Should Life Sentenced Teen Die in Prison?
Two-time Jail Author with Psych Degree has served 37 Years since he was 16
Arlando “Tray” Jones slides into a desk at Maryland’s Jessup Correctional Institution college class, 15 Georgetown University students introducing themselves to his fellow convicts rimming the room.
The youths stepped behind prison walls thanks to their law school professor, a convict advocate who wants to “humanize” the prisoners, having students pair with them to develop “prison reforms.”
As the media relations coordinator for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, I convinced my supervisors to allow the class and invite a Washington Post reporter to write about it.
As he enters the room, Jones’ ebullient spirit spills from a flashlight smile.
“Anybody ever tell you that you look like Charles Barkley?” I jab, referring to the Hall of Fame basketball legend.
Jones returns the volley.
“That’s the Republican in you,” he says.
The 53-year-old former East Baltimore drug dealer has served 37 years of a life sentence for murder, entering prison at 16.
His warm grin quickly dissolves into a cold glare when he hears his convict classmates griping to the students about the parole commission or their sentencing judge.
“Hey,” Jones shouts, jumping from his seat. “Don’t any of you tell these students you are not guilty. We’re all guilty.”
—
My goal is to show the department providing a quality college education to those in our custody.
Yet I quickly discern the professor’s intent: make martyrs of the convicts. I must redirect the story.
Jones.
Jones pairs with a 20-year-old Black student named Rashema, who grew up in in a nearby poverty-stricken Washington, D.C. neighborhood and knows about prison. Her brother sits in one.
Jones grew up fatherless. Baltimore police shot his dad to death during a robbery. Jones’ life of crime began as a kid collecting illegal lottery numbers for his grandfather from stores on his way home from elementary school.
At 16, he lived with a heroin-addicted aunt, who died of an overdose, and her neighborhood drug dealing boyfriend.
Stepping out of his house to go to high school each morning, Jones looked down at the holes in his jeans and tears in his sneakers, an empty belly.
He stared down at the corner to Eager Street, where drug dealers loitered with Cadillacs, jewels and gorgeous women draped in furs.
Which way are you going to go?
Like a factory supervisor, Jones soon earned $300 a night shoveling drugs through his East Baltimore neighborhood. Police claimed he became the “hitman” for a neighborhood drug lord named “Fat Larry.”
“A number of Black mothers and fathers curse the day I was born,” Jones wrote in his jail-penned memoir, Eager Street. “I brought such grief to their lives.”
Rashema explains the Black Lives Matter movement swelling outside the prison walls. She’s furious over increasing national reports of White police officers gunning down unarmed Black men and women.
“What about when you’re just sitting in the park and the police roll up and start harassing you for no reason?” she asks Jones.
The avowed Republican snickers.
“Young lady, if those police officers weren’t in that neighborhood,” he replies. “It would be chaos.”
—
I approach the Post reporter and, with 30 years of newspaper reporting in my back pocket, mention he should listen to Jones and Rashema to keep his piece from being a convict gripe session.
Jones is the perfect department subject. He completed his GED in prison then attained his college diploma in applied psychology before gaining the help of a former jail professor to write two books.
My plot works. The reporter asks to speak with Jones privately and I drive to Jessup to prep Jones for the interview.
His locomotive light smile leads the way into the vacant visitors room. His fat palm — “too much bread” — swallows mine in a brotherhood handshake.
Jones survives by devouring books, allowing him to scale daily the ribbons of razor wire atop prison fences. He quotes Socrates to Malcolm X, staggering me with his brilliance.
“Do you know what love is, Gerry?” he asks. “Love is giving someone the power to destroy you but trusting that they won’t.”
I scramble for a pen and paper to write it down, but no need. I’ll remember these words forever.
Jones tells me he didn’t commit the murder he was convicted of. Like a football referee, I throw the penalty flag.
“Tray,” I say. “I’ve got 19,000 convicts who say they didn’t do it.”
“This was the one I didn’t do,” he replies.
I throw my head back cackling at his honesty. He then laments the burden of being a Black man in America. I fire back.
“Others grew up in that same environment Tray but used it as motivation to succeed,” I say.
“I know,” he replies. “I made the wrong choice.”
—
All is well until I read the daily reports listing details of incidents at our 24 Maryland prisons. One claims a Jessup inmate assaulted a correctional officer.
Jones.
He was tracking state legislation he hoped would free him. When it failed, he left the phone room distraught. A correctional officer ordered him to stop but he continued, banging her shoulder.
