Sword and Scale - Episode 89

Episode Date: May 7, 2017

Matthew Hahn is bright, eloquent, friendly and just generally the kind of person you like immediately. He's the kind of person that will tell you everything about his life within seconds of meeting him, but only if you ask. He's an open book which is unusual, because once you hear his story, and your jaw drops to the floor with the disbelief that what you're listening to is not is tall tale, but a reality that this person you're speaking to has lived through, there's one other fact you have to accept: Matt Hahn is a criminal. And you still like him, because his moral compass is stronger than most... See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised. And to think that I was facing 400 years to life, having never conveyed a violent crime, that's crazy. Welcome to Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst monsters are real. They say there is no honor amongst thieves, but I think the following story will prove that to be patently false. You know, over the years, we've approached the true crime genre from every conceivable point of view. We've talked to both defensive attorneys and prosecutors, forensic pathologists, and forensic

psychologists, 911 operators, and the paramedics that respond to the scene. We've also talked to the victims themselves, their families, their friends, and their neighbors. One point of view though, that we rarely cover, is that of the perpetrator, the criminal. There's a lot of people out there, maybe some of you listening, who are so fascinated

with true crime and murder specifically, that you'll take the extra step to write a letter to a convicted murderer, hoping to get a response. This is not something that's really ever interested me, partially because I've heard the horror stories of these masters of manipulation, these psychopaths, who even from behind bars end up figuring out ways to victimize those kind enough and not even enough to reach out. Some of these criminals are true monsters, their humanity stripped away, maybe even genetically before they were born. So I've never had much interest in actually speaking to a convicted criminal until I ran across this story, which can shift your whole paradigm of simplistic thinking. Black or white, true or false, good or bad.

It all gets turned on its head with the following story. On this episode, we're taking a deep dive inside the mind and life of a convicted criminal, and his incredible road to redemption. Stay tuned. This is Matt. My name is Matt Han. Matt, what's the first crime you ever committed? Well, that's a difficult one. It would actually probably have to go back a really long time into childhood.

I think I stole some baseball cards when I was in first or second grade. In first or second grade, so it goes all the way back then. Yeah, that, that, if I was being completely honest about it, yeah. Stole some cigarettes with a friend of mine named Pat, back then, lighters, the types of things that maybe young boys like to, like to do when it comes to going off into the woods and getting in trouble. So, pornography, playboy magazines, cigarettes, baseball cards, that sort of stuff.

But when did it turn? When did it become a lot more serious than, you know, typical petty theft? Well, I wouldn't even say I was a consistent thief through all of my childhood or anything like that. But I would definitely say that once I started using drugs, especially in high school, that's when things changed for me a little bit.

I didn't start stealing really on the regularly until after I dropped out of high school, though, and I was using method of vetamine. Now, you're a smart guy. I know because I've read your writings and you're eloquent and you know how to get a point across and tell a story. How did you fall into this trap of drugs sort of ruling your life?

It doesn't happen overnight, let's just say that. The first time I ever remember getting high in any capacity was actually when I would steal like a corps original from the fridge at my parents house when I was maybe nine or 10 years old. And I remember enjoying throwing back like one beer or two beers and getting a slight buzz from it. And it's something I would remember later on.

I've always had a draw towards things that I was told not to do, if that makes any sense. And so sometimes I think in six or seventh grade, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted to try smoking pot and I said, well, of course I do because I'm not supposed to. So I smoke pot. I don't actually remember getting all that high. I'm not sure if I was doing it the right way, but I did smoke pot.

This was in eighth grade and I got actually arrested my first time in eighth grade for going to a dance after having smoked some pot. But meth is a completely different animal. Absolutely. And that's the drug that kind of led you down in this wrong path. What is it about meth that makes it such a downward spiral? Well, there's the length of time it lasts. You know, when you smoke a joint or something, it lasts an hour or two, maybe longer if

you've smoked a lot. But if you do a little bit of math, you're stuck with that high for at least 24 hours. And towards the end of that 24 hours, you start feeling like a little bit of a come down. And you still got some left, left over from when you bought it, so you do it again. And that lasts another 24 hours. And then when you get to the end of that, you still got a little bit left over. You're starting to come down a little bit, so you do it again. And that lasts another 24 hours. And then when you get to the end of that, you still got a little bit left over, you're starting to come down a little bit, so you do it again. So what ends up happening is it turns into like a week-long project, even in the beginning. So that's what happened to me early on in my senior year of high school. I had missed. I want to say I think I missed maybe between four and six weeks, the beginning of my senior

year because I had the kissing disease, I had a mono. And when I came back to school, I was expected to catch up with all the work that I'd missed, as well as keep up with the current load. And a friend of mine was living with me at the time. And we got this really genius idea to do speed, to allow me to catch up. And so we went and bought some methamphetamine.

Now I should point out that I had done speed a year or two earlier and never enjoyed it. But something was different this time. And I think it was because I'd bought speed before and this time I bought pure crystal meth. And I started doing it. We started doing it. And this must have been September or October

of my senior year high school and it just didn't stop. I dropped out within two months, staying up for a week or two weeks at a time. Is it the kind of thing where once you're done with this process that which sometimes can take a week like you said, now you just need to find money to get some more? In the beginning, I'd say no because it took so little to get me high that if I could come up with 20 or 40 bucks, that was good enough for a week. It wasn't very expensive, but as time progresses, you use a lot more. And I'd say yes.

In the very beginning, I wasn't stealing to support my habit, but I'd say within six months, I certainly was. So within six months, that's as long as it took, just six months to get in that deep. Yeah, absolutely. Six months into it. Tell me about your family. What was your family like?

Were they still together at the time? I had a good upbringing. My parents did start to have difficulties in their marriage, maybe early on in high school. And by my senior year, my father had moved out. But I'm not sure how much of any of this I attribute to that family situation. Other than the fact that perhaps after my father moved out, I felt a little bit more anger and a little bit more free-rained to do what I wanted.

