Jason Hernandez was once staring at a life sentence without parole for dealing drugs. But reading books helped him turn his life around, a reform so profound that he was granted clemency by President Barack Obama and released in 2015.

The most powerful and important book for Hernandez was “The New Jim Crow,” which looks at ways mass incarceration targets communities of color, Hernandez said in an appearance on the show On Point Thursday.

“You’re talking about a book that, I probably would not be here today on this phone with you, or if I was, it would be through a prison line, because that book actually broke me free from jail,” Hernandez told our guest host, Ray Suarez. “‘The New Jim Crow’ awakened me that there are systems in place that were designed to disrupt and destroy and incarcerate communities of color.”

Hernandez joined our program on criminal justice reform Thursday. A bill is working its way through Washington right now to change sentencing laws on the federal level.

But even as Washington is considering easing mandatory minimums and giving judges more leeway to get around them, some states are banning books, including “The New Jim Crow.”

Hernandez now runs the nonprofit Crack Open The Door, which advocates for sentencing reforms. His journey from life in prison to reformer couldn't have happened without "The New Jim Crow" — he took it upon himself to write his own clemency application

He isn’t the only one to benefit from books in prison. We also heard from a caller, Sean in South Dakota, once a “validated skinhead” who faced a lengthy stint in jail before a parole officer took a chance on him.

The book “Tuesdays with Morrie” by Mitch Albom changed his life — a memoir about the author’s conversations with a college professor, one that caused Sean to look hard at his own beliefs.

“It changed me forever,” Sean said, his voice cracking with emotion, “and it allowed me to grow exponentially.”

It turns out that Hernandez, too, had been deeply affected by an Albom book — “The Five People You Meet In Heaven,” a fictional account of the people one man encountered after he died.

Pursuing his high school diploma after his prison sentence, Hernandez wrote an essay about the five people he’d meet in Heaven. Four of them were related to books he’d read — including Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New JIm Crow,” Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code,” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

That last book, he wrote in his essay, showed him that evil people can get other people to do evil things, be they Nazi leaders or gang leaders. Good people could get good people to do things, too, he realized.

“There is no way possible that I shouldn’t be able to convince kids not to get involved with drugs, gangs, or to convince those that are involved in it to stop,” Hernandez wrote.

He also wrote in his essay about a fellow inmate in prison who exposed him to literature, and more background about his background. The lessons about the Mayan and Aztec cultures opened his eyes to a story about Mexican heritage that didn’t start and end with prison, which seemed to be the default narrative in the TV shows and movies he watched growing up.

In books of all sorts, Hernandez found another narrative.

“Those books, they give you hope, especially in a situation where there is no hope,” Hernandez told Suarez on the show. “I remember going through magazines and books and they would show canyons and rivers, and what I would do every day when I would read I'd either copy them or if it was my magazine I'd rip the page out and put it in a folder, and I said, even though I’m serving life without parole, I'm going to get out one of these days and I'm going to that place. And here I am now.”