After releasing his new CHAMPIONSHIPS album, Meek Mill appeared on CNN to talk about a topic very important to him. Meek Mill has become an activist for prison reform following his release earlier this year, and he spoke about his personal relationship with the issue in a talk with CNN's Michael Smerconish.
"There's a lot of things in the system that clearly don't make sense," he explained. "It's keeping many young black men caught up in the system without even committing crimes." Meek himself has been the target of such discrimination, and as such, it's something he feels very passionate about. He refuted any claims that he shouldn't be able to campaign for reform when he caught himself a gun charge in 2008.
"I grew up in in America in a ruthless neighborhood where we were not protected by police," he said. "We grew up with people selling drugs in our neighborhood on our front steps. We grew up in ruthless environments. We grew up around murder. If you grew up in my neighborhood, you see seven people die a week, I think you would probably carry a gun yourself," CNN's Smerconish didn't hesitate for long: "Yeah, I probably would, yes."
Of course, he wanted to reiterate that it's not just him being targeted by police. "I'm not the only one that gets found guilty for these things. Cops charge people with these things at an alarming rate," Meek said. "Pointing a gun at a police officer is suicide for a black young man. I never thought about committing suicide in my life."
During the interview, he also took a moment to discuss JAY-Z's verse on "What's Free" from CHAMPIONSHIPS, specifically referencing the Kanye West line. He says he doesn't see it as a diss from JAY, but he himself doesn't agree with Ye's views. "Kanye came out of nowhere and just went red hat, and that was kind of against everything we represent," he said. "We came up fighting, and fighting for our rights for a long time, and what that red hat represents don't really represent what we've been fighting for our whole lives." (Hov has clarified that it isn't a diss.)
Despite not agreeing with Kanye he did give Trump some respect for his efforts for prison reform. "I'm not a politician, but I feel like anything that a president does to fix laws and statues that don't make any sense and are unfair to American people is the right thing to do," he said. Watch the full interview above.