And so when was the first time you got arrested? You said it was in eighth grade? Yeah, yeah, I got arrested for smoking pot, having a bong on my middle school campus. So then the second time was when you were a senior in high school? I had a lot of contact with the police throughout high school. You know, being drunk at a party, parents come pick me up. Sometime before my senior year, kind of like walking around the streets at night,

being drunk, because I got lost while I was walking around trying to find a place to buy cigarettes, stuff like that, but I wasn't really getting arrested, but I did get arrested there in December of my senior year. And it was, for under the influence of methamphetamine, I got taken to juvenile hall for a couple of hours, and then they released me, and that was actually when I decided not to go back to high school, was getting arrested for under the influence of met there in my senior year, and I never

went back after that. Now, you say that your family, your parents breaking up, didn't have anything to do with it, but my question has to be, where was sort of the adult at this point kind of, you know, seeing that you were getting into trouble and steering you away from it. Let me think about this a little bit. Hold on, Mike. Is it the kind of thing where you just, you don't want to say anything negative about your family?

Yeah, there's a little bit of that. We can move on. No, hold on, I mean, let me think of the way, because it's actually something I've been struggling with recently as I was writing. I've been writing about this period and trying to decide the best way to express it. So, I think the best way that I could characterize it is that after

my dad moved out, my mom was understandably in a really bad place, seeing that her marriage had fallen apart. And I was at that point kind of, I was kind of like a little maniac. And I think to a certain extent, particularly once I had started doing meth, I was scaring. I yelled a lot. I kind of threw fits. I was not a fun person to live in the house with. And I think to a certain extent, my mom was scared of me during that period of time, especially after the meth it started. I still had a little sister living in the house that was going to high school. My understanding is that she was scared while I was living in the house. And I pretty much just did what I wanted.

Of course, my mom tried to parent me. Of course, she tried to do what was best for me. And at that time, I just didn't care anymore. I would leave when I wanted and I would stay away. Stay away from the house. She kicked me out of the house a couple of times. And I'd sleep in the car. I'd sneak into the garage and sleep in there. So let's talk about this time when you started to get into robberies and stealing to support

your addiction. How many robberies would you say you've taken part in? Well, we should probably distinguish between robbery and burglary here, right? So I've never done a robbery as it's defined by the penal code, right, which is like kind of like the typical sticking somebody up, right? Yeah.

So I've never done anything like that, but I have done plenty of burglaries. And I'd say that- So burglaries would be just robbing someone's home or workplace or something like that. Yeah, and it starts out petty, and it progresses in the same way that the drug use progresses.

So in the very beginning, it started basically as stealing from places where there is nobody around. So when you're doing meth, you're awake all night. You kind of try to stay away from the house because your families are asleep. So me and my friend would kind of just go find a place where we could hang out at night. And very often we would go to the hills,

we go to the woods above Saratoga where I grew up and you know, smoke cigarettes and talk all night because that's kind of what meth makes you wanna do is just talk all night. And a lot of the time we go to like old construction sites, or not old construction sites, new construction sites. And, you know, hanging out there, you'd see that people had left things lying around,

tools, et cetera. And it kind of dawned on us once that the person we were buying, the meth from, was kind of a tool nut, and that he probably appreciate some of these things. And so in the beginning it was stealing stuff like that and bringing it to him and trading it for a meth. Always that something significantly below the market value for the tools. So you could bring someone like a thousand dollars of tools and maybe get 5050 worth of math. But you kinda, I kind of set rules or parameters for what was morally acceptable,

so far as stealing goes and I always told myself, you know, you can steal from a place like a construction site, but you can't steal someone's property from their home or you don't wanna go into their car, you know, like I would set kind of like, that was the next bar, that was the next line that I wouldn't cross. But then, kind of, once you've already started stealing, then you're driving down the street at night

and you see an open garage. That was the next line I crossed. I'd see an open garage and I'd say, well, there's a bike in there. I could probably go sell that. The next line would be, okay, there's a car. Its doors are unlocked, and so I'd steal from them. And on a couple of occasions, I'd go into the garage, and I'd notice that a door was unlocked in the garage, and I'd go through it. And so maybe steal something from the kitchen.

Right. You're just a teenager at this point. The period I'm describing right now is about 18 years old. Yeah. So is there a point at which you go? What the hell am I doing describing right now is about 18 years old. Yeah. So is there a point at which you go, what the hell am I doing? Yeah, there were points like that. And there was a lot of shame associated with it, but I would just get high again and

I'd forget all about that. So when did you first get caught doing something like this? I was 18 years old still. It was February of 1999. And I was doing exactly what I just described. I was driving around at night, kind of looking for opportunities. And someone had left a garage door open. I parked the van. I was driving down the street. I went into the garage and for whatever reason I had this bad feeling. I'm not sure what the what actually caused me to have the bad feeling, but it proved to be some sort of intuition.

And I remember walking out of the driveway, and I was kind of in a really nice neighborhood in the top of the hills, and I remember looking down the hill and seeing three or four headlights kind of one after the other, trailing up the mountain. And I just knew it was the cops.

Because remember, it's like three in the morning, a quiet neighborhood. There's not gonna be four cars driving one after the other they're trailing up the mountain. And I just knew it was the cops. Because remember, it's like three in the morning, a quiet neighborhood. There's not, there's not gonna be four cars driving one after the other in the middle of the night in this neighborhood unless they're cops. And I saw I left my van there and I ran through the hills and made my way to my mother's house.

And when I got to the street, I saw all the cops out in front of the house. So I kind of hop through backyards to get and sneak into my house and start hiding stuff. And so I started hiding all the stolen stuff I had lying around the garage in my bedroom. I was putting it in the attic or what have you, but eventually the cops came and got me. And that was the first time I got arrested for a felony. Numerous felonies. Numerous. Numerous.

Berglaries, I would imagine. Was there anything worse than a burglarie that you ever took part in? And he sort of violent back to? No. No. Now, I mean, the most, I mean, the most violent thing I've ever

engaged in was a fist fight with somebody once. When I was 18 years old. Now, this was the first time you got caught. What was the second time? Well, that happened in 2005, so 18 years old. Now this was the first time you got caught. What was the second time? Well, that happened in 2005, so six years later. But there was probably a lot of crimes in between. Not really. So in 1999, I got arrested for that first case.

And I guess I should explain California's three strikes law as it was back then a little bit. So I was arrested there in 1999 for residential burglaries, which are strikeable in California, which means if you commit three of them in your life, then you can get sent away for 25 of life. I was arrested for a number of other charges that were felonies as well, like possession of stolen property or second-degree burglary. And the district attorney kind of threatened me with the maximum amount of time that was possible given my offenses. I think it was somewhere

in the realm of 40 years and said, you know, Mr. Hawnier facing 40 years, you know, maybe you want to take a deal. So I took a plea bargain for five years, eight months. And part of the plea bargain was that I was agreeing to having three-plus strikes on my record. So I went to prison in 2000 and I got out in 2001, but I also had three plus strikes on my record, which meant that if I ever commit any felony ever again, then I was gonna be facing 25 to life. So you took a plea for the three strikes. It wasn't actually three different charges.

