Hakim Crampton has spent more than a decade living and working in the same community he grew up in before he was imprisoned in the 1990s. Now he’s working on a judicial branch commission.
“I was considered an endangered species, as they used the terms back in the eighties,” Crampton told a local publication. “And I was constantly told that I myself, my generation, weren’t going to live to see 18. We were going to be dead or in prison. And we believed it.”
Crampton was charged with homicide in Milwaukee in 1991 on someone else’s false confession. He was granted parole after 15 years in prison. He worked hard to prove his innocence.
He went back to Michigan and began to work with schools across the state on a new curriculum called SLAM that helps kids learn through poetry and lyrics.
He’s also taking his knowledge of the prison system to the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission as the first formerly incarcerated person to sit on a judicial branch commission.
“By having a seat at the table, it gives voice to that critical experience, that directly impacted experience that can help shape and reshape the criminal system,” Crampton told a local news network, “at a time in which everyone pretty much, both bipartisan, Democrats and Republicans realize that our system is failing so many people.”
He’s working on the parole system and ending the school-to-prison pipeline.
