Rapers Jay-Z and Meek Mill announced Wednesday that they are launching a new organization for criminal justice reform that aims to "drastically" reduce the number of people in the US prison system.



The group was formed less than a year after Mill, 31, was released from prison after protesting racial prejudice in the US probation laws for probation.

The REFORM Alliance will initially spend 50 million US dollars to "disable the revolving door of probation and probation" by "changing the laws, policies and practices that perpetuate injustice", according to its declaration of intent.

The founding members of the group include Mill and Jay-Z, CNN commentator and Justice Prosecutor Van Jones, who will act as the organization's CEO.

The New England Patriots of the National Football League, Robert Kraft and co-owners of the National Basketball Association, Clara Wu Tsai (Brooklyn Nets) and Michael Rubin (Philadelphia 76ers), are also involved in the cause.

"I'm here to talk to all the people who have no voice," said Mill, who was born Robert Rihmeek Williams and raised in North Philadelphia, a notorious drug dealing area, from a single mother after his father was killed.

Long before he became famous, Mill was imprisoned for drug charges and possession in 2008 and was arrested again in 2017 after a Philadelphia judge ordered him to be imprisoned for two or four years on probation.

His detention sparked a public protest, and the Mills case became a focal point in the national conversation about the treatment of blacks by the US criminal justice system.

Among his celebrities were the activist and footballer Colin Kaepernick and Jay-Z, who had written in the New York Times on behalf of his compatriot, an editorial.

"I come from the environment I come from, I don't even think it's possible for you to be an angel," Mill said at the launch of REFORM. "They grow every day with a murder, they grow every day in drug-contaminated neighborhoods."

"I was involved in the system and every time I took my life in the music industry," he said, "every year there's always been something that brought me back to zero."

The current goal of REFORM is to free one million people from the system in the next five years, with a focus on probation and probation.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, there are about 6.6 million people in the US criminal justice system - 4.5 million of them on probation or probation