Name: What 30 Years of False Imprisonment Taught Bruce Bryan
Uploaded: 2023-06-01T18:23:20.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What 30 Years of False Imprisonment Taught Bruce Bryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-01. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'What 30 Years of False Imprisonment Taught Bruce Bryan' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-06-01. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience for everyone to like guys started realizing while you
were there your
story like the word started getting around the green room and it was one of
those things like
what he just got out three weeks ago wrongfully accused for 30 years and here
he is having a good
time it was it was a crazy experience to like be sharing the green room with
you because you could
see everybody like you became like the celebrity of the green room you know I'm
saying like
everybody wanted to hear the story everybody wanted to talk to you everybody
was blown away by it
and by the the grace that you displayed like the fact that you could be wrongfully
accused spend 30
years of your young life in in a cage and then come out and just be this
wonderful fun guy having a good
time everyone's laughing having conversations it was beautiful it was beautiful
um I look I'm standing
next to him last night you know worried most of the night because you know we
had got on a plane
and that was his first time flying in over 30 years um there was a lot of
stimulation and
you know I could tell you that I'm still in shock even sitting here now that we're
sitting next to
each other because I spent the last several years visiting him at sing sing
which is um you know not
a great place sing sing prison in New York um but I don't want to throw cold
water on anything but
you know there there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment last night
going on that people didn't
see from you um I think for Bruce I mean there was one point where we were
sitting in the balcony
um watching a tell and by the way congratulations on that amazing club thank
you an amazing the
comedy mothership is uh is really a dream for the comedians love it the crowd
was amazing it was just
so awesome to see so congrats on that thank you very much how funny is david
tell he's he's my side hurts
he's a master he's a master but um we were sitting there and some other folks
came in and at some point
uh you know bruce kept looking over his shoulder and you know I realized that
he was uncomfortable
and uh he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side shoulder
to shoulder with them
I know I think I know why you did it yeah why did you do it well I think in
prison you become
accustomed to not wanting people behind you right and then I got this scar in
prison from behind so
you're always conscious of what's behind you you know of course yeah no one
goes through that experience
unscathed right you come out with these uh idiosyncrasies or these quirks that
you
these defense mechanisms that you develop while you're incarcerated you know
you're in an abnormal
environment for decades you're gonna have it's gonna have an effect on you
psychologically how old were
you when they put you in I was 23 going just turning 24 and tell us the whole
story what happened
well I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide I think that everyone knew that I
didn't do this case at all
everyone knew I didn't commit the crime I mean I literally woke up that
afternoon because my girlfriend
wanted to change her niece's costume and she wants she also had a taste for
chocolate cake so just imagine
waking up to change a costume for Halloween a child's costume and then
disappearing for the next 29 years
of your life right and being being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor
involved in your
conviction has a history of misconduct and it wasn't until some 27 26 years
later that he finally gets
arrested and gets convicted former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa he gets
convicted for the very same misconduct
that I've been telling them about that he's been doing for decades
so he would just find someone pin it on them yeah he would concoct the story of
theory as he did in my situation and he did this just to just to convict
someone yeah anyone yeah so it wasn't that he was targeting you it just he just
decided it was you anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or
in drug dealing you it's easier to get someone that has a history of being
involved in the streets to put a
a case on them than it is there someone that doesn't so you know once they find
out that you have a record it's easy to say all right well he did this homicide
what kind of a record did you have at the time I had a drug I had a drug sale
prior to that so that's enough for him to say okay he's a part of a drug crew
and uh you know let's arrest him and lock him up his that this particular
prosecutor his thing was bribery um he would pay off witnesses and he ended up
not only getting convicted but went to federal prison for it he was in some of
the worst
penitentiaries in new york from attica to i was in clinton great meadows sing
sing all maximum securities
all maximum security prisons way upstate in uh in some uh towns that are
essentially you know some you know a lot
of racism is pervasive in those towns and the prison is the uh it's the only uh
economic development in that
town so you got brother cousins aunts and uncles working in the same prison so
you get into an incident
with one officer you got a problem with the entire system and that's just how
it is when you go deeper
upstate i mean borderline canada you know clinton danamora great meadows and
different prisons like
that so and the economy of the area depends upon depends upon the prison
because there's really nothing
there but snow during the winter time and farming so there's nothing else there
so the prison is the driving
force behind the economy so everyone's there right siblings so nepotism is you
know it's prevalent in
these prisons and one of the things that you you encounter is that you know
