His First Day Out Of Jail After 40 Years: Adjusting To Life Outside

Smartphones, the Internet, job-seeking. For prisoners released after decades behind bars, the modern world is difficult, confusing, and still better than anything ‘on the inside.’

01.03.15
Justin Rohrlich

I meet Otis J. the night he arrives at “The Castle,” a West Harlem halfway house for newly-released convicts. Sprung from prison in August after doing 40 years for attempted murder, Otis shows up with a laundry bag containing his life’s belongings. I notice he moves at a slightly slower pace than everyone else, and keeps his gestures compact. I imagine it’s partially a by-product of spending the bulk of one’s life living in a 70-square-foot cell, and partially due to the fact that in prison, sudden moves tend to get you shanked, pepper-sprayed, or both.

A kindly man with a downy white beard and a gentle manner, it’s almost as if the 69-year-old Otis somehow willed his senses into dulling down, just to survive 40 years in the flat, featureless prisons of New York State. He had resigned himself to the fact that he’d die behind bars, so he adapted. And as with anything one does for four decades, it’ll probably take a little time to undo it. The prison diet didn’t agree with him, so says he never ate much. I ask what he had for a first meal when he got out, if cravings had ever turned a cellmate into a rack of ribs or a cheesesteak like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, but he just shrugs and says he’s “not really that interested in food.”

Otis, who tells me he was called “Saladin” on the inside, has taken an almost tragically circuitous route in getting here. Denied parole nine straight times, he insists he is innocent of the crime for which he was convicted. He says he was arrested at a park on 119th Street, and the crime happened a few blocks away, at 116th & 7th, that his conviction was a case of mistaken identity. Otis says he was wearing a tan jacket similar to one described by witnesses.

Whether that’s true or not, taking responsibility for one’s crime is a crucial part of being paroled. By maintaining his innocence and refusing to admit to something he says he didn’t do, Otis fell into a catch-22 known as the “parole paradox.”

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/01/03/his-first-day-out-of-jail-after-40-years-adjusting-to-life-outside.html