A first-time offender in his early 20’s, Marcus Hull was originally sentenced to 30 years and four months for possessing drugs with intent to sell.

After serving 15 years in federal prison for a nonviolent crime, Hull was released in September. As part of his newfound freedom, Hull aims to help young people keep theirs by steering clear of the criminal justice system

He will be in Pensacola on Friday, Oct. 9, to talk about second chances and the prison-industrial complex. Hulll was invited to speak at the Open Books Bookstore at 6 p.m. through the help of his brother, Quincy “Q” Hull, a Pensacola poet and activist.

While Marcus made no excuses for the choices he made, he felt powerless to the influence of gangs in his hometown of Chicago and the trappings of dealing drugs.

“Chicago is the mecca of gangs, and no matter how educated you are or well established your family is or try to provide opportunities for you, eventually something will gravitate and pull you in,” Marcus Hull said. “I took advantage of the opportunities that were presented and paid a price for it,”

The price he paid, besides losing his freedom and a good portion of his young adulthood, included becoming a part of what’s called today, the “prison-industrial complex.”

Scott Satterwhite, co-founder of Open Books Bookstore, said he hopes Hull’s appearance brings about an open and frank discussion about mass incarceration and the issues surrounding the prison-industrial complex.

“We need to talk about what it does to people, what it does to families, what it does to the communities,” Satterwhite said. “You can’t lock up as many people as we lock up in the United States without this touching your community. It’s important that people start to see prisoners as human beings.”

Crime is one of the 16 metrics gauged and measured on the Pensacola Metro Dashboard that provide san at-a-glance look the health and well being of our community. Reducing crime can go a long way in improving the overall quality of life.

But at a time when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business.

At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society.

Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

Young people, mostly young black men, with little money, less hope and a need or a want for quick cash, turn to a life of crime and end up in the unrelenting grip of the criminal justice system.

Before his arrest, Marcus was an inspiration to and influence on his brother’s life. Fast becoming a talented writer and performer, Marcus won first place in a statewide poetry contest and performed in Chicago as the MC of a hip-hop group.

But the pull of the streets and the need to make money to support himself and his family were too hard to avoid.

“Where I grew up you weighed your options and decided which one was more of a risk,” Marcus Hull said. “It was safer for me in the streets because school had become a haven for drug dealers and gang-bangers.”

As a result of his incarceration, Hull became another statistic in the prison system.

In the U.S. today, about 1.8 million people are locked up: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1. million in state prison and 600,000 in local jails

Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The U.S. now imprisons more people than any other country in the world—perhaps half a million more than Communist China.

The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people.

In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States.

Nevertheless, America's prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.

Satterwhite is seeing a turning point in the prison-industrial complex as more people who pushed for harsher penalties for non-violent crime are realizing that the war on drugs and mass incarceration is hitting too close to home.

“The staunch law-and-order people wanted to lock up anybody who committed a crime, until it happens to their sons, until their brothers get caught up in the system,” Satterwhite said. “There’s a large cultural shift on the issue of prison. It has cost millions of dollars and disrupted millions of families and it’s a conversation we should be having.