No, you mean three separate arrests. No, I did not have three separate arrests, but that's not how the three strikes law works. You can get arrested for multiple strikes on a single arrest, and that's what happened to me. So I got arrested for basically all three strikes on one. They just can't strike you out on one arrest. So they were just kind of sitting there waiting for me to commit another felony so that they could try to give me 25 a life. Wow.

Wow. I didn't know that. That's fascinating. So how many years did you spend locked up? Between my time in the county jail, fighting the case, and my time in prison, I I think it was about 20 months, 20, 21 months total. 21 months for that one arrest or was there another? Nope, just for that first arrest. Okay, and so it was 21 months total. I got sentenced to five years,

eight months originally, but my release was dependent upon completion of a drug program while I was in prison. And once I completed that, I went to the parole board and they let me go in August of 2001. So I didn't obviously serve the entire five or eight month sentence. Is that the total amount of time you spent behind bars or? Total amount of time, just shy of nine years.

Okay, so just shy of nine years. And I wanna talk about some of the time you've spent behind bars before we get any further into the reason why you were there. So you spent some time in Folsom Prison. Tell me about that. Well, the good of the bad. Well, this was 10 years ago.

And you say it's a very interesting prison. Nothing modern about it. Yeah, Folsom was built sometime in the 1880s, I believe. I don't think it's the oldest prison in California. I think that belongs to San Quentin, but it was built shortly after. When you pull up to it, it looks completely different than any of these modern prisons you're accustomed to seeing. So it doesn't have chain-linked fences, it doesn't have corrugated gun towers around it. It doesn't have barbed wire. Instead, it has these 30-foot tall granite walls, with blocks that probably weigh a ton or two a piece. It looks very old.

It looks like something you would see in Europe, from the medieval era. So it looks like a castle. So it's kind of beautiful in its own special way. The cell blocks are old. The cells are really small, they're maybe four feet by, I want to say eight or nine feet, not very big, two men living them with the toilet and shelves and a sink, so they're very small. You know, cool things have happened

there like the that famous Johnny Cash album got recorded there I think in 1967 or 69 so there's a sense of history there. to watch him die. Wow. When I hear that whistle blowing, I hang my head and cry. But I feel like living there, both the guards and the prisoners kind of have a sense of pride in living at Folsom, even though of course nobody really wants to be there. That's interesting how you say it's a sense of pride. You wouldn't expect something like that in a prison. No, and I didn't expect it either. But if I want to put some things in perspective, there's like some really, really bad places I could have gotten sent to. Mm-hmm. You know, when I had gone to prison there, they do this thing called classification or reception where they decide based upon, you know, how much time you're doing the severity of your crimes, you know, what security level you belong on.

And I was originally slated to go to a cork ring. The cork ring level three yard, which is, you know, a very different prison than Folsom. And I would have had a very different experience there. I'm not sure I would have had much pride in that place because there's a lot more violence there. Even though violence happens at Folsom, there's a lot more violence in some of these other prisons. So I think people sometimes feel grateful for landing at Folsom as well, because there's a lot of lifers on the yard,

guys who've been down 10, 20, 30 years, and the lifers that make their way to places like Folsom tend to be the type that really want to go home at some point. So they come to Folsom because there's vocational training available. There's a lot of drug programs. There's a lot of activities available to them that maybe are self enriching. That will make them look good when they go to the parole board.

So you have that element of people who've been down a really long time being grateful to be a place like that. Not to mention the fact, just the demeanor of men who've been down for that long tends to have a calming effect on the prison as well. Unlike Corcoran, a maximum security California state prison, Folsom is only a level three, as opposed to a level four. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, or CDCR, employs a point-based classification system, not only for its prisons, but for its prisoners. Each

prisoner's classification score is the sum of weighted factors that the CDCR deems to be a threat or security potential. One of the many factors is the age at first arrest. I got the maximum amount of points for the age at first arrest because I was 18 years old. Right. And so this is kind of like a measure of delinquency, right? And I guess the Department of Corrections thinking is that the younger you are when you get arrested, the more problematic you're gonna be behind bars. And so they kind of scale it. You know, if you're 18 to 21 years old,

you get a maximum number of points. If you're 21 to 25, you get something in the middle. And all the way up to like if you're over 35 They figure you're not that much of a problem. So yes, I got 10 points there So you had 10 points for that one and then the next one was age at reception Which you got six points for so the age at reception is the a the actual age I was at the time that they were doing the classification So that would basically be current age when you're getting classified versus age it when you got arrested. And so I was no longer

in the lowest bracket at that time when I went to prison the second time. So I was I think 26 years old at that point. And so I got six points for that. 26, yeah. So this next one's pretty interesting. The length of the prison term doubled. Right. So my prison term on my second prison term was 14 years, four months. And so I got 28 points for that. Clearly, CDCR, that's the California Department of Corrections. What they're thinking is is that the longer your prison term is going to be, maybe the more apathy you're going to have. And therefore the more dangerous you could be to a staff or other

prisoners while you're there. Because you don't have anything to lose at that point. The longer your term, the less you have to lose. The thinking is also that people in prison tend to be more impulsive than others. And so long term goal planning is not often on people's lists when they get there. And so if something's 10 or 15 years out, that seems like a really long ways away. Now there's the gang or disruptive group, which you got no points for. You've got no points for the prior jail sentence either.

Yeah. For some reason, I guess we should distinguish a little bit between jail and prison, because you'll see that when it comes to classification, they distinguish between a prior jail sentence and a prior prison sentence. And so a prior jail sentence meant it would apply to somebody who'd been sentenced to the county jail at some point. And I had actually been sentenced to the county jail for a misdemeanor when I was 18 years old,

but for some reason they never caught up with me. And so I didn't get any points there. But I did get a point for a prior prison term. Right. And this one's interesting that you pointed out, the mental illness, which you got zero points for, but it's an interesting one because it means they associate mental illness with sort of a higher threat level. Yes, or unpredictability. Some listeners

may argue that the CDCR is stigmatizing the mentally ill, but remember that old motto, safety first is much more important than a political agenda when dealing with people who have been proven to be dangerous. So you stood at 45 points, which puts you in a level three. Now, what is the difference between levels in prison?