these prisons it's not just
cold in those areas a prison is a cold environment and it's up to you to create
your own heat it's a dark
environment and uh somehow you gotta find that light you know that light within
yourself in order to um
in order to travel in order to you know to do something with your life more
meaningful you know
what i mean um and it's difficult it's not easy uh you watch guys uh you know
guys you talk to today and
you know tomorrow they're swinging from the light they're dead right yesterday
they were fine you know
the next morning you wake up they they've hung themselves you know and and
these are the things
that that you encounter day in and day out and you still have to maintain a
sense of uh a sense of
humanity right you've got to become you could either do two things you could
become bitter or you could
become better i chose the latter because one of the things i did early in my
incarceration was
make a conscious decision to not serve time but to have time serve me i made up
my mind that if you
were going to have me incarcerated for a crime i did not commit then i was
going to take this time
and use that cell as if it was an office i was going to use that school
building as if it was a
university and every chance i i had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection
and and and and do the
things that i needed to do to to protect my soul um i was going to do it you
know and i made it my
business to do so and i started delving into material that i probably would
never have read
you know being in uh being a free man i started reading you know everything
from you know philosophy
books to you know very very few novels but i i tend to learn from the
experiences of others so
autobiographies became my thing you know from from quincy jones to miles davis
and and just
continuously studying right and then studying the system and what drives the
system and and and why it
has become what it is you know from education to you know to to the whole
system of why educational
system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's
going to be caught
up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade right based on
your reading level
they can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop these are
things that most people
don't know right these like fifty percent of the incarcerating people in new york
state or probably
in the country are living with dyslexia so then so they're unable to to learn
you know the basics
of education like reading and these guys go home and they commit crimes over
and over again because
they were never corrected and these same systems that were built on the premise
of rehabilitation
are draconian in that they do nothing but you know steal a person's humanity
and allow them to become
or looked at as nothing more than a number right you got to wake up six o'clock
in the morning and
sometimes when they're coming around they're asking you your name and they're
not actually your name
they're asking you you know your numbers what cell location you're in they're
not calling you mr brian
they're calling you 60 cell right and a lot of people begin to internalize that
and lose their sense of self
and so i remain guarded and um and try to maintain a sense of humanity through
my meditation
right do fasting every now and then and just do deep introspection and
reflection for me that was the hard part
the easy part was education and learning the hard part was introspection and
fighting a system
right not just a prosecutor or court but fighting a system that was premised on
um you know uh oppression
right that was premised on it's a business a prison industrial complex you got
cheap labor you know 13th
amendment says you allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime you
see and so you know in
in a system like that you have to find a way you got to find it within yourself
too to rise above the fray
did you meet anyone else inside that showed you this path yes early on in my
incarceration there was a
group of guys called the resurrection study group and it was founded by a guy
named eddie ellis who has
since passed on and what the resurrection study group did was they developed
this this program called the
non-traditional approach to social and criminal justice and it helped them
understand why the vast majority of
incarcerated people in new york state came from at that time they came from
seven basic neighborhoods right
and these are neighborhoods that were all impoverished that were all plagued
with what we call crime
generative factors from you know substance abuse to dilapidated housing to uh
you know just poverty right
um and so you see you see violence and what i've come to realize is that
poverty is violence
so wherever there's poverty you you're going to see violence because poverty
itself is violence
and so these neighborhoods you begin to learn and study and you begin to see
that this is not by accident
these you know these prisons were built for a purpose um there's a saying they
say you build it they're
going to come that's the same thing with prisons you build them they're going
to come
similar to uh the 1994 crime bill that was signed by uh bill clinton and
offered co-authored by
our now president joe biden um and incarcerated more people across the country
than in any other time
right it perpetuated the three strikes you're out um you had guys who stole a
slice of pizza third
strike he gets 25 to life um we're looking at cases now where guys
this took 200 he's been in jail for 20 years some guy sentenced 70 years for
armed robbery
right all of these things come under the 1994 crime bill so when you begin to
see it as a system
that was designed to do certain things it's a wake-up call for you and you
begin to say hold on man um
i fell for the trap it's time for me to begin taking a different route and and
and begin to educate
myself more and so the resurrection study group these guys steered me in that
direction
they steered me in that direction and i began to learn from another gentleman
that was a part of it
by the name of dr gary mendez who also died and he had a program called the
