Glenn Martin's Unlikely Path to the Oval Office

Glenn E. Martin served six years in a New York State prison for robbing a jewelry store at gunpoint. Two decades later, he walked through the security checkpoint of the White House to advise a sitting president on how to fix America’s criminal justice system.

What happened between those two moments — and what happened at that checkpoint — tells you more about the state of criminal justice reform in America than any policy paper ever could.

Bedford-Stuyvesant to Rikers Island

Martin grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, raised by a single mother who had emigrated from the Caribbean. The household knew poverty, underemployment, and the absence of health coverage. By his own account, the trajectory started small: stealing chocolate from department stores as a boy, then escalating. Breaking into stores. Then armed robbery.

At sixteen, Martin was arrested for shoplifting and sent to Rikers Island for 48 hours. During those two days, he was stabbed four times. He was a teenager.

By twenty-three, he was back at Rikers, this time convicted of armed robbery. He was sentenced to six years in a New York State prison. During his incarceration, he lost regular contact with his four-year-old son. Eventually, he asked his family to stop visiting — the eight-hour round trip was too much to ask of them.

And then a prison counselor said something that, by Martin’s telling, changed the trajectory of everything that followed: “You should go to college.”

It was the first time anyone had suggested the possibility to him. He took the advice. While incarcerated, Martin pursued rigorous academics, studying Russian literature, exploring different cultures and religions, and earning a college degree behind bars.

Building the infrastructure of reform

After his release, Martin didn’t fade into the reentry playbook of keeping your head down and hoping your background check doesn’t come back. He went in the other direction entirely.

He joined the Fortune Society, one of New York’s oldest reentry organizations, and quickly rose through the ranks. His fluency in both the system’s failures and its language made him effective in ways that people who’d only studied criminal justice from the outside rarely were. He understood what it felt like to be inside, and he understood what the policy levers looked like from the outside.

In November 2014, Martin founded JustLeadershipUSA (JLUSA), an organization with an audacious mandate: cut the U.S. correctional population in half by 2030. The model was distinctive. Rather than speaking for formerly incarcerated people, JLUSA identified those with leadership potential and put them through a yearlong training program — the Leading with Conviction fellowship — designed to give them the skills, networks, and platforms to speak for themselves.

By 2025, the program had trained 257 leaders across 27 states plus Washington D.C. Over 3,000 members were active in 42 states. The organization had become one of the most credible voices in the national debate over mass incarceration, criminal justice spending, and the reentry gap.

Martin also co-founded the Education from the Inside Out Coalition, a national campaign working to remove barriers to higher education for students who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated. And he launched the campaign that would become his most visible achievement.

#CLOSErikers

The #CLOSErikers campaign, founded by Martin, took aim at the most notorious jail complex in the United States. Rikers Island, where Martin himself had been stabbed at sixteen, housed roughly 10,000 detainees at its peak in facilities that had been the subject of decades of investigations, lawsuits, and condemnation by civil rights organizations.

The conventional wisdom was that Rikers was too big, too entrenched, and too politically connected to close. Martin’s campaign argued otherwise. Through sustained organizing, coalition-building, and strategic pressure on New York City officials, the #CLOSErikers campaign secured a commitment from the city to shutter the Rikers Island complex within ten years.

It was one of the largest single wins in modern American criminal justice reform — the equivalent of closing a mid-sized prison system — and it happened because a formerly incarcerated person built the political infrastructure to make it possible.

The Oval Office

On June 17, 2015, Martin arrived at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House, for a meeting on criminal justice reform. He was an invited guest. President Barack Obama’s administration was in the middle of what would become the most significant federal push on criminal justice issues in a generation, and Martin — by then one of the country’s most recognized formerly incarcerated advocates — was at the table.

What happened at security, though, felt like a different century.

While his fellow guests received standard green visitor passes, Martin was issued a pink badge marked “Needs Escort.” A Secret Service agent initially told him he could not enter the building. He was pulled aside, separated from his colleagues, and forced to wait while other attendees — people with no criminal records, people who had never been inside the system Martin was invited to help reform — walked through without incident.

