Free Meek Documentary Has This Former Skeptic Rethinking Meek Mill

Sep. 05, 2019

At one point during Free Meek, Amazon's gripping v-part docuseries that chronicles the North Philly rapper's Kafkaesque itinerary through the criminal justice arrangement, the 32-year-quondam corrects the impression that his 12 years in the mess that is our parole and probation maze was somehow aberrant. "I never looked at it is a nightmare, I looked at it as real life for a black kid in America," Mill says. "This is real life."

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Manufacturing plant's very real experience included 23 hours a day in a cage, for the sin of non-criminal "technical" violations of probation such equally popping a wheelie on a metropolis street, and it featured a weird fixation on him past a gauge seemingly more than concerned (equally even her own defence force lawyer, in a stunning scene, concedes) with her own issues of control—rather than dispassionately meting out justice. That feel ended last calendar week when, the example finally having been removed from Mutual Pleas Court Gauge Genece Brinkley, a deal was struck and Manufacturing plant pled guilty to a 12-year-old gun charge (which he'd never denied), leading Common Pleas Court Gauge Leon Tucker to say: "I know it's been a long road for you, and hopefully this is the end of it."

With that, for the starting time fourth dimension in over a decade, Meek Manufacturing plant was gratuitous.

Manufacturing plant may finally be in the clear, but the documentary stands as an indictment of a broken organisation. It raises serious concerns about just how much justice there is in our criminal justice arrangement, particularly for the powerless—which Manufacturing plant was when he was first arrested, and badly beaten, over a decade ago on what the film suggests were corrupt charges. And it raises questions virtually Meek himself; in the past, I've written that, while Mill's case sheds light on inequities, nosotros ought non to deify him: Meek Mill is no Nelson Mandela. Yet the Amazon doc—granted, it was produced past Mill loyalists—can only pb to a reconsideration of Mill, both as an evolving artist and as a newly-awakened social activist.

First, the systemic implications. When Judge Brinkley sentenced the rapper to two to four years in prison in 2022 for violating his probation, the prosecution wasn't even seeking jail time. That wasn't the only head-scratcher. In fact, Brinkley had been downright weird near the case for years. She showed up at Broad Street Ministries, where Mill was supposed to be feeding the homeless, and excoriated him for folding T-shirts instead. She urged him to have "etiquette classes."

Mill is uniquely situated to effect change. And, though his example may be over, so are nosotros—by looking at the overreaching of his judge and request how we can stop abuses from happening to others who likewise don't have a voice.

Whatever fair-minded viewer of Free Meek can only conclude that Brinkley confuses justice with command. When she says to Mill, afterwards her bizarre visit to Wide Street Ministries, "It was just when you realized that I came there to check on you that y'all decided to serve meals," that is all about her ego. Or how near this: "I gave you break after interruption, and you lot basically only thumbed your nose at this courtroom," she told Manufactory. When she sentenced him to land prison, she said: "And then I'll be done with you."

Sounds more like a jilted lover than an attempt to rid civil society of a menace, doesn't it? Which begs the question: How many other young African-American men are confronted by merely such a justice system, men who don't accept Jay-Z or a billionaire similar Michael Rubin bachelor to them to turn their cases into movements?

"Brinkley is an example of what's come to be called 'Black Robe Fever,'" says Isaac Solotaroff, an executive producer of Gratuitous Meek; his blood brother, Paul, wrote the Rolling Stone article that first documented the travesties of Mill's case and serves every bit the doctor's de facto narrator. "Judges become intoxicated by their own power. Genece is hardly the only guess to human activity in such a capricious way. There are many other stories like hers and Meek's around the country."

How is it that at that place's equally yet no public consideration over Brinkley'due south fitness to serve? Only recently, the Pennsylvania Judicial Conduct Review Board moved to suspend Mutual Pleas Court Approximate Lyris Younge for an alleged pattern of civil rights violations and for her "impatient, discourteous, disrespectful, cavalier, and undignified" demeanor while presiding over Family Court cases. Well, the aforementioned description could feasibly fit Brinkley's conduct in the Factory case; yet, I'1000 told, the Review Board hasn't acted on complaints against her because, unlike in Younge's case, there's no multi-case pattern of judicial intemperance.

