed, just be rubber-stamped, ignored, and just reliving all the stories I had been told from my grandparents about racism and prejudice. I mean, as a kid on the South Side of Chicago, you’re pretty much in a cocoon until you actually experience it, and you barely get the education of it. School systems don’t really teach you the harsh realities of what it is. So, it’s like one of these things where, once it gets you, it’s got you type of thing. I became very dejected, and I had almost waved the white flag.”
He added, “I stopped sending out letters and getting on the phone. My mom and my aunts were concerned, and they contacted the prison so much that the warden pretty much came to my door, and was like, ‘Man, look, if you don’t check in with your parents, give them a phone call, we’re putting you on segregation — because they’re beating up our phone line. They want to make sure you’re okay. They’re not taking our word for it.’”
Adams recalled seeing the increase of wrinkles and anguish on his mother’s forehead when she was finally able to come visit him following his decision to isolate himself further than what the system was already doing.
“I said to myself, if this woman can drive up eight hours just to lay eyes on me and not give up, who am I not to fight? So, I started to go back and just painstakingly start to teach myself the law, and told myself, man, look, if evil’s gonna win, evil’s gonna know who’s been in the fight,” he said.
What true justice means to Adams
His book, Redeeming Justice, explores his personal fight for equity on both sides of a broken system, so we asked Adams what true justice looks like to him.
“True justice is equity and equality,” he stated plainly. “That’s what it is, an equal and level playing field, and we don’t have that. We have an adversarial system, and we have a system that picks on the poor and gives breaks to the wealthy. It just seems like it ain’t enough justice warriors out here to level the playing field, so we need to find a different avenue in doing it, along with voting, changing the laws, but more importantly, shifting resources to the people who are directly closest to the problems because they usually have the solutions. They’re just further away from the resources to provide those solutions. Justice is finding our way to equity and equality across the board when it comes to our system.”
His thoughts on the work that must be done from the inside out
From working to get former President Joe Biden to commute the sentence of two Virginia men, known as the Waverly Two, who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to life, to simply being a leader in his community and a role model for inner-city youth who look like him, Adams is a force to be reckoned with. It’s all because he did not allow the system to defeat him.
This is not always the case for many, which is why he stresses the connection between economic power and criminal justice reform.
“When a fire department dispatches to go put out a blaze, it looks crazy, but everybody knows what they’re doing,” Adams said. “They’re jumping off the truck, you got some people responsible for the water hose, other people responsible for tapping the fire hydrant, the other people responsible for the latter, but they’re all doing all of this to get the water hose to the person who is closest to the fire, and it can only be the person that’s the closest to the fire. The reason they’re doing this is because the person closest to the fire can see where the blaze needs to be extinguished, to get it out quickly.”
He continued, “The water hose is so powerful, if you spray it in that direction, it’ll probably get there, but it won’t get there effectively enough to get it out and save lives and save homes. I use that same analogy to what’s going on in our neighborhoods, and what’s going on in our system, right? We need to get to the people who are where the blaze is going, so they can see exactly where they need to apply the water to put it out. For example, with the criminal system, why aren’t public defenders given the resources that they need to represent the city and the citizens that it represents in whatever county it is? Why are they on such budgets? Why are there always cuts? They are the ones closest to the fire, which is the criminal system.”
“A lot of times when people have incidents that should be given probation, and they end up going to prison, they come out in a lot worse shape and a lot less stable,” Adams further explained. “When you talk about the neighborhoods, you have people in the communities where 90% are living, paying taxes, doing what they’re supposed to do, raising families. It’s only 5-10% who are the YNs, quote, unquote, right? So, if you give the resources to the people in the communities to be able to provide these jobs, we know there ain’t gonna be any shooting from 8 to 5 when they’re at work, right? We know that if Jamal’s daddy got locked up, but we have resources to make sure Jamal is doing stuff on the weekend … he’s going fishing, he’s going hunting. It’s kids from the South Side of Chicago that I represent, that feel like going downtown is going out of town. That’s just insane.”
Using his platform to empower others
It’s no coincidence that Adams not only aims to infiltrate the system, but also to encourage others that there are other career pathways available to them than what is portrayed or glorified in the media. He’s also using the advice of his auntie to help others avoid allowing something in life to “put a period where God only intended a comma to be.”
“I could have been Jarrett Adams, wrongfully convicted and got out, period,” he said. “Instead, I decided to put a comma there that says [he] went on to fight for other people to make sure that them and their mamas don’t feel alone on the island while the criminal justice system was strangling them.”