“Assault!” she shouted.
The incident causes me a problem. Jones will be put in restrictive housing, “segregation” as we call it, “solitary confinement” as it is referred to by those believing it to be cruel and unusual punishment.
Convicts found guilty of prison infractions are locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, out for one hour of recreation, punishment that can extend for months.
“I’ve got a prayer and meditation regimen to do the time,” Jones tells me. “But segregation is torture. They didn’t even give me a book, not one book.”
Jones’ infraction, supported by a prison panel review, could wipe out my intent to show the department in a positive light. Just freed after serving over a month in isolation, Jones agrees not to discuss the matter.
When the Post interview him, Jones is as smooth as a corporate public relations man.
The Sunday magazine article is positive, despite the students ending the semester as their professor intended, wearing t-shirts proclaiming, “free my homies.”
—
Many states, including Maryland, have passed laws to reduce “mass incarceration” by freeing “non-violent low level drug offenders.”
The effort is upside down.
A landmark 2012 court case, Unger vs. Maryland, ordered the release of close to 200 convicts, who like Jones, were serving more than 30 years or a life sentence.
The court determined juries, at the time of conviction, received improper instructions.
In the first six years after the court decision, five of 188 long-term Maryland convicts returned to prison, 3 percent. The state’s last general population recidivism rate — those who return to prison within three years of release — was 40 percent.
Odds are most of the younger bucks released will return to a life of crime.
In 1995, Democratic Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening declared no Maryland lifers would be granted parole. Maryland remains one of three states in the nation where the governor has final say on parole board decisions.
“Life means life,” Glendening said.
Glendening’s “life means life” pledge stood for 20 years, maintained by two predecessors.
Releasing lifers is politically perilous. Free 100 and if just one commits a violent crime, future political aspirations disappear. The textbook example lives across the Jessup prison yard from Jones: Willie Horton.
Horton is a Massachusetts convicted murderer granted a weekend furlough in 1987. He travelled to Maryland, where he was convicted of viciously robbing a couple and raping the woman.
The following year, his picture appeared on every American television after Republican presidential candidate and vice president, George H.W. Bush, used Horton’s conviction to paint his opponent, Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, soft on crime.
Bush became president while Horton’s crime helped keep Dukakis from becoming the most powerful man on the planet.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled sentencing juveniles to life in prison without the possibility for parole unconstitutional. In April, Maryland joined 24 other states barring future teen life sentences.
—
In February, Pennsylvania released the longest serving “juvenile lifer” of the nation’s 2,000. Joe Ligon, 83, was convicted at 15 for joining pals in a Philadelphia stabbing spree, killing two people.
Ligon spent 68 years in prison before his attorney successfully argued that the American penal system, intended to punish juvenile convicts, destroys them.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling and the national momentum to reduce the numbers of those incarcerated, particularly Black convicts, more than half the nation’s lifers, I review Jones’ parole record to make a pitch for his freedom.
Yet Jones appeared before the parole commission a month earlier receiving five more years before his next hearing due to the correctional officer assault charge.
—
In 1997, Robert Richardson and his wife robbed a Louisiana bank, stealing $5,000 after a chief investor pulled his financial support from their new clothing store.
Richardson received a 60-year sentence without the possibility of parole. After 21 years, he gained governor clemency. He and his wife are now the subjects of a documentary, “Time,” petitioning states to ban life sentences without parole.
“Desperate people do desperate things,” said Sibil Fox Richardson, who received three and a half years in prison as her husband’s accomplice.
“We made the worst decision of our lives,” she added. “But we are more than the worst decision we ever made.”
Despite spending 37 years in a 7 by 10-foot cell, with a bunkmate, Jones’ buoyant spirit remains undiminished.
“When someone befriends me,” he says. “I’m going to be a better friend to you than you will ever be to me. That’s what makes me get up in the morning.”
Now living in Florida, I regularly exchange letters with Jones. I send him blocks of gold, his beloved books, and he mails me his latest memoir, Old Too Fast, Smart Too Late, about his early prison days.
During the Post jailhouse interview, the reporter asked Jones what he missed most about being incarcerated.
“A quarter pounder with cheese,” he said.
I vow to myself that I will buy Jones that sandwich.
And we’ll have fries with that.
Gerard Shields is the host of the Retail Politics Podcast and author of the new book, “The Front Row: My Jagged Journey Recording American History From Reagan to Trump.”