The easiest way to describe it is, there's four levels, level one being the lowest, security level, and level four being the highest. Level three and level four are what we would typically call maximum security prison. So they're what you would imagine when you think of prison. Cell blocks, gun towers, lots of locked doors, armed guards everywhere. Level one and two are maybe more which you would envision when you think of them, you ever seen the movie Cool Hand Luke. There's the dormitory living. So level

three and four are very secure and a level one and two are much less secure. To the point where on a level one yard, there's often not any fences whatsoever around the facility. And I did end up living in an aprism like that for three years. And there was no fence whatsoever. And that's kind of an interesting experience unto itself. But Folsom was a level three. Folsom was a level three. And Folsom has a hill inside of it. I did not know that. There is a hill. It's called China Hill. I'm not sure it was originally intended to be within the prison, because my understanding

is that Folsom originally was just a cell block, a giant stone cell block, and that was the prison originally. But as it expanded, they eventually put these walls around it, and I guess they soft fit to include the hill within those walls. This is a place where, at one point, inmates would grow their own vegetables. Right. And you found a way to do this too. I grew vegetables there.

I wasn't allowed to grow vegetables there, but I did. How did you pull that off? So that was my first job when I got to Fulsome was as a landscaper. And I wasn't really much of a landscaper. Their idea of landscaping was hanging us a weed whacker and telling us to go make sure the grass didn't get too high. So it didn't really take very long to weed whack the hill

when you got 20 or 30 guys up there. So we had a lot of idle time. And our boss was a guard. And we kind of had an unwritten or unspoken understanding that so long as we put in a few hours of work each day, he would pretend like he didn't see us growing any vegetables up there. And that's

what we did. We had bell peppers growing, watermelon squash, tomatoes, peppers, green onions, stuff like that. And it was pretty cool actually to do that, you know, to go from the cell block down below in those little teeny cells, the noise, the confinement. Up to that hill during the day, it was actually kind of like a nice reprieve from where I was living. It just makes you feel normal again for a little while. For a little while. Sometimes I'd be, I kind of would dig these troughs around on my vegetables, so I could turn this big and it would just fill the trough up with water.

And so there'd be lots of mud, and sometimes I'd just sit there and kind of play with the mud like a little kid. You know, reminding me of maybe when I was a kid playing at the creek or something. There's something about touching the earth when you're in prison that's comforting because you don't actually get access to dirt very often, it strangers that sounds.

There's so much concrete, there's so much steel, there's so much granite in the case of Folsom, a very little plant life. So to go up there was pretty cool. And you found a way to smuggle some of these vegetables back into the prison. Yeah. So Folsom is kind of, a lot of prisons are like this.

There's a prison within the prison. So there's all the main housing units that are kind of in the middle of the prison. And then there's like an area between those housing units and the walls. And the very middle is much more secure. And in order to go into the middle, you have to pass through security gates. So when we would have to go to China Hill, we would pass out of a security gate to get to this area that was right there near the walls.

But obviously when we came back in, we would have to go through the same security gate and get searched, which was basically stripped down naked, you know, the whole left foot, right foot, Ben Squad coughing. And that was just part of the routine. When you go to work, you get naked on the way back. And they decided to build kind of a new, fangled, higher technology security gate

while I was working up at China Hill. And so they moved us from one gate to another, but the other gate that they moved us to was kind of like out in the open. It wasn't the type of place where you could strip all the inmates down but naked. There would have been free staff walking by. And somebody would have complained if they were having a strip down naked out in the open like that. So basically we just got a pat down. And the pat down was never too serious because there'd be a long line of maybe 50 or 60 or 75 guys that they were trying to usher through.

So during that brief period of time, and I wanna say it was a month or two, you know, we were sneaking down vegetables. We were sneaking peppers or one guy snuck like a little teeny, one of those little teeny pumpkins. It was supposed to be a big pumpkin, but the soil wasn't so great because it kind of had stunted growth, but he snuck it back in and he kind of had it on his shelf

in his cell kind of reminded me of those decorative pumpkins you'd have around Halloween. People would sneak back slices of watermelon because you could never sneak a whole watermelon, but you could sneak a slice back at a time. And it's not like we snuck back, we smuggled in entire meals or anything. You kind of just smuggled in morsels.

But there were morsels of food that a lot of people in there hadn't seen in a really long time. I mean, like I said, there was lifers living there. Guys who'd been in 1520, and one case one of my cellars had been in there 30 plus years. And they don't serve you watermelon and a chowhaw. You don't get green onions with your food and the chowhaw. So to give these to some of those guys was kind of awesome.

You could see them having like what I call a taste memory or something like that. Like while they're eating a slice of watermelon, you could kind of see them remembering the last time. Maybe they had had one. It was a cool experience while it lasted and didn't last very long. They opened up that new security gate and we were back to stripping out on the way in.

Yeah. It must be like tasting freedom again to just get a bell pepper that you haven't had in many, many years. Yeah. That's exactly what it's like. You take a lot of things for granted when you're in the free world. And you don't really realize even when you go to prison or when you're in jail, you don't really realize you miss some of these things until you get a small taste of them again. And you're like, that's what it's like.

I remember this one time, you've heard of conjugal visits before I'm sure, right? Sure. So in California, they call them family visits. And they're not restricted to just someone you're married to. Obviously, wives come in and that's usually what people are trying to have happen. But your parents can come, your brother or your sister can come. And they basically spend three days with you.

And I want to call it like a trailer, basically. But each of these trailers has a little teeny yard outside, with like a little maybe five foot by, five foot piece of lawn. I'll never forget my dad came for a family visit and spent three days in full sun prison with me. And you know, when, I guess I should explain, when you're in prison, you don't ever take your're in prison you don't ever take your boots off

You don't ever take your shoes off outside of your cell and it's kind of a rick-a-rool with within the inmate population because You never know when something bad could happen and if you're caught with your shoes off You know, you're not gonna be very good at fighting. So you're not allowed to take your shoes off outside your cell But at the family visit, I could. And I remember taking my shoes off and taking my socks off and putting my feet into the grass. And I hadn't felt grass between my toes in so many years. And it was such a wonderful experience.

