Jelani Cobb on Jay-Z’s Criminal Justice Reform Efforts

In 2023, the Brooklyn Public Library’s ‘The Book of HOV’ exhibit drew more than 600,000 visitors to learn about Jay-Z’s one-of-a-kind life and career. That exhibit is now being celebrated in book form with ‘The Book of HOV: A Tribute to Jay-Z,’ out today through Assouline, collecting unseen photographs, selected interviews, new essays, and more.

 In this exclusive excerpt, acclaimed author and Columbia Journalism School Dean Dr. Jelani Cobb reflects on Jay’s commitment to fighting inequality in the criminal justice system.

“I got rich and gave back
To me, that’s the win-win”

The vast, unforgiving expanse of Riker’s Island sits in the East River of New York City, just east of Queens and just south of the Bronx. The 10 municipal jails located there were built to accommodate up to 15,000 people, though by the early 2010s the population there regularly exceeded 20,000. If you grew up in the city in the Eighties or afterward, you saw boys disappear into Rikers with strange regularity only to find their way home a few months or two years later as changed men, sometimes scarred in ways that were visible and others in ways that were not. Successive waves of politicians promised the public that every good possibility in the city was tied to locking up more and more of the Black and brown young men who populated the five boroughs. So Rikers grew — and its reputation for violence, for negligent, even malevolent management and overall misery grew along with it. The way that Kalief Browder, 16, medium brown and smallish for his age, came to reside in that storehouse of hurt for three years is a story in its own right.

Accused of stealing a backpack in the Bronx in 2010, Browder was dropped into an abyss of bureaucracy and neglect. Arrested and held for three years without a trial. He spent more than 700 days in solitary confinement despite the state having no evidence in support of the charges. After more than 30 court dates, the charges against him were dropped. Jay-Z became an integral part of Kalief Browder’s story simply by telling it. Upon his release, Browder hired attorney Paul Prestia and filed a suit against the New York City Department of Corrections. When the New Yorker broke the story of the abuse he suffered, Jay-Z was among the first people to reach out to him, meeting with Browder in 2014 and talking with him about the difficulties of readjusting to life after his ordeal on Rikers.

The following year, Jay lent his visibility to Browder’s cause by becoming an executive producer for Time: The Kalief Browder Story, a six-part series that chronicled the egregious failures of the criminal justice system and the ways in which Browder’s life represented a broader, systemic pattern of abuse. “I have an obligation to further a conversation for an entire race of people – not just [for] me, for all of us,” Jay-Z said of his motivations for joining the project.

Tragically, Kalief Browder, besieged by trauma and depression, took his own life in 2015. The series, which was still being shot at the time of his death, became the definitive account of his life, his struggles and the wounds that a system charged with protecting the public had imposed upon an innocent man. In 2017, Time was given the prestigious Peabody Award for outstanding documentary filmmaking. In the wake of Browder’s death, the series spoke on his behalf, renewing public outrage and helping to pressure the city into a $3.3 million settlement with his estate.

This was not a one-off. Jay’s commitment to social justice continued beyond the Kalief Browder case. His efforts have centered most frequently upon a criminal justice system that has warped the lives of millions, many of them people of color. Its effects were not difficult to identify. In November 2017, the rapper Meek Mill was arrested in Manhattan for popping a wheelie on a motorcycle. The charges were dismissed, but he was nonetheless sentenced to two to four years in prison for violating the terms of parole in a case that dated back to 2007. The case highlighted the unfair and arbitrary nature of the parole and probation system in the United States.

Roc Nation launched a massive campaign for justice that brought together a cross-section of musicians, activists, and public policy advocates who recognized the ways in which Meek Mill’s case was a stand-in for the millions of Black men who are navigating the probation and parole system. Their litigation in the case both exposed abuse and corruption in the Philadelphia criminal justice system and resulted in Meek Mill’s release after five months in prison. (After a subsequent legal battle, he was pardoned of the drug and gun charges that led to the original 2007 case.) The Free Meek Mill campaign evolved into the Reform Alliance, an organization that Jay-Z partnered with Michael Rubin, Claire Wu Tsai, Robert Kraft, and Michael Novogratz to create. Reform Alliance is dedicated to finding bipartisan ways to address unjust sentencing laws that are the engine of mass incarceration. At its founding the organizing raised $50 million to support these efforts.

There is no shortage of need in this area, and Jay-Z has consistently devoted his attention to the cause of creating a more equitable world for some of the most vulnerable communities. In 2019 he also founded Team Roc, the philanthropic and social justice arm of his Roc Nation entertainment company. That year, Team Roc launched the most ambitious and public campaign for justice of Jay-Z’s career to that point. The Black community of Kansas City, Kansas had suffered for decades under the thumb of a single police officer whose violence and corruption spared no one. Roger Golubski, a 40-year veteran of the Kansas City Police Department, was accused of crimes ranging from rape to murder to drug trafficking, utilizing his police badge as a shield from accountability for these offenses. In a particularly egregious accusation, Golubski was accused of conspiring with three other individuals to abuse Black girls, some as young as 13 years old, while holding them captive for months at a time at an apartment that was also used for drug trafficking. Golubski was also accused of framing innocent men who were aware of his activities and sending them to prison in order to continue freely terrorizing KC’s black community. FBI records noted that more than 200 other KC police officers had been accused of excessive force and misconduct in recent years. In September 2021, Team Roc filed suit against the Kansas City PD for the release of more records relating to wrongful behavior on the part of its officers. The Team Roc lawsuit marked a rare occasion when the department, having escaped most oversight, was forced to respond to public scrutiny of their actions.

