I was sentenced to death as a child.
At 16, I was beyond redemption, according to state of Louisiana officials, who decided that whatever harm they believed I had committed could only be answered with my execution. I entered death row before I was old enough to vote, before my brain had fully formed, before I had language for what prolonged fear does to a person over time.
I had been playing basketball in a New Orleans city league when the murder happened. The main eyewitness couldn’t see without her glasses, which she wasn’t wearing that night. The investigating detective got a bad tip from a snitch trying to cut a deal, called my name into Crimestoppers to get a warrant for my arrest – and then collected thousands of dollars for his tip. None of that mattered. I was convicted and shipped off to Angola—for the next 10 years.
I survived death row. I then spent years in general population. Only much later did I come home.
That order matters. Because freedom, when it finally arrived, didn’t arrive cleanly. It didn’t erase what came before. And it didn’t come with instructions.
When I was eventually exonerated, many people assumed the hardest part was over. Innocence restored. Gates opened. Life resumed. The public assumptions tend to stop there, as if surviving something extreme automatically prepares you to live afterward.
It doesn’t.
But release without repair is not liberation. It’s displacement. I had learned how to survive incarceration. I continued in that mode even once I walked out of prison.
No one taught me how to live in freedom.
In 2005, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that sentencing juveniles to death was unconstitutional. Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that “the differences between juvenile and adult offenders are too marked and well understood to risk allowing a youthful person to receive the death penalty.” The Court finally acknowledged what science and common sense had long suggested: children are more impulsive, more susceptible to pressure, and more capable of change.
It was a landmark decision. It was also too late for me and many others caught in the tide of what’s now known as mass incarceration. I am one of millions in this struggle.
“My sons showed me patterns I didn’t know I was repeating:
rigidity passing for discipline, emotional distance mistaken for strength,
control replacing curiosity.
These weren’t deliberate choices.
They were learned behaviors, shaped by years in institutions
where autonomy was dangerous and compliance was rewarded.”
What the Roper ruling could not undo were the years already lived under the threat of execution— or the psychological architecture built during them. Prison, especially death row, is not simply a place you endure. It is a system that teaches you how to survive by narrowing yourself. Hypervigilance becomes instinct. Control feels like safety. Stillness can feel dangerous.
Even innocence doesn’t protect you from institutionalization.
After two years on death row and eight more in general population, I was governed by rigid rules, shaped by institutional time, learning how not to draw attention to myself. By the time I returned to the free world, those lessons were deeply ingrained, even if I didn’t yet know how to name them.
The changes within me showed up in small ways. In how tightly I structured my days. In how uneasy rest made me. In how control felt more dependable than trust. These habits once kept me alive. Outside, they made intimacy harder.
Then I became a husband. Twice.
Both marriages ended. Not because love was missing, but because incarceration had shaped how I gave and received it. Prison teaches emotional efficiency. Vulnerability can feel dangerous. Dependence can feel risky. Those instincts don’t disappear just because you’re legally free. Intimacy requires a softness that survival doesn’t reward.
I don’t offer this as confession. I offer it as consequence.
The costs of incarceration rippled outward—into marriages, families, and futures that were never part of the judgment but are shaped by it all the same.
I also lost friends.
Men I lived alongside — men who survived death row — did not all survive freedom. Some returned home carrying trauma without language, structure without support, pain without care. Drugs filled the space that confinement once occupied. The same system that caged us released us with little preparation for what came next. Survival skills don’t translate easily into civilian life. Not everyone makes that transition.
I am the father of seven children, including four sons. For the past nine years, I have been a single father to two of them—boys who are now 10 and 12. They have grown up watching me figure out freedom not as an idea, but as a daily practice shaped by everything that came before.
Fatherhood changed the stakes. My sons—especially the two I raise alone—became mirrors. They showed me patterns I didn’t know I was repeating: rigidity passing for discipline, emotional distance mistaken for strength, control replacing curiosity. These weren’t deliberate choices. They were learned behaviors, shaped by years in institutions where autonomy was dangerous and compliance was rewarded.
My sons were born into my freedom, but without freedom’s ease.
As a single father, I began to see how incarceration followed me into parenting. What prison demanded of me as a teenager didn’t belong in the life I wanted to model for my children.
That realization forced a difficult truth: I had been released from prison, but I hadn’t yet decarcerated myself.
As a society, we talk about decarceration mostly as a policy goal—shorter sentences, fewer prisons, smarter reform. Those efforts matter. But they’re incomplete without addressing what confinement does to a person internally. .
That understanding is what led me to the road.
Earlier this year, as I marked the 30th year since my death sentence, my sons and I left New Orleans headed for two years on the road.
Living in an RV with my children isn’t about escape. It’s about movement as a deliberate counterweight to institutionalization. I have learned that mobility disrupts the rigid mental structures incarceration builds. It interrupts institutional time—the counts, the schedules, the sameness—and replaces it with something less familiar and more demanding: choice.
Regaining my sense of freedom means lifting unnecessary boundaries for my sons. Because of the way I am still wired, I have carefully planned our trip, structuring freedom and choice into our lives. The idea is that these will become ingrained in me, just like prison once was.
So far, it seems to be working. On the road, fewer rules are imposed. More are negotiated. Homeschooling becomes an act of unlearning. We trade bells and rows for conversation and inquiry. Curiosity becomes central again, not compliance.
This may sound romantic. My hope is for repair. Because freedom can be destabilizing. Without the external structure of everyday life and all the rigidity I built up, I will be forced to confront what remains inside. To reflect.
I’ve come to call this process “decarcerating the self.”
In this uneven, nonlinear work, grief lives alongside possibility—grief for the years lost, for the friends who didn’t make it, for versions of myself that never had room to exist.
Now, unexpectedly, I have another layer of challenge: I lost a contract that I’d planