Jared Kushner Wants Justice for All the Wrongly Incarcerated White Billionaires

Jared Kushner—a man who both comes from and married into a family of wealthy grifters—has revealed how he got so interested in prison reform: the experiences of his father, a white collar criminal. “There was one issue that was very close to my heart because I had a personal experience, which was prison reform,” he told CNN’s Van Jones on Monday.

In 2004, real estate mogul Charles Kushner pled guilty to 18 counts of making illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering, after which he spent 14 months in prison. Jared found all of this deeply unfair, and visited his father in federal prison nearly every weekend, according to the Washington Post. The incident affected Kushner deeply; he decided he no longer wanted to become a prosecutor. “Seeing my father’s situation, I felt what happened was obviously unjust in terms of the way they pursued him,” he told the Real Deal in 2014, the Post reports. “I just never wanted to be on the other side of that and cause pain to the families I was doing that to, whether right or wrong.”