And I don't know. It's just an example of the little thing that you have when you're free that you don't really appreciate in the same way until you don't have it anymore. Yeah. What do you think about the three strikes law? I think it's a little crazy, to be honest with you, particularly, and I know I have like a subjective bias here, right? But I think it's crazy if you think about my case and the fact that I'm not actually convicted of any violent crimes. I've been convicted of serious crimes, but I've never been convicted of a violent crime. And to think that I was facing 400 years to life when I got arrested the last time,

having never committed a violent crime. That's crazy. That's crazy. I was in county jail with people who were facing 25 to life for getting caught with like a half a joint of a PCP, or a lane you, like a joint, of pot with PCP on it because it was a felony and

they had two strike priors and that's crazy to me. In fact, most of the people I met that were three strikers did not get struck out on a crazy violent crime. It was usually something petty. Now to be fair, California's three strikes law has been modified a little bit in the last few years. So you can no longer in California be struck out for a non-serious or non-violent crime. So if you got caught with PCP now, you couldn't get a third strike.

But if you got caught for a residential burglary like I did, then I would still get struck out. But there, as far as you know, do you know if it's retroactive? Are there people still in prison for a minor third offense or third strike? Yes, there are. And those people, a lot of them at least, are allowed to go back to court

to have their sentence changed. And there's actually a really good program, I think, at Stanford Law School, the Three Strikes Project that is going around finding these people, bringing them back to court and getting them released. It is retroactive, but you have to have somebody who is going to represent you to make it happen. Right. And not everybody falls into that category.

Right. So this third strike that could have landed you in jail for the rest of your life. Let's talk about the reason why you were there. Third strike that could have landed you in jail for the rest of your life. Let's talk about the reason why you were there. So you broke into a safe. Yeah, so obviously, I got out of prison the first time and I didn't go back to getting high and stealing just like right out the gate or anything. I did well for a couple of years, went to college,

had a 4.0 grade point average, had a great job, but a very close friend of mine, actually the guy that was living with me, they're my senior year when I had dropped out, but a very close friend of mine come to suicide in 2003. And after that happened, I became a daily drinker, and just a number of months later, I relapsed on meth. And so that would have been in the beginning of 2004 that I relapsed on meth. And so that would have been in the beginning of 2004 that I relapsed on methamphetamine.

And I pretty much went right back into the same old behavior that I did the previous time there in 1999. This friend of Matt, who suicide triggered his relapse, was also the same friend who first introduced him to methamphetamines. It begs the question of what Matt's life would have looked like had he never met him. But Matthew Hahn rejects that idea. I don't know if I'd lay the responsibility on his back.

I definitely make my own decisions. And this friend of mine did not get me into doing math. We did it together. It was definitely a joint decision. There was no peer pressure or anything like that involved in it. Was he involved? Of course. He was one of my best

friends going back almost all the way to second grade. So anything that happened in my life was going to be in some capacity related to him. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia when I was in prison the first time. And ultimately that's why he killed himself there in 2003. But I'd have to say that it's my inability to cope that led to my decision to get high again. So you start getting high again and then you start burglarizing again? Yeah, exactly. So at some point I decided that I wanted a three-wheeler.

You know, when I say three-wheeler, you know, like ATVs, you know, like the four-wheeler ATVs, I'm not sure if in Florida, they're banned, but I don't think three wheelers are allowed to be manufactured or sold in California anymore because they're so dangerous, but I wanted a three wheeler. And somebody that I knew told me, yeah, there's a guy that owes me a bunch of money, and he owns this three wheeler.

You know the guy, and I did know who the guy was, and I knew where he lived, and it was in a town right next to where I grew up. So I went to this house, and this was maybe the third week of February of 2005. I went to this house maybe around two or three in the morning, which was usually my time for prowling like this. And I kind of like walked around the front yard of this house. This is a very nice neighborhood. It's a very large property. There's a main house in the back of the property, and then there's a smaller cottage in the front of the property. And so I creeped around and never found this three-wheeler. I did see something that I wanted on the way out. I think

I stole a plasma cutter and saws off from this house on my way out. But I kind of decided that I was going to go back again at a later date and see if I could find this three wheeler. And I did about a week later, I guess you want to call, I'm not going to say it's a buddy or a friend, but I was with a drug acquaintance of mine. And I told them,

hey, I want to go to this house. I want to go see if there's a three wheeler there, and if there is, I'm going to need your help when you end of the truck. So it seems like a sort of a cumbersome thing to steal a three wheeler, pretty heavy and all that. It would have been very cumbersome. I actually had those ramps that you used to get a motorcycle

up into a truck, so that was what my thinking would. I was thinking that we'd be able to use those to get them in there. But at the same time, it's also a very stupid idea, and not to mention wrong, but that was what my thinking would, I was thinking that we'd be able to use those to get them in there. But at the same time, it's also a very stupid idea, not to mention wrong, but it was really stupid. I don't exactly come up with the greatest ideas when I'm getting high, but this was one of my great ideas right here.

So we went to the house again, or I went to the house again, he went there for the first time. Again, it was about two in the morning and We creeped on to this property. We walked past that small cottage that's on the front of the property and looked around and After a few minutes realized there was no three wheeler there. We walked to kind of the side of the main house to looking kind of a storage shed area over there and Didn't see anything and we kind of just decided it was time to leave. And I remember getting a little nervous. Remember how I told you when I got arrested the first time I had this intuition in the house

and I left and my intuition was right, there was cops coming up the street. I kind of had a feeling like that. And at that point I kind of come to this weird, maybe drug-induced conclusion that when I would have feelings like that, it's because there was some sort of like sensory input coming from my environment that I wasn't fully conscious of, but my body was responding to any house. So like, I took it to mean that maybe there'd been a noise off in the background that I hadn't really registered consciously, and so I would stop and be silent and listen and see if anything was going on. So I stopped and I listened and I didn't hear anything. And so we continued back towards the front of the property. And that's kind of when I

stopped dead in my tracks, because this cottage that was on the front of the property, the door, the back door was now wide open. And the light was on. And the light from this door was shining out into the front yard right where we had to walk past to get out. And obviously, somebody was awake, right? This is the middle of the night, and we had just walked in the property that door wasn't open. And now here we are standing right next to it, the door is open.

