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This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

This next story is about a friend of mine.

We're close in age, but have little else in common. Mitchell Rutledge, aka Big Mitch, was born black and poor in Georgia. I was born kind of brown and middle

class in New Jersey. He never met his father. I still talked to my 94-year-old father every week.

He dropped out of high school in his early teens and was illiterate into his early 20s.

I was surrounded by books growing up and finished graduate school in my early 30s.

Big Mitch spent the last 44 years of his life in Alabama prisons for killing a man. But this is not a story

about an innocent man sentenced to prison for a crime he didn't commit. Big Mitch never denied the

crime or made excuses for it. This is the story of my friend's spiritual transformation while serving his life sentence.

It's also about a friendship only God could have engineered, a friendship that began with a single

Sunday morning call. Through these weekly conversations, I hope you come to know and love him

as much as I do.

Here's our conversation on March 10th, 2024, where Mitch begins by setting the scene for an original poem he later shares with us called Den of Jackals.

He compares prison life to living in a Den of Jackals.

Everyone is out to get someone else.

No one can be trusted.

...