In October 2021, Team Roc and The Innocence Project, a partner in the campaign, took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post calling for a federal investigation into the practices of the KCPD. In stark language the ad demanded U.S. Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta take action, noting: “The police and eyewitness reports of criminal behavior perpetrated by members of the Kansas City, Kansas police department, over the past several decades, are staggering. They detail graphic accounts of rape, murder, sex trafficking and corruption so rampant and so blatant, it would be shocking if even a single allegation were true. And yet your department refuses to act.”

Team Roc continued to apply pressure, organizing a mass rally the following year to highlight the pattern of abusive behavior. Their efforts achieved what had for decades been considered impossible: the arrest of Roger Golubski on federal civil rights charges in September 2022. But for their efforts Golubski might not ever have faced consequences for the years of abuse, violence, and exploitation he imposed upon the vulnerable of Kansas City. (This month, Golubski died in an apparent suicide on the day that his federal trial was set to begin.)

In 2020, Jay-Z and Team Roc turned their attention to the egregious abuses taking place at the Mississippi State Prison, more commonly known as Parchman Prison. Parchman has long been one of the most notorious prisons in the United States, but by the time Team Roc became involved conditions at the facility were terrible even by its own standards. Deteriorating buildings flooded regularly, leaving some incarcerated men to live in dirty, shin-deep water sometimes for weeks on end. The damp conditions spawned toxic mold which in turn led to health problems among the men exposed to it. The buildings barely provided shelter from the elements and the men being held there lived with the constant threat of fires that filled the corridors with clouds of thick, asphyxiating smoke. The food served there was commonly contaminated with rat feces and roaches. Mismanagement and neglect meant that the correction officers lost the keys to cells and simply left the men being housed there locked away for months at a time. These conditions were aggravated by violence so pervasive that in January 2020 five incarcerated men in Mississippi prisons were murdered in one week, three of them at Parchman alone.

Parchman Prison’s history is a microcosm of the American criminal justice system. Parchman began as a slave plantation, producing cotton in the years when it was the anchor of the Southern economy. The end of the Civil War brought with it the technical abolition of slavery, but a clause in the Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery “except as punishment for a crime,” meant that the system of bondage could resurrect itself through the nation’s prison system. Parchman Farm was reborn as Parchman Prison in 1900, a place that became notorious even then for the rate at which incarcerated men died from overwork and abuse.

That history informs the present. In 2019 men at the facility were able to record video of the smoke-filled hallways and walls smeared with blood. The images galvanized calls for reform in the system, but state officials continued to drag their feet. Team Roc sprang into action, initiating a series of actions that brought change to the conditions at the facility. In early 2020, Jay-Z and Yo Gotti filed suit on behalf of 152 incarcerated men against the State of Mississippi for maintaining conditions in which “the deprivation of health and mental healthcare [is] so extreme and the defects in security so severe, that the people confined at Parchman live a miserable and hopeless existence confronted daily by imminent risk of substantial harm.” Team Roc posted a series of interviews with the family members of men held in Parchman as a way of highlighting the squalid, dangerous conditions in the prison.

Not content to simply apply pressure through the legal system, Jay-Z and Team Roc partnered with rapper Yo Gotti to produce Exposing Parchman, a documentary that aired on the A&E network in the spring of 2023. The film chronicled the extreme negligence and malfeasance in the prison, the toll it exacted on both the men incarcerated there and their families on the outside, and the links between the contemporary abuses at Parchman Prison and its history as a slave plantation. These combined efforts were significant enough to trigger a federal investigation of Parchman by the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice.

In January 2023, having extracted a series of improvements including new showers, new toilets, repairs to infrastructure, removal of mold, and new heating and ventilation systems, Jay-Z and Yo Gotti withdrew their suit against the state of Mississippi but warned that they would keep an eye on conditions there to ensure that they did not deteriorate to such inhumane levels again. Team Roc noted at the time that they “were not taking our foot off the gas.”

It means something to be born into the projects and aspire to wild success and then, against seemingly infinite odds, actually attain it. But it means something far different and enduring to not only beat the odds but to then try to stack them in the favor of those who come after you. This is no easy task, but our collective chances look that much better when you tell the story of the once-young boy whose time and life were stolen from him by an inhuman system and 700 days in solitary confinement. Our lives look that much different when someone is willing to expose a powerful man whose police badge has allegedly become a license to harm. Or when a system reduces men to the status of livestock. The needle of possibility moves ever so slightly forward when you provide 200,000 Thanksgiving meals or create an educational fund for the children of Sean Bell, whose life was taken by men who were sworn to protect it.

For more than a quarter century, Jay-Z has been among the foremost chroniclers of the America we prefer not to talk about. Through the work of Roc Nation and its many social justice collaborations, he’s gone even further — leaning into the work of change and advocacy, leading by example – ensuring that on some level, his wins might be matched by wins of our own.

Criminal and Social Justice Essay by author Jelani Cobb for ‘The Book of HOV,’ published by Assouline.