The guy who was with, like, let's get out of here is what he said. And I agreed with him. It was time to get out of there. But as I was walking by, I looked through the door. And as I looked through the door, there's like a little laundry room right inside this door. And just beyond that was a little bedroom. And sitting in the middle of the floor of the bedroom

was a safe. And I looked at the guy and I said, hey, let's go get that safe. He's like, no, no, no, don't go get it. I don't really know what came over me. I'm like, we're gonna go get this thing. So I walked in and I picked up the safe. It was really heavy and I said something along the lines of it's too heavy to help me. So he helped me and we carried that thing out to the bed in my truck,

tossed it in the bed and we took off. And that's how I came in possession of the safe that would probably change the rest of my life, right? So how do you open a safe? I don't know how to open a safe except by butchering it. So it was a liberty safe and it looked like basically impenetrable. So I knew I was going to have to do like, I had to cut it open with something. And I have to use like a grinder or pry bars or something like that.

And I knew that it was going to make a whole lot of noise when I did it. So at this point, it's maybe three or four in the morning. And I can't just start grinding, banging on it with a sledgehammer, right? I'm going to wake up all the neighbors. And I live in this quiet, super urban neighborhood. Everybody's, everybody probably,

who lived around me probably knew I was on drugs, but I didn't need to give them a reason to call the cops on me. So I told this guy that I was with. I said, hey, I'm gonna wait till like eight or nine in the morning to go cut this open. He's like, well, I'm not staying around that long. So he just called me and let me know when you're gonna do it. Call me, let me know what was in it. Of course, I thought this was a great idea because if I opened it up and I found a bunch

of money in there, I might be able to keep more of it than it should, right? So that's what I did. About eight, nine in the morning, I cut it open. It took me longer than I anticipated, but I did get it open with a grinder and a pry bar. And at first I was creeped out and disappointed by what I found. So when I first reached in to this safe, the first thing I found, I'm sticking my hand into this safe and there's something squishy and it's soft. I'm like, what the heck could this be? And I pull it out and it's a diaper. But it's not like a brand new diaper. This is a soil diaper.

Hmm. I mean, why would you have a diaper in a safe? So I reach in and there's another diaper and then another diaper and then another diaper. There's five or six soil diapers in there. I remember opening one up to see, like maybe he's hiding something in the diaper, you know, that he doesn't want like

banging around or something in there, but no, it was in fact a wet diaper. I also pulled out a pack of new diapers, not a full pack, but like maybe a six pack or something of unused, unsoiled diapers. Also in the safe was a 22 pistol, some paperwork, some bank cards, adoption paperwork for the guy that owned the safe, and a memory stick for a camera, a digital camera. So it wasn't much of a score. Right. It didn't look like I'm gonna get rich off this thing.

I mean, I guess the gun was the coolest thing that was in there, but I was a felon. I wasn't even allowed to have a gun anyhow, so it's not like it was anything I could keep. So I remember I went and I think I cracked a beer open, yeah, it's like nine in the morning, but I'm an alcoholic, so I cracked a beer open, smoking a cigarette, and I go and I put this camera card into my computer tower. Yes, it's just 2005, so we still had computer towers back then. And I put it in there and like all the images

that are on this memory stick start popping up kind of as thumbnails, you know, like the little teeny images. Right. And at first glance, I thought I'd stumbled upon somebody's like private, you know, like homemade porn collection, like he and his girlfriend or something had been taking pictures of each other. And so I clicked on one of them and I'm like, what's this? And something was very strange about it.

There are times when we make choices in life. Choices that define our character. And there are times such as this moment when Matthew Han is suddenly confronted with his own character, which is telling him that he must act. It's not a choice at all. It looked like a little girl. It looked like a child. It did not look like an adult engaging any sort of sexual activity.

So I looked at that first one and I said something very bad is happening here, but I'm not sure. How old of a child? To me, it looked like it. At the time, I thought she was maybe three years old. Oh, God. So I looked at the next photo. And this one was not as much of a close-up, and it depicted him, and it depicted her, and it was very clear that it was a child, and it was very clear that he was an adult, and it was very clear that he was engaging in sexual acts with the child.

And I'm not gonna describe it any further, but I went and I looked at the rest of the photos. I don't remember if there is five or 10 or 15 more, I don't remember, they kind of all blurred together. And like, I knew that I had to do something about it. I knew I had to. Even though he's a self-admitted criminal, this line is too far. Whoever did this simply cannot get away with it. Matt instantly knows he has to do something. But what? And how? If he admits to stealing the safe, he will be beyond California's three strikes,

which means an automatic sentence of life in prison. Ask yourself, honestly, what would you do? Any felony, any felony would get me a minimum 25-to-life in prison. So off the table was walking into the local police department and saying, hey guys, I've been burglarizing houses in the neighborhood but look what I found. You know, like that wasn't really an option for me, but I knew that I had to do something about it, and I knew that I would basically, I knew that I would involve turning it into the police, but I had to figure out the best way to do it anonymously. I did toy with other ideas very briefly. Like, you know, I could kill this guy, but I'm not a killer, and I knew I wasn't. I knew that I had to turn into the police. So what I did is I went back to the

memory card, and I said, okay, well, I need to be a witness here. And so I need to look at every picture on here and kind of like burn it into my memory. In case I have to come forward at some point in the event that maybe the memory card got lost or something as I was trying to turn it in. So I remember there were pictures of like a car accident on there, maybe for insurance purposes. There was obviously the molestation pictures and the one that really got me was the last photo.

And it was pictures of what looked like a grave. It was like a picture in the backyard of an area that had like weeds growing around and then a place that had like an ovular shaped spot of turn to soil, like something like where maybe somebody had buried a pet or something. And when I saw that photo, I immediately linked that 22 caliber pistol in the safe with the photos that I'd seen earlier on the card and I thought, like, what if he killed this girl? And that's when I became resolved to do something

and to do it quickly. So I called the guy that I'd stolen the safe with and told him he needed to come over and we had to talk about what I found. And he did come over eventually. I said, I didn't find anything really worthwhile. I told him what I found, the guy on the paperwork and this and that. But then I said, I did find this. You sure you didn't find a stack of money in there that you kept for yourself? Might have been great for the lawyer fees that would have come later, but no stack of money. I still wonder if maybe he suspected me of actually having found a bunch of really cool stuff in there without telling him, but

So I showed him the photos and his first reaction was I Don't want anything to do with this and I said well, I don't really want anything to do with it either But we have him and I'm gonna go do something about it He's like I again, I don't want anything to do with this and I said all right. Well, I'm gonna turn them in And if it ever gets tracked to me, I don't want anything to do with this. And I said, all right, well, I'm gonna turn them in. And if it ever gets tracked to me, I won't say anything. And that's what I did. Later that night, I took the memory card. I wiped them clean, so there's no fingerprints on it.

