Daniel Loeb’s Third Level Bets on Topeka Sam’s Felony Justice Group

Nearly 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the United States, prisons, prisons, and other correctional facilities. Currently, more of these inmates are jailed for drug offenses than in 1980 for all crimes.

Around 230,000 women are in prisons and prisons, with black women being “significantly over-represented” compared to their proportion of the population. The effects of incarceration on health, wealth and other factors can be devastating – especially because women, according to Ms. Sam, tend to be punished more severely than men and have a harder time re-entering society.

After leaving prison in 2015, after cutting her sentence by years and participating in a drug program following an appeal, Ms. Sam founded nonprofit criminal justice groups including LOHM and Hope House with a friend Bronx.

Ms. Sam, 44, has also raised her public profile as a criminal justice reformer. She helped attract the attention of Alice Johnson, a woman who was sentenced to life imprisonment for a nonviolent drug offense, which, at the urging of Kim Kardashian West, resulted in a commutation and later a full pardon from Mr. Trump.

Mr Loeb first met Ms. Sam around 2017 when he was looking for new ways to donate to criminal justice groups. Her emphasis on protecting recently released women from relapsing convinced him to support her as something of a philanthropic entrepreneur.

“So often people don’t see lived experience as expertise,” said Ms. Sam.

For potential donors, such people are among the most compelling supporters of the criminal justice system overhaul, said Ann Jacobs, executive director of the John Jay College Institute for Justice and Opportunity. “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough,” she said. “If you want to find out, you need a lot more immersion.”

On the third point, Mr Loeb said, widespread protests against racial justice following the murder of George Floyd led some employees to question whether the company intended to make a statement. It wasn’t like that, but Mr Loeb said to his colleagues: “Just because we are not making a formal declaration does not mean that we are doing nothing.”

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