The three of us killed a suspected drug dealer. We were convicted of murder.

Jason Bryant grew up in California. Mixing with the wrong people he and two others decided to burglarize suspected drug dealers. It went wrong and there was a killing. Jason was not in the room, and did not pull the trigger, but he was convicted and sentenced to 26 years to Life. Jason tells how it happened. Later he explains how he turned his life around, took college degrees, was pardoned by the State Governor after 20 years and now works to reform and change the system and help others.

When he was 20 years old, Bryant was sentenced to 26 years to life for his involvement in a 1999 robbery that resulted in a shooting death.

Behind bars, Bryant was looking for ways to be of service. It was at the book club that he heard about Ernest Gordon's "Miracle On The River Kwai." In the book, prisoners of war created a culture of sacrifice and they called it "mucking" for each other.

Inspired by the POW's stories, Bryant and his co-defendant Ted Gray decided to "muck" for a young man. They hatched a plan to raise money from other prisoners to create a scholarship fund for a Palma student in need.

The base pay for incarcerated people in the state of California is eight cents an hour. Those with an industry job make $1 an hour, which can get you to $100 a month. That income didn't stop almost 800 inmates from raising $32,000 for the scholarship over the course of 3 years. The inmates made the money working jobs like sweeping, clerking and making furniture.

Marcus Orlovsky met Jason first through Niki Ernst and the Global Inspiration Tours. Subsequently Marcus introduced Jason to some UK school students where this video was recorded. Marcus runs the Bryanston Square Unlock programme which includes a full day were students meet with real inspirational people. With the emergence of Covid, much of this work has transitioned to remote, meaning that the limitations of geographical constraints have been removed. Instead, Time Zones are the limiting factor, and in this case, students were engaging with Jason in the late evening.