 Can we get the house lights on for one second? I need honesty. Raise your hand if you did dumb shit as a teenager. All right, now the difference between us is that we had parents that cared about us. We had a positive adults in our lives that kind of gave us a path and we had some wealth and some resources. But what if you're a child that has none of that? What if you're in the foster care system and there isn't a person that you can call your parent? What if there's not an adult showing you the right path? What if you have no money and you're living in extreme poverty? So I took this journey in 2003. We had just made a movie called Road Trip and a movie called Old School. And I do very mature movies. And this was about five years before the hangover kind of revolutionized my life. But the thing that really changed my life was in 2003, I went to Silmar Juvenile Hall in the San Fernando Valley right here and met some absolutely amazing kids. Here are some of them there. Little Art is right here, 14 years old, facing a life sentence. And I walked into a prison for my first time and these were 14, 15, 16 year olds that were facing life in prison. And on one side of the table, I met David Negretti. And David Negretti, two days before I showed up for my first time, had been sentenced to 200 years in prison with no chance of parole ever. He will die in prison for standing next to somebody that shot a rival gang member in the butt. 200 years. Across the table from him was Profit Walker. Profit Walker was still fighting his case and he ultimately got six years in adult prison for getting into a fist fight on a train and fracturing someone's jaw. So we're gonna come back to them in a second. Let me tell you about the current state of the system. So America now has the dubious distinction of leading the world's prison population. We account for 25% of prisoners but only 5% of the global population. We're the most jailing country in the world ahead of Saudi Arabia, China and Russia. We are the largest prison system in the free world. Check out the stats here. While we spend 9,000 a year to educate kids in the K through 12 system, we spend $200,000 a year to incarcerate them. One child to incarcerate a year, $200,000. Five times what it would cost to send them to Harvard to put them in prison with virtually no treatment and services whatsoever. Our prison system has a $14 billion budget and a 74% recidivism rate for the population I work with, the teenagers and the young adults 18 to 25 years old. Which means if public safety is the ultimate goal, we're actually making our communities less safe. Nobody in this room would spend $14 billion at their company that fails seven out of 10 times. We would shut it down. But unfortunately we don't have that luxury here but we know how to solve this problem. So the data shows that if kids while they're incarcerated get a high school diploma or a GED, it reduces recidivism which is reincarceration by five to 10%. More data shows if they go to college and they get their first two years of college and AA degree, that's an additional 10% in reduction. Combine that with all the things you can do when they come home, housing, substance abuse, therapy, employment, different peer group. If you combine all those things together, you can reduce recidivism by 50% to take it to 34% and save billions of dollars in the taxes that all of us are paying. And if you don't believe that fixing the criminal justice system is your issue, please note that all kids, not just kids that commit crimes but all kids are affected by these policies. Since 1980, while prison expenditures has risen by 436%, our higher education funding has decreased by 13%. That's a tragedy. So what's stopping us? Number one, pure politics. Liberals are scared of looking soft on crime, conservatives want to look tough on crime. In the 1990s, the pendulum swung, Columbine happened. Experts at different universities said we have a new breed of kids, they're super predators. We need to lock them up, not seeing that kids have the capacity to change as we all know anyone that has kids. We decided to treat them like adults, fear them and lock them away forever. Before that, Richard Nixon started the war on drugs. We've spent a trillion dollars since President Nixon on the war of drugs. We spend 51 billion dollars a year on the war of drugs. What has this accomplished? Addiction rates are the same, overdose deaths are at an all-time high and drugs cost less than before. A trillion dollars, we've failed completely. Here's the good news. There's a movement growing. During this last recession, and it's funny that it takes a recession to actually change a system, this has become a bipartisan issue. Conservatives hate big government and what's worse big government than a bloated prison system that fails like it does. They hate wasteful spending and you have a lot of Christian conservatives that believe in redemption, forgiveness and second chances. So last year, as Jordan said, I co-wrote a bill called SB 260, which was to look at all kids that committed crimes as children and were given life sentences and this was a bill that shouldn't have gotten any Republican votes. It really probably shouldn't have passed in the current climate, but we ended up getting nine Republicans. Newt Gingrich came on board and supported it, wrote an op-ed. Grover Norquist came on board, not only talking about the fiscal savings of the bill, but also about the human value we're saving when we believe in kids and give them second chances. And David Negretti, who I talked to you about at the beginning, who got 200 years in prison, when I went to see him in prison and said SB 260 was passed, David Negretti now knew that after he served 20 years, if he did major transformation, he would be able to go home to his mom. Governor Brown signed the bill on the second day it was on his desk and it's now the law. 6,500 young kids are now going home. Thank you. Now let's go back to my other student, Profit Walker, right here. He's not the white guy and he's not the guy with the big ears. Profit Walker went to prison. In prison he got his AA degree. Unfortunately, in prison, you can only get to an AA degree because there's no online classes. We just changed that. We have an online pilot. One prison, kids can get on a computer and actually take online classes and now for the first time ever in the history of the prison system, we can get them to their BA. But Profit got his first two years of college done while he's an inmate in prison. He got accepted into the Loyola Marymount School of Science and Engineering. He left prison right onto LMU's campus, full scholarship. Within a week of getting there, he calls me and says that he'll do anything. He has a daughter, he'll sweep floors, just he needs a job. He went to a fundraiser, met someone that owned an engineering company. Within the two weeks of leaving prison, he was making $110 an hour, not minimum wage, $8 an hour. $110 an hour, a week from leaving prison. Working for this company, went back to Watts where he's from, where he saw that all the problems where he left before he went to prison were still existing. And he just found out that the assembly member that represents Watts is leaving office. So Profit Walker is now running for state assembly and has now outraced his competition in the last three periods as the front runner to win the assembly seat. And I knew him behind a jail cell at 15 years old. So now is the time for the private sector, for us, for all the brains, for the resources in this room, to push government to do the right thing, fiscally and morally. Which is why I wanna pitch today an X prize around reducing recidivism. These kids have grown up without adults loving them, without role models, without proper parenting guidance. Let's be those adults to these kids and show them that their worst act is not gonna define their entire lives. Thank you very much. Thank you.