 When I was with you in 2013, we did this amazing, amazing action, and we simply asked you with the help of Travis Maurer, Travis, you in the house? Travis Maurer helped us with the technology so that you could text message 42420, that was on purpose, and demand that those who could receive relief under the fair sentence acts, since you did that, more than 6,000 people have come home. We're going to think about that and revisit that today, but before we do, there's somebody I want to bring up and have speak to you. Because we say 6,000 people and that's a number, but for every number there's a name, and the first person who let me know in 1994 about the horrors of this dirty stinking drug war was the story of a young woman named Kamba Smith. I read it in the pages of Emerge magazine, but you can still get magazines and not just online, and I looked at this beautiful young woman who reminded me of me, who went to an HBCU like I did, who was a mother like I wanted to be and would be soon. And I looked what they had done to her and sentencing her to 24 and a half years in prison, and it horrified me, and I knew that as part of my work as a prison reform activist, I also had to dismantle the drug war. Thank you, Kamba Smith, for that great learning moment, although it came at such a brutal expense, and even as it did, and she came home, she has honored all of us by remembering the edict that we leave no soldier behind every day since this sister has been home. She has not only raised her two beautiful children, but she has stood on the front lines demanding that we set the captives free. You can please join me in welcoming a soldier for truth and for justice, Kamba Smith Pradia. Public Speaker, and I think they were worried about me going over my time because this is like my passion. So I actually wrote a statement, but in the spirit of Harriet Tubman, in the spirit of save her name, my name is Kamba Smith Pradia. Today, I'm a wife and a mother with a 20-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter. In 1989, I was a college student at Hampton University, and I met a very charismatic man who I'd seen on campus hanging out with students or picking up girls. I fell in love with him and became his girlfriend, even though I knew he was a drug dealer. I thought like some of the other college girls, thinking what he did was his business and I'm doing school. During this three-and-a-half-year relationship, the federal government was building a case against him, and they knew that one time he instructed me to pick up money from an individual. They knew that I was his current girlfriend. They knew that I was being abused, and they knew that he killed his best friend because he thought he was cooperating with the authorities. The government stated that I never handled, used, or sold the drugs that were involved with the case, but yet they still indicted me with hopes by having me and custody that they would eventually get to him. On September 1st, 1994, I turned myself into the Eastern District Courthouse of Norfolk, Virginia, seven months pregnant because the prosecutor assured me that if I did, he would allow me a bond to go home to give birth to my son. He lied. Then a month later, after I turned myself in, my boyfriend was found murdered in the same apartment that we had been living in, in Seattle, Washington. After I learned of his death, the jail kept me on suicide watch because they were concerned about my mental and emotional stability. On December 12th, 1994, I gave birth to my son, where five minutes after I gave birth to him, my leg had to be shackled to the bed. But when the political climate, with the political climate of the criminal justice system in the 1990s, there was no room to see me as a human being. I was seen as a statistic, another single young black mother who was involved with drugs. I was seen as a disposable. I was seen exactly the way scores of other black women like me were seen, like our lives had no value. The judge sentenced me to 24 and a half years and six months in federal prison. I was never supposed to spend any of my son's childhood with him. I was 23 at the time and I was supposed to stay in prison longer than I had been living on this earth until I was 45 years old. I thank God for the media, in particular black media, because George Curry, editor of Emerge magazine, was the first to do an extensive article about my case, which led to Elaine Jones and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund taking on my case pro bono. I'm not still in prison today, still in prison today because I had parents and a family who deeply dedicated and sacrificed a great deal to support me because of people like Julie from FAM, because of Ethan Nadelman, because of Deborah Small, because of Congressman Bobby Scott and Maxine Waters, because of people like many of you gathered in this room today. There and your activism made national magazines and television shows take notice, such as the Washington Post, The New York Times, Glamour Magazine, Nightline, BET, The View, just to name a few. And on December 22nd, after serving six and a half years, I was granted clemency by former President Bill Clinton. Since then, I've become a national and international public speaker, completed my college degree, bought a home, gotten married, fought to get my voting rights restored, wrote a book, raised my son, who is now a senior at Washington and Lee University on a full ride. And this year, and this year, I was appointed to the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission by Virginia Governor Terry McCullough. Thank you, but understand that's not what I've come to share today. Even through my successes, my heart still aches because I have a sense of survivor's guilt. Organizations didn't come together and devote resources just to free me. It was done in hopes that my case would set a precedent for others for thousands of women just like me. No group was more incarcerated than black and brown women in the 1990s. And yet no group has benefited less from the work we've done together to dismantle the disparities in sentencing and race-based outcomes. In July this year, I remember getting a message from random people on Facebook about President Obama commuting 46 people sentences who had nonviolent drug offenses. Immediately, I went online to search for a list of names. I was disappointed that there were only five women on that list. It was painful not to see at least one person I knew to be on that list. I'm here to say that our work is not yet done. I have faith that many more will come home before President Obama goes out of office. My concern is, will these women have the resources necessary to put the pieces of their lives back together and to reunite with their families? For survival, will they have a job? Will they have a home? Will they have a probation officer expecting them to fail? Or will they have a compassionate probation officer who will understand their hurt, their desire to want to do better and succeed even through, even though they may get doors shut in their face or have a child who was abused during their incarceration or have never been in a healthy romantic relationship in their lives or they got no real drug treatment in prison and they relapsed? Will their needs be met because you can't expect women to have been incarcerated for over 10, 20 years and have everything just fall in place? These are real issues that need to be addressed. I'm here to be a voice for the many that deserve their freedom. I've come to say that I'm not meant to be here. I was not meant to be here. My release date was in 2016. But here I am because of you. Next time, next time we stand together, then so should Michelle West, Danielle Metz, Ramona Brandt, Alice Johnson, Theresa Griffin, Sharonda Jones, Minnie Thomas, Patricia Clark, Carol Richardson. And these are just black women. I know that I just know who have a life sentence. Most, if not all of them have been incarcerated for over 20 years and there are tens and thousands of other women who may not have a life sentence, but they have children and families and histories of abuse who pose no threat to society and who lives matter and they should be with us too. I'm grateful, but that survivor's guilt thing is real because there are so many people like me that could be doing the same thing I'm doing that need to come home.