That may be, but I challenge you to spotter Free Meek or wade into the history of the Manufacturing plant/Brinkley relationship and to not feel similar you're witnessing a miscarriage of justice—and this says nothing about the film'south piece of work, thanks to 2 individual investigators, in holding Manufactory's original 2007 arrest up to inspection, sowing reasonable doubt equally to whether it was legitimate, or orchestrated past corrupt cops.

Costless Meek doesn't go deep beyond the particulars of Mill's own story, which is as well bad. Because, in addition to Brinkley's conduct and questionable judgment, there's her complicity in a organisation that drives mass incarceration, which nosotros rarely call back of equally an outgrowth of probation and parole. Pennsylvania has the nation'southward highest number of citizens nether that system—about 3 times the size of the incarcerated population. How many thousands of them are getting resentenced to prison time like Factory, non out of a concern for public prophylactic, but considering some judge felt dissed?

This is why Meek Manufacturing plant'due south next act promises to exist then interesting—because, like Nixon going to China, he has the street cred to change behavior rather than perpetuate information technology. He and Rubin are to be lauded for seeking to emancipate 1 million people from the parole and probation organization, just but getting guys out of prison isn't existent modify. Providing opportunity to them, however, is.

A Harvard Kennedy School of Government report suggests the respond would seem to be plenty. In Less Is More: How Reducing Probation Populations Can Ameliorate Outcomes, the authors argue that probation has non served equally an alternative to incarceration and so much every bit a driver of it. Perhaps a futurity projection of Manufactory's—now that, along with Rubin, he's dedicating himself to criminal justice reform—is to introduce united states to all of those he came beyond on the inside whose cause he at present champions.

Which gets u.s. to the afterthought of Mill himself. In Complimentary Meek, he comes off as thoughtful, straight-frontwards and e'er-evolving. "Let me tell you something, that guy comes from a wonderful family," Solotaroff says. "He was loved." (When Solotaroff's wife gave nativity during the shooting, the Mill family unit showed upwardly for him with four numberless of baby wearing apparel).

Indeed, in his recent piece of work and in the md, Mill, who says he read a lot of books while in prison, seems to be learning and growing, as in a scene in the recording studio, when he stops a rail to lecture his producer on constitutional issues. "Y'all know what the 13th Amendment is?" he asks. "If you under the state custody or federal custody, yous immune to exist, what? A slave, a legal slave. Own't that crazy?"

"The change I'yard seeing in my brother is almost scary," Factory's sis, Nasheema Williams, says in Free Meek. "I'm glad I'm seeing it, 'cause this is the stuff I prayed for."

Here's hoping Mill's newfound social consciousness and thoughtfulness consistently finds its way into his work. Back at the dawn of rap music, I retrieve being on the New York City subway and seeing legions of immature African-American men furiously scribbling rhymes in tattered notebooks. Information technology was the birth of a new literary form. When NWA rhymed "my full capabilities" with "correctional facilities" in Express Yourself, and when Public Enemy'due south Chuck D said that rap music was "the CNN of the ghetto," it signified that rap was becoming more than a passing fad. Something culturally significant was itinerant, and, if you cared about ceremonious gild, y'all ignored the letters of hope, love, anger and celebration coming out of hip hop nation at your peril.

Mill may finally be in the clear, but the documentary stands as an indictment of a broken organisation. It raises serious concerns most just how much justice there is in our criminal justice arrangement, specially for the powerless.

