Kim Kardashian and Van Jones Discuss Prison Reform At The Criminal Justice Summit

Photo Courtesy of Twitter/@KKWSTYLE

Kim Kardashian West doesn’t care about your opinions about her visiting Donald Trump. She’s a woman on a mission that is trying to change criminal justice reform. Which is exactly what happened after she visited President Trump at the White House and he released former convict Alice Marie Johnson.

At Variety and Rolling Stone‘s Criminal Justice Reform Summit, CNN commentator Van Jones hosted a conversation with Kardashian West about how she got the attention of the new administration.

First Kardashian West reached out to Ivanka Trump, who connected them to her husband, Jared Kushner. “He has been amazing. He has fully listened,” Kardashian West said. “Ivanka was amazing in really connecting me. And we really worked together as a team to present Alice’s case.”

Jones pressed, “But you’re not a Trump person. I don’t mean to get into your business. A lot of people I think might say, ‘I just… I just… I just… TRUUUUMP!’ They can’t get over that to make the call… How does that work in your mind?”

“I did consider the fact that I would get a lot of backlash if I went to the White House,” Kardashian West explained. “For me, if it’s a life versus my reputation. People talk shit about me all day long, I didn’t really care. What more could they say about me, seriously? When I outweighed the options of bad stories about me that would probably last a week in this news cycle, versus saving someone’s life, that wasn’t an option. I will gladly go there and take the heat. Okay, if he’s gonna listen to me and he’s taking the meeting, maybe I can really get through to him and really explain to him. From meeting all of the people that I have met behind bars, I guarantee you, they don’t care who signs that clemency paper.”

She also explains how being robbed at gun point in Paris changed her priorities in life. Kim Kardashian has been working to get people who were wrongly and harshly convicted out of jail. According to The Sentencing Project, there are 2.2 million people in the nation’s prisons and jails—a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Changes in law and policy, not changes in crime rates, explain most of this increase. The results are overcrowding in prisons and fiscal burdens on states, despite increasing evidence that large-scale incarceration is not an effective means of achieving public safety.

FULL KIM KARDASHIAN AND VAN JONES KEYNOTE INTERVIEW IS DOWN BELOW: