Hub and spoke.

Audio collective.

This is Rumble Strip, I'm Erica Heilman.

So we are sitting at the Motel 6 in Colchester.

When did you get out?

22nd, 16 days ago.

And they released me with promises that I never got,

but I'm not going to hold that against them because I'm going to commit to crime.

But I ain't seen nothing yet.

That's T.O.

He got out of prison in Rutland a couple weeks ago after a six-and-a-half-year prison bid.

I met T.O. through my private investigator friend Susan Randall. He had been a client of hers in a federal

public defender case. When I first met him, it was 2017, and it was May, and Susan and Tio were

having lunch in Burlington, and they asked me if I wanted to come.

He had just finished a six-year bid, and he'd just gotten out a couple days before.

And after lunch, he and I drove down to a parking lot near the lake in Burlington

and talked in my car about what it was like to start over after six years with nothing.

In the year after that interview, Tio found

housing. He had a job. He enrolled in the Community College of Vermont. Then he went back to

jail for a short time. I'm not sure why. Tio has been in and out of jail his whole adult life,

and before that he was in Spofford, a juvenile detention center in the

Bronx. He's been in for drugs, for possession of a stolen pistol, for assaults. So it's become a

...