Life After Prison

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2021

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a kid, Jonathan was good at soccer and making friends. But by the age of eighteen, he was a drug dealer facing his first serious conviction. For his third conviction, although the charges were for nonviolent offenses, he received a twenty-one-year prison sentence. In 2019, after serving seventeen years, he was released under the First Step Act, a bipartisan prison-reform bill that has helped to reduce the sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine for some federal prisoners. In total, Jonathan has spent twenty-five years behind bars. Now, as a middle-aged former felon, he faces a world full of hazards and struggles with the unintended consequences of a long sentence. (Jonathan’s real name has been withheld, in order to protect his family’s privacy.) Also, David Remnick speaks with Kai Wright, the host of WNYC’s “The United States of Anxiety,” about long prison sentences and how the goal of incarceration has shifted from “correction” to warehousing people for as long as possible. This podcast was originally released on January 17, 2020.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:13.7	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:17.1	It's been over a decade since Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow, became a bestseller.
0:23.0	The book identified mass incarceration not as a good solution to crime, but as part of a much larger problem.
0:30.0	People concerned about social justice and people concerned about the size of government, both started to pay attention.
0:37.2	As public sentiment has shifted, reform has come in fits and starts.
0:41.8	For example, in 2018, Florida restored voting rights to former felons in a referendum.
0:48.2	But the following year, the state legislature undermined that right.
0:52.9	The biggest piece of federal legislation in the last few years has been the First Step Act,
0:58.4	a bipartisan bill signed by President Trump that released some 3,000 people from prison
1:03.7	and reduced sentences for many others.
1:07.0	One of the people released under the First Step Act is a man we're going to call Jonathan.
1:12.2	Our producer, Kalalia, started meeting with him shortly after he got out.
1:16.7	This piece originally aired in January 2020.
1:22.4	Jonathan was released from a federal prison in Orlando.
1:26.1	He caught a bus to New York where his mother is living.
1:29.4	Before getting on, Jonathan bought his first smartphone.
1:34.0	When I got on the bus, I went to the back of the bus, and I got the phone, and I ordered
1:40.5	the last Avenger movie.
1:43.5	And as long as there are those that remember what was, there will always be those that are unable to accept what can be.
1:52.0	And I was watching it, and that's how I kind of collapsed my time like I was in a cell.
1:58.0	I got in the corner and watched that movie. Because now I know what I must do.
	...

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