Martin described the experience as “humiliating.” Speaking to CBS News, he said it “felt very prison-like” to be “stopped by a person dressed like he’s in a police uniform” without explanation. A passing White House staffer, recognizing that Martin was an invited guest, eventually helped him through the checkpoint. By the time he reached the meeting room, every other attendee was already seated and the discussion had begun without him.

The open letter

On June 25, 2015, Martin published an open letter to President Obama and Secret Service Director Joseph Clancy. He called the treatment “as insulting as it was indicative of the broader problem” in a nation with 65 million people holding criminal records. The Wall Street Journal carried the letter.

The Secret Service responded with a statement citing “standard security protocols” requiring “comprehensive security checks.” The White House declined to comment directly but pointed to the Federal Interagency Reentry Council, established in 2011. Staff later expressed apologies privately and acknowledged that similar issues had occurred with other formerly incarcerated visitors.

The irony was almost too neat: the man invited to advise the president on fixing the criminal justice system was subjected to the same dehumanizing treatment he’d spent his career fighting. The system that invited him to the table couldn’t stop treating him like an inmate long enough to let him sit down.

Martin was later invited back to the White House, this time to speak on a panel and meet directly with President Obama. The second visit went differently. But the first one — the pink badge, the escort, the empty chair at a table full of people who didn’t have criminal records — became one of the most powerful illustrations of what criminal justice reform advocates mean when they talk about the permanence of a record.

The Bay Area connection

Martin’s work has particular resonance in the San Francisco Bay Area, where criminal justice reform has been a central political issue for more than a decade. San Francisco’s former District Attorney Chesa Boudin built an entire electoral campaign on decarceration principles that tracked closely with JLUSA’s mission. The city’s approach to diversion programs, restorative justice, and alternatives to incarceration draws from the same policy framework that Martin helped build at the national level.

The Bay Area’s tech sector has also intersected with criminal justice in ways that make Martin’s work relevant locally. Companies like Checkr, headquartered in San Francisco, have built businesses around making background checks fairer and more nuanced. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, based in Palo Alto, has invested millions in criminal justice reform organizations. And the broader conversation about algorithmic bias in sentencing and policing — a debate that lives squarely at the intersection of Bay Area tech and Martin’s world — continues to shape policy in California and beyond.

Martin’s insight, that the people who’ve been through the system are the ones best positioned to fix it, has become something close to conventional wisdom in progressive criminal justice circles. But when he first started saying it, it wasn’t conventional at all. It was radical. And it required someone willing to stand up and say: I went to prison, and I know more about what’s broken than you do.

The 65 million

The number Martin returns to most often is 65 million. That’s the estimated number of Americans with a criminal record — roughly one in five adults. They’re a constituency that doesn’t have a lobby, doesn’t have a PAC, and for the most part doesn’t have a voice in the political process that governs their lives.

JustLeadershipUSA was built to change that. The Leading with Conviction fellowship, the #CLOSErikers campaign, the White House meetings, the open letters — they’re all pieces of a single argument: that the people most affected by the system should be the ones leading the effort to change it.

Martin’s youngest son, Joshua, is one of the reasons he talks about this with the urgency he does. Given the statistics — roughly one in three Black children in America will enter the criminal justice system by age eighteen — the work isn’t abstract. It’s personal.

What the pink badge means

The story of Glenn Martin’s path to the Oval Office is not really a story about one man’s journey from prison to the White House. It’s a story about what happens when 65 million Americans are permanently marked by a system that invites them to the meeting but makes them wear a different badge.

Martin earned the 2017 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award and the 2014 Echoing Green Black Male Achievement Fellowship. He speaks at universities. He advises policy makers. He has sat across from a sitting president and made the case for a more humane system.

And he still had to wait at the door.

That’s the story. Not the unlikely path to the Oval Office — but what happened when he got there.