I stuck the memory card in like a little change purse. And then I kind of wrapped that up in an envelope. And on the envelope, I wrote something along the lines of 9-1-1 graphic photos enclosed, turnover to Las Gadas, Monastery, no police department, something along those lines. And then I typed up a note on my computer that I needed to include in there with it. And it basically said, I stole this from whatever address. They belonged to this guy, Robbie Aitkenz, which was the name on the paperwork in the safe.

I presumed that they belonged to that guy. And then I put, I don't want anything to do with it, it's because I stole him. And I think I ended the note with, please remove this animal from the streets. I put the note in the envelope, and I took it to a house down the street later that night, maybe two, three in the morning again. A house

that I thought looked very familial, if that makes any sense, like I had a family so that like a parent would find this and turn it in immediately. And I stuck it in their mailbox and waited. John Robertson Aiken, who went by the name Robbie, was a 22-year-old with no previous criminal record. The girl in the pictures was his goddaughter, and also his boss's child. Aiken had woken up that night after hearing some noises, like whispers and a box being kicked. He discovered that his gunsafe was missing and called 911. Afterwards, he seemed unusually anxious. His boss's wife, the girl's mother, would later recall at the trial that Eight can

told her, I feel like my life as I know it is over. When detectives Dan Akarto and Mike Barbieri received the memory card, they knew they had to act fast. A young girl was in danger. With the help of prosecutor Dana Overstreet and district attorney investigator Carl Lewis, they quickly came up with a plan. On March 3rd, they called Atkin. They told him they had some follow-up questions about the burglary and asked him to come down to the station. Once there, they chatted with him for a while, casually, as detectives do before dropping the hammer on a suspect. Then Lewis said he had something else he needed to talk about. He pulled out a leather folder

and meticulously opened it in front of Robbie Aiken. Inside was a photograph. Not a photograph of anything graphic at all, just a close-up blown-up photo of Aiken's face. But this photo had been taken from the memory card. And instantly Aiken knew what it meant. If police had this image, they had all of them. The detective Mike Barbieri would later say he just melted into the chair. It gave me goosebumps. Aiken put his hands over his face, took a deep sigh, and began to talk. It was just, I, I, it's stupid, you know, it was one day, you know, being stupid and, and

you know, did it. And you know, halfway through it, I was so upset at myself I just stopped and said what am I doing and you know stopped and spent the next week just throwing up all upset about it thinking you know how could I do this to somebody I love. Eightkin had started as an employee for the lost goddo's family whose daughter he molested. He worked at the computer store owned by the father, but had become so close with the family, he was almost like a son. He had gone with them to Tahoe, Hawaii, and Italy. He babysit their beloved first girl,

and they had even trusted him enough to make him the girl's godfather. They were so close that Robbie sometimes slept in the same bed with the child. When police searched Aitken's apartment, they found one of the little girl's dresses, stuffed in a bag inside a motorcycle helmet. A computer forensic search was conducted which revealed thousands of pornographic images, including more than 100 images of child pornography. According to court documents, the child's mother went to Elmwood Correctional Facility

to ask Aitken two questions. Was I there? No, he said. Did you sell the photographs? No, he said. Then she left. The irony of this that when Aikins was finally charged and convicted and sentenced, he faced a 30-year sentence while you faced life in prison for turning him in.

Right. Well, I was eventually arrested for, in the very beginning, just possession of stolen property property later to be charged with I think one first degree burglary a residential burglary and a number of other things like possession of methamphetamine. So I was facing 16 felonies when I was eventually arrested and in California right with the three strikes law I was facing 400 years to life, not just 25 the life, as if there's a huge difference, but it was always facing 400 years to life. And I think he was facing maybe 25 the life in the very beginning that was eventually pled out to 30 years. And you know, ultimately the only thing that saved me from getting the 400 years to life was the media.

You know, the person who was prosecuting this guy, Robbie Atkins, basically went to the local newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, and told them, like, look, here's the guy that turned this guy in, and he's facing 400 years to life. He's facing more time than the guy who molested this little girl. And that guy's name was Sean Webby at the Mercury News. And he came to visit me in the county jail and did an interview with me and basically ran

a front page Sunday edition spread on the whole story. The story I just told you. And he ran a follow up again, the following Sunday. And it got a little bit of media attention. And eventually put enough pressure on the district attorney to come to my lawyer and say, okay, maybe you want to consider a plea bargain. So let's talk.

And once that happened, I eventually got a 14-year, four-month sentence instead of 400 years to life. And this media attention, it's interesting because it drew a lot of strangers to your defense. But also, there was some backlash. There were some people who see things, there are some people who see things very black and white and would call you a dirt bag or scum, you know, in comments of these articles and forums. What would you say to people like that? How do you feel about people calling you things like that?

I don't feel bad about it. I don't feel like their opinion is that relevant. And I think to a certain extent, I understand it. They don't know me. The only thing they know about me is that I'm convicted of these felonies and that it's not the first time I've been convicted of them. So I don't really hold it against them. I also try to recognize that there's probably a good chance

that they don't have a friend or family member who's been a drug addict or an alcoholic or who's gotten convicted of crimes as a result of it or who's spent time in prison or jails. And I feel like if that person did have those sort of people in their life, then maybe they wouldn't have that opinion. So knowing things like that, I feel like sometimes it's my responsibility to be transparent with others about where I've been, what happened to me, so that I can maybe piece by piece or person by person, change the stereotype or the stigma just a little bit. I go back to the high school that I dropped out of there in senior year.

I go back there once a year to talk to the students. And this year, I was in the room for a little bit of a debate they had before I spoke. Now, mind you, the students in the class have no idea that I'm in the room. They know I'm there, but they don't know who I am. And then they get given kind of a synopsis of my case, and then they have a debate over whether I should spend the rest of my life in prison or not. And it's great watching the kids going like, you know,

that guy, he's a piece of crap. Should be in prison for the rest of his life. Whatever good things he did, don't mitigate the bad things he did. And of course, there's people on the other in the spectrum, they're like, he should get probation. You know, whatever, I don't think either of those were appropriate for me.

I think I probably needed to go away for a while. And then when they announce, the teacher announces, like, all right, like let's just let him tell you the story. The look on the people's faces who wanted to fry me is priceless. It's priceless. And it's funny because they were very apologetic and it just, it doesn't matter. You know, like, I get it.