national trust for the development
of african-american men and what it did was is help us restore those values
that we strayed away from
so this this is what got me on the right path early in my incarceration
so this is what got me on the right path early in the right path early on the
right path early in my

What 30 Years of False Imprisonment Taught Bruce Bryan

the Joe Rogan experience for everyone to like guys started realizing while you
were there your
story like the word started getting around the green room and it was one of
those things like
what he just got out three weeks ago wrongfully accused for 30 years and here
he is having a good
time it was it was a crazy experience to like be sharing the green room with
you because you could
see everybody like you became like the celebrity of the green room you know I'm
saying like
everybody wanted to hear the story everybody wanted to talk to you everybody
was blown away by it
and by the the grace that you displayed like the fact that you could be wrongfully
accused spend 30
years of your young life in in a cage and then come out and just be this
wonderful fun guy having a good
time everyone's laughing having conversations it was beautiful it was beautiful
um I look I'm standing
next to him last night you know worried most of the night because you know we
had got on a plane
and that was his first time flying in over 30 years um there was a lot of
stimulation and
you know I could tell you that I'm still in shock even sitting here now that we're
sitting next to
each other because I spent the last several years visiting him at sing sing
which is um you know not
a great place sing sing prison in New York um but I don't want to throw cold
water on anything but
you know there there's a lot of stealing yourself for the moment last night
going on that people didn't
see from you um I think for Bruce I mean there was one point where we were
sitting in the balcony
um watching a tell and by the way congratulations on that amazing club thank
you an amazing the
comedy mothership is uh is really a dream for the comedians love it the crowd
was amazing it was just
so awesome to see so congrats on that thank you very much how funny is david
tell he's he's my side hurts
he's a master he's a master but um we were sitting there and some other folks
came in and at some point
uh you know bruce kept looking over his shoulder and you know I realized that
he was uncomfortable
and uh he switched seats very quickly so that he would be side to side shoulder
to shoulder with them
I know I think I know why you did it yeah why did you do it well I think in
prison you become
accustomed to not wanting people behind you right and then I got this scar in
prison from behind so
you're always conscious of what's behind you you know of course yeah no one
goes through that experience
unscathed right you come out with these uh idiosyncrasies or these quirks that
you
these defense mechanisms that you develop while you're incarcerated you know
you're in an abnormal
environment for decades you're gonna have it's gonna have an effect on you
psychologically how old were
you when they put you in I was 23 going just turning 24 and tell us the whole
story what happened
well I was arrested back in 1994 for homicide I think that everyone knew that I
didn't do this case at all
everyone knew I didn't commit the crime I mean I literally woke up that
afternoon because my girlfriend
wanted to change her niece's costume and she wants she also had a taste for
chocolate cake so just imagine
waking up to change a costume for Halloween a child's costume and then
disappearing for the next 29 years
of your life right and being being charged with a homicide while the prosecutor
involved in your
conviction has a history of misconduct and it wasn't until some 27 26 years
later that he finally gets
arrested and gets convicted former Queens prosecutor John Scarpa he gets
convicted for the very same misconduct
that I've been telling them about that he's been doing for decades
so he would just find someone pin it on them yeah he would concoct the story of
theory as he did in my situation and he did this just to just to convict
someone yeah anyone yeah so it wasn't that he was targeting you it just he just
decided it was you anybody that he felt was involved in a criminal lifestyle or
in drug dealing you it's easier to get someone that has a history of being
involved in the streets to put a
a case on them than it is there someone that doesn't so you know once they find
out that you have a record it's easy to say all right well he did this homicide
what kind of a record did you have at the time I had a drug I had a drug sale
prior to that so that's enough for him to say okay he's a part of a drug crew
and uh you know let's arrest him and lock him up his that this particular
prosecutor his thing was bribery um he would pay off witnesses and he ended up
not only getting convicted but went to federal prison for it he was in some of
the worst
penitentiaries in new york from attica to i was in clinton great meadows sing
sing all maximum securities
all maximum security prisons way upstate in uh in some uh towns that are
essentially you know some you know a lot
of racism is pervasive in those towns and the prison is the uh it's the only uh
economic development in that
town so you got brother cousins aunts and uncles working in the same prison so
you get into an incident
with one officer you got a problem with the entire system and that's just how
it is when you go deeper
upstate i mean borderline canada you know clinton danamora great meadows and
different prisons like
that so and the economy of the area depends upon depends upon the prison
because there's really nothing
there but snow during the winter time and farming so there's nothing else there
so the prison is the driving
force behind the economy so everyone's there right siblings so nepotism is you
know it's prevalent in
these prisons and one of the things that you you encounter is that you know
these prisons it's not just
cold in those areas a prison is a cold environment and it's up to you to create
your own heat it's a dark
