Gucci Mane knows that there are better ways to get clean than an extended bid in prison. However, the rapper credits his time locked away for saving his life. Mane told Zane Lowe that he likely would have died from his various addictions had he not been forced to kick the habit behind bars.
In an interview with Lowe on Beats 1 Radio, the Evil Genius rapper was asked whether he thought things "would have ended badly" if he had not been knocked off the path he was traveling in the early 2010s. "I think I would have been dead, probably," Mane said. "It's a possibility."
"Do you think in some degree, going away saved you, in some respects?" Lowe asked.
"In hindsight, yeah," Mane said. "I wouldn't want to do it like that again, but you know... I don't know. Drugs could've killed me, so you don't know the future, but at the same time, jail was so hard, so I don't know."
Jail being hard definitely stuck with LaFlare. Like his fellow recently incarcerated artist Meek Mill, he wants to work on prison reform. The rapper told Lowe that fixing the American prison system is the non-musical thing he's most passionate about.
"Prison reform. To try to get all these people out of jail that are just locked up," he said, when asked to name something outside of music that he feels strongly about. "I was just locked up so many people that don't deserve to be there, but it's like, what do you do?"
Mane said that he's overwhelmed by all the wrongs in the prison system and doesn't know where to begin fixing it, but he'd be willing to lend help to any movement that came calling. "Yes, 100 percent. If somebody came to me with a plan like, 'this is what we can do,' because I don't know, and I can't act like I know," he said.
Back on music, Gucci shared info about his Glacier Boyz project and his upcoming album, both of which were made outside of the nonstop grind that Gucci typically operates within. "With the Glacier Boyz, you know, we just want to make the music doper," he said. "It's going to get done. It don't take us long to record. We've been in the studio, but just like...look for it early in the spring."
That same looseness was a part of Evil Genius. "I think this time, this album was like the first time I kind of had more fun making the records," he said. "I was wanting to take my time and chill. I didn't want to be in studio with a deadline, like I got to make an album and it got to come out at this time."