But—and hither'due south where I may be slipping into get off my lawn mode—something happened. Spike Lee chosen it "the new minstrelsy;" in our free market worship, the socially witting raps of MC'southward like KRS-One and Mos' Def ultimately took a backseat to the nihilistic glorification of Glock-fueled violence and misogyny. Instead of rappers offering honest, unflinching glimpses into street life—like Biggie Smalls' perfect encapsulation of the lack of inner-city opportunity at the tail end of the Reagan era: You either slingin' crack rock / Or y'all got a wicked bound shot—we got macho poses and narcissism run amok, without context. Manufacturing plant's work was a case in indicate, equally in "Dreams and Nightmares," the song the Eagles and Sixers use every bit they enter their fields of play:

No crawling, went straight to walkin' with foreign cars in my garage / Got foreign bitches menaging, fuckin', suckin', and swallowin' /
Anything for a dollar, they tell me become 'em, I got 'em…
I'm that real nigga what up, existent nigga what up /
If you own't about that murder game then pussy nigga close up /

Mill wasn't solitary. Rather than annotate on and bemoan the conditions of inner-city life, information technology seemed a new generation celebrated rather than challenged the hardness and inhumanity of the streets. In final yr'southward Championships, his about recent anthology, Manufactory tin withal pander, as in "Stuck In My Ways":

As well many bad bitches waiting in line/
That pussy practiced, I'ma take her to shine/
She lose a point, it'll make her a ix/
She know I got some newspaper, I ain't gotta pay her

Only, more often than not since his release from prison, there are signs that Mill'south criminal justice journey has surfaced an sensation in him to move across the one-dimensional pose, as in the championship track:

All the young'ns in my hood popping percs now/
Gettin' loftier they get by, it'south gettin' worse at present/
Them jails got x yards in 'em and that'southward your first down/
And I ain't come up here to preach/
I just had somethin' to say 'crusade I'k the one with the reach

Now that Manufacturing plant's case has ended, now that his legal travails take made him more of a star than his rhymes ever had, now that he and Rubin take created a $fifty meg nonprofit to greatly reduce those caught up in the parole and probation system, now is when the Meek Mill story really gets interesting. Because you never know just who, owing to a mix of circumstances and internal fortitude, is going to step up.

"If, dorsum in the '50s, I'd have told yous that a Harlem pimp would get 1 of the most influential speakers and leaders of the 20th Century, you'd take laughed at me," the political consultant Mustafa Rashed, who offers compelling context around Philadelphia'due south deindustrialization and disinvestment in Gratuitous Meek, told me last week. "But that pimp went on to be Malcolm X. I'm non saying Meek is Malcolm X. Just you listen to a song like "Oodles O' Noodles Babies," and you realize you never know who is going to become the person they become."

How is it that there's as notwithstanding no public consideration over Brinkley'due south fettle to serve?

In ane of Paul Solotaroff's Rolling Stone interviews with Mill, the rapper showed but that propensity for growth. "If the law are already failing you and your customs, and your community is failing yous, and your own people are declining y'all, you will kick into survival mode," he said. "I think that upshot should be addressed. I can't blame it but on constabulary, because it'south a cocky-hatred event, too, where nosotros are killing one another, African Americans, and we're too living in unsafe neighborhoods where you tin't walk to the Chinese store without thinking y'all're gonna get killed."

This is why Meek Mill'southward next act promises to be and so interesting—because, like Nixon going to Communist china, he has the street cred to change behavior rather than perpetuate it. He and Rubin are to be lauded for seeking to emancipate ane one thousand thousand people from the parole and probation system, but just getting guys out of prison house isn't real alter. Providing opportunity to them, notwithstanding, is. Mayhap Mill starts telling the stories of those he met on the inside, creating a groundswell of empathy. Or maybe he and Rubin hire and railroad train returning citizens to be entrepreneurs. Or maybe his rhymes are constructed to give inner-city kids something hopeful to say yes to, instead of just more gun-waving and interim out.

Manufactory is uniquely situated to effect alter. And, though his instance may exist over, and then are we—by looking at the overreaching of his judge and asking how nosotros tin can end abuses from happening to others who likewise don't have a vocalization.

Photo courtesy Miller Mobley / Atlantic Records

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/free-meek-deconstructing-meek-mill/

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