The Fast and Furious star and Seven Bucks Productions have teamed up with HBO and 44 Blue Productions for a new documentary, Rock and a Hard Place. The HBO special follows 38 incarcerated young people who are granted a second chance: the opportunity to trade an extensive prison sentence for a fresh start by completing the Miami-Dade County Corrections & Rehabilitation Boot Camp. It’s a form of “rehabilitation/punishment,” as shown in Yahoo Celebrity’s exclusive first look at the trailer.
While seven out of 10 inmates normally return to prison within three years of being released, the Miami-Dade boot camp’s success rate is unprecedented. In the program, drill sergeants push inmates to their limits, encouraging them to learn from their mistakes and become constructive members of society who are substantially less likely to return to prison.
“I know this boot-camp program, I believe in it, and I want the world to see the importance of this program,” Johnson, an executive producer of the documentary, tells the inmates. “So you’re probably thinking right now, ‘What have I gotten myself into?’ When I was your age, I was getting in trouble, started getting arrested. I know what it’s like.”
The 44-year-old actor has been vocal about his experiences with the law as a teenager, which helped inspire the special.
“I know what that’s like. At 14, when I started training, at 14 is when I also started getting arrested — for fighting, theft, all kinds of stupid s*** that I shouldn’t have been doing,” Johnson told Muscle and Fitness in 2014. “I got arrested eight or nine times, I think, by the time I was 17.”
On social media, the Rock has often addressed his humble beginnings.
“I always keep those moments that were defining for me in my past and challenged me in my past — from getting evicted out of my apartment when I was 14 years old, to being cut from the CFL and only having seven bucks in my pocket, to bouts with depression — I keep moments like that very close to me because it continues to be great motivators for me,” he told Muscle and Fitness magazine. “I didn’t have doors of opportunity.”
Johnson continues to use his success to create doors of opportunities for others. Johnson and Seven Bucks Production’s project, Rock and a Hard Place, will debut on HBO on Monday, March 27, at 10 p.m.
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