20 Years in Prison to Published Poet- A Conversation with Charles Brooks Sr.

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Transcript

00:00so can you tell us a little bit about your story okay um i guess first i should let you know i'm

00:10from detroit i'm from linwood and davidson i'm 43 years old i graduated from high school in 1998

00:17born and raised here um i was a street kid you know troubled childhood troubled neighborhoods

00:23or whatnot and i was in the street so to not get into a whole lot of detail a long story short i

00:29caught a lot of arm robbery and weapons charges and i did 20 years in prison wow so i just came

00:34home june of this year june 5th 2025 and um i'm happy to be here uh there's a lot about me that

00:41is different currently i'm an author and a motivational speaker and i'm a father and a

00:45husband and an uncle and i'm free um these are things that when we met charles we we didn't

00:54realize we didn't know we we met you because we were talking on the air about some food and

00:59different combination and found out that that your daughter is an amazing chef by the way yeah

01:03um and brought in food and that's when we started talking about you and your story and just

01:08how the things that you've gone through in your life the decisions that you made bad or good

01:14have brought you to a point to where you are right now right and that point is helping people

01:19make better decisions when they have a chance before they make a bad decision so when i was young

01:25you know people would try to talk to you but they talk to you like you're a child right i was old

01:30enough at least mentally to understand what was going on around me and i was offended when people

01:35would talk to me like i had nobody to really give me the real so um that's maybe that's mostly my

01:40perspective when i talk to you i want you to understand that i'm not trying to feed you words

01:44or i don't want you to think that i'm trying to sell you a dream i'm going to tell you the reality

01:49of what it is to be shot four times when you're 21 years old and you have to learn how to walk again

01:53or 21 years later there are days when i can't get up and walk at all my knee swells i want you to

01:59understand what that comes with because when you're out here playing with these guns and these switches

02:02and you think it's a video game right prison's not a video game watching people die from prison

02:08watching people die in prison it's not a video game so i i needed someone to kind

02:13of tell me those things in that manner right and i never had that right

02:19so