I understand why people think that way. And it's my responsibility to maybe change your opinion about it. And I think it's very important to restate the fact that you didn't keep this, what was it? A USB drive or an SD drive, you didn't keep this, whatever it was, you know, as you're get out of jail free card, you turned it in immediately knowing that one little slip up and they could trace this back to you and they could prove that you burglarized this home and that you'd be sent to jail for ever essentially and you did it anyway. Yeah, I turned it in anonymously right away. I mean obviously I tried to protect myself by turning it in anonymously, but

yeah, this happened in February of 2005 and I got arrested later on in April. I feel like the only time that I really didn't talk about it too much already, but while I was in the county jail fighting my case, the district attorney who was prosecuting him, this is the same district attorney that went to the Mercury News, she visited me in the county jail and basically told me that there was a motion to have all the evidence thrown out, the photographic evidence, that she needed me to, in some capacity, go on the record, admitting that I stole the safe. And up to that point, there was nothing on the record saying I did it. When I'd been arrested, I had an off the record conversation with the police about the contents of the safe, but they kind of kept their word and didn't put any of that into the official record. So when she came to me, she basically came to me saying, look, I know you did

it, but we don't have any official documentation of it. And we need you to admit that you still the safe. And so then she left the room and I met with my lawyer for a little bit and he's like, look, I can't recommend that you go on the record saying you stole the safe. You're fighting a case here. And if you go on the record saying you stole a safe, you can't go to trial. You're done, you know. And he said, I recommend you telling them how you turned it in. You answer all the other questions they have about it. That you admit that you had possession of the safe. I recommend all those things, but I don't recommend you say that you stole it, or that you were the only person who had read possession of it.

So when we went back in the room with the district attorney and the prosecutor, we did kind of, we had a, on the record conversation, and it's funny, she started it out with kind of, this isn't law and order, I'm not offering you a deal. I can't offer you a deal. That's not how this works. You know, we're just going to have a conversation and whatever you choose to tell us, you can tell us. And so they did. They asked me the contents of the safe. They asked me all these things. And in the beginning, I did avoid mentioning that I'd still in the safe. And towards the end of it, she kind of turned off the recorder and said to me, she's like, look, Mr. Hahn, we have to establish a chain of possession.

And what that means is we need to make sure we have to have proof that the memory card went from Robbie Aitken to the police department without the police department ever committed a crime in the process. And that link is you. And so we went back on the record. And when she asked me, did anybody else ever have possession of the safe? I said no. I am the only person who ever possessed that safe between Robbie Ackins and the time that it made its way to the Laskettas Police Department. And so I admitted to stealing the safe then. And I think that's why she eventually went to the Mercury news and told them is because I'd really given up my shot

for a trial. I had given up my defense for my own case in order to convict him. And so after that testimony was submitted, Aikens no longer wanted to go to trial. And that's why he ended up getting 30 years just because his motions to have the evidence thrown out weren't going to work anymore. So how's life now?

Life's great. I'm not in prison. That's the first good thing, right? I got out in 2012, so I did just under seven years. I think I mentioned it briefly earlier. I did college while I was in there. So during my last year in prison, I submitted a bunch of applications to colleges around the state, which was kind of a process under itself, because there's no internet access in prison. So I had to do everything through the mail.

So I paroled in February of 2012, and I got into all the schools I applied to. So I got into UC Berkeley, UCLA, every UC in the state, and decided to go to Berkeley. I graduated there in December of 2013. Same time I got into Berkeley, April 2012, I met the woman who would eventually become my wife, an amazing woman, Noel, hello, I love you. You know, I got off parole in 2013. You know, I got off parole in 2013. I've been sober now going on 12 years this month. So it's an amazing life.

You know, my relationship with my family is restored. It's better than it's ever been. My relationship with the friends that matter are restored and better than they've ever been. I'd like to think that I'm making up for wrongs done. I'd like to think that I'm giving back in the ways that I can. I don't know if I'll ever be able to make amends for all the crappy stuff I've done, but what I'm trying. It's a good life. I have to pinch myself sometimes. I've been out of the country. I've been to Costa Rica. I'm getting ready to travel to India and Nepal. Here later this summer, if you'd asked me just a little bit more than

five years ago when I was still sitting in prison waiting to get out whether this would be the life I have today, I would have said, no, that's not possible. Well, Matt Han, thank you for telling your story and best of luck to you and thank you for doing the right thing amongst all the wrong things you did during that period of your life. Thank you, I appreciate that. Tell our listeners where they can find out more about you. I have a blog that I just started recently. It's called Hans Gratch and it's at Hansgratch.com. That's h-a-h-n. Scratch.com. You can also follow me on Twitter at Hanscratch or on Facebook at Hanscratch. And you have a book coming, don't you? There is a book that I am working on, but it doesn't have a title yet.

But I'll definitely be keeping people up to date on Twitter and on my blog about that as it kind of comes to fruition. Look forward to it. Thanks Mike. I wish I had a good time. If you're a Patreon supporter, stay tuned. We have an extended part of this interview coming up right after the music break. For everyone else, thank you for listening. If you want to join Patreon and get all sorts of bonus content, including our premium

show Sword and Scale Plus, which is up to 10 episodes now by the way, go to patreon.com slash sword and scale. It takes just five bucks a month to get early commercial free access to all our future episodes. You get Sword and Scale Plus and extended interviews. Plus you also get access to the first podcast I ever created, Universe of Mystery, and all sorts of other bonus perks we have planned throughout the year. Go to patreon.com slash sword and scale to find out more. Also we have something incredibly exciting planned. A new show called Sword and Scale Rewind.

It's hosted by Stephanie Wilder Taylor and Lynette Corolla. Yes, that Lynette Corolla. And it will be an after show that goes along with a regular show. A lot of you have told me that you'd like to go back and listen to past episodes again and again. Well Rewind is going to go all the way back to the start at episode 1, the Bruce Blackman case, and it will offer all sorts of analysis, a behind the scenes look at the making of sword and scale, and additional interviews with guests and also listeners too.

Plus the witty charm of Lynette and Stephanie. I cannot wait, it's going to be great. Oh and also I should mention that I will be appearing on their podcast for crying out loud on May 15th and Adam Carolos podcast on May 16th. So that week should be a blast. Catch both shows and subscribe today if you haven't already. Okay I think that's it for announcements. Stay tuned for the rest of Matt Hawn's interview coming up right now. Race segregation behind bars is a reality. And I think, you know, anybody that's seen any of those prison shows knows about it. Tell me why is that the case? Why is this racial divide?