environment and uh somehow you gotta find that light you know that light within
yourself in order to um
in order to travel in order to you know to do something with your life more
meaningful you know
what i mean um and it's difficult it's not easy uh you watch guys uh you know
guys you talk to today and
you know tomorrow they're swinging from the light they're dead right yesterday
they were fine you know
the next morning you wake up they they've hung themselves you know and and
these are the things
that that you encounter day in and day out and you still have to maintain a
sense of uh a sense of
humanity right you've got to become you could either do two things you could
become bitter or you could
become better i chose the latter because one of the things i did early in my
incarceration was
make a conscious decision to not serve time but to have time serve me i made up
my mind that if you
were going to have me incarcerated for a crime i did not commit then i was
going to take this time
and use that cell as if it was an office i was going to use that school
building as if it was a
university and every chance i i had to just self-reflect and engage in introspection
and and and and do the
things that i needed to do to to protect my soul um i was going to do it you
know and i made it my
business to do so and i started delving into material that i probably would
never have read
you know being in uh being a free man i started reading you know everything
from you know philosophy
books to you know very very few novels but i i tend to learn from the
experiences of others so
autobiographies became my thing you know from from quincy jones to miles davis
and and just
continuously studying right and then studying the system and what drives the
system and and and why it
has become what it is you know from education to you know to to the whole
system of why educational
system looks at a guy in the third grade and determines whether or not he's
going to be caught
up in the criminal justice system as early as the third grade right based on
your reading level
they can determine how many prison beds that they're going to develop these are
things that most people
don't know right these like fifty percent of the incarcerating people in new york
state or probably
in the country are living with dyslexia so then so they're unable to to learn
you know the basics
of education like reading and these guys go home and they commit crimes over
and over again because
they were never corrected and these same systems that were built on the premise
of rehabilitation
are draconian in that they do nothing but you know steal a person's humanity
and allow them to become
or looked at as nothing more than a number right you got to wake up six o'clock
in the morning and
sometimes when they're coming around they're asking you your name and they're
not actually your name
they're asking you you know your numbers what cell location you're in they're
not calling you mr brian
they're calling you 60 cell right and a lot of people begin to internalize that
and lose their sense of self
and so i remain guarded and um and try to maintain a sense of humanity through
my meditation
right do fasting every now and then and just do deep introspection and
reflection for me that was the hard part
the easy part was education and learning the hard part was introspection and
fighting a system
right not just a prosecutor or court but fighting a system that was premised on
um you know uh oppression
right that was premised on it's a business a prison industrial complex you got
cheap labor you know 13th
amendment says you allowed to be enslaved if you're convicted of a crime you
see and so you know in
in a system like that you have to find a way you got to find it within yourself
too to rise above the fray
did you meet anyone else inside that showed you this path yes early on in my
incarceration there was a
group of guys called the resurrection study group and it was founded by a guy
named eddie ellis who has
since passed on and what the resurrection study group did was they developed
this this program called the
non-traditional approach to social and criminal justice and it helped them
understand why the vast majority of
incarcerated people in new york state came from at that time they came from
seven basic neighborhoods right
and these are neighborhoods that were all impoverished that were all plagued
with what we call crime
generative factors from you know substance abuse to dilapidated housing to uh
you know just poverty right
um and so you see you see violence and what i've come to realize is that
poverty is violence
so wherever there's poverty you you're going to see violence because poverty
itself is violence
and so these neighborhoods you begin to learn and study and you begin to see
that this is not by accident
these you know these prisons were built for a purpose um there's a saying they
say you build it they're
going to come that's the same thing with prisons you build them they're going
to come
similar to uh the 1994 crime bill that was signed by uh bill clinton and
offered co-authored by
our now president joe biden um and incarcerated more people across the country
than in any other time
right it perpetuated the three strikes you're out um you had guys who stole a
slice of pizza third
strike he gets 25 to life um we're looking at cases now where guys
this took 200 he's been in jail for 20 years some guy sentenced 70 years for
armed robbery
right all of these things come under the 1994 crime bill so when you begin to
see it as a system
that was designed to do certain things it's a wake-up call for you and you
begin to say hold on man um
i fell for the trap it's time for me to begin taking a different route and and
and begin to educate
myself more and so the resurrection study group these guys steered me in that
direction
they steered me in that direction and i began to learn from another gentleman
that was a part of it
by the name of dr gary mendez who also died and he had a program called the
national trust for the development
of african-american men and what it did was is help us restore those values
that we strayed away from
so 