Rahsaan became active in social justice first through Restorative Justice circles at San Quentin State Prison back in 2014. He longed to offer the world emotional intelligence and inclusion as solutions to gun violence and wrote about such in Wall City Magazine.

At one restorative justice symposium, he met Emily Harris, Statewide Coordinator for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. In a Prison University Project (now Mount Tamalpais College) class Emily co-facilitated, she taught that about how hard it is to get major law changes passed, so think about the change that will lead to the change. Voting came to mind as the key to everything, so Rahsaan pitched the idea of restoring voting rights to system impacted people in California to Taina Vargas, founder of Initiate Justice, who he met through Emily. Taina loved the concept and turned it into a movement that restored voting rights to people on parole in California.

Rahsaan also became the chairman of the North California Society of Professional Journalists (San Quentin Satellite Chapter). He used his position to hold symposiums with outside journalists aimed at improving coverage of system impacted people. He argued that one-sided coverage of the murder of Polly Klaus lead to the passage the Three-Strikes Law which sentenced thousands of harmless human beings to life sentences, and for people first language to be used in describing those in prison. The Marshall Project attended one of those symposiums and eventually changed their policy to exclude the use of words like “Inmate.” Thereafter, The Marshall Project launched the language Project, a series of essay, one written by Rahsaan, explaining why journalists should not call people in prison, “inmates.” Shortly thereafter, the Gov. of New York announced that the word “inmates” would be removed from the state’s lexicon.

Additionally, Rahsaan sought to change the gun enhancement law that nearly tripled his sentenced and removed any mercy from mitigating circumstances like provocation from the victim by adding mandatory ten year and 25-to-life sentences on to his 20-to-life sentence. He worked with Lizze Buchen of ACLU of California and NBC Bay Area Producer Michael Bott to bring incarcerated men together to speak out against gun enhancements in what came out more like a conversation against gun violence. Thanks to the work of ARC, Initiate Justice, the Ella Baker Center, Lizze, and other organizations, CA Senator Steven Bradford’s bill 620 passed making it so gun enhancements are no longer mandatory in California.

Rahsaan also wrote for dozens of organizations, including Business Insider, Boston Globe, Prism, Slate, High Country News, Outside Magazine, Current, The Marshall Project, and Apogee Journal.

Today Rahsaan fights for abolition through his program Empowerment Avenue, that address root causing of crime by breaking through isolation, intergenerational incarceration, and poverty by helping incarcerated writers, artists, and filmmakers connect to colleagues in society and major platforms to build their careers and receiving prevailing wages for their work—pre-entry.

“It isn’t public safety to warehouse someone for 20 years working for slave wages then released them middle aged and broke,” Rahsaan says. “That’s releasing someone into bad circumstances and hope they find the support on their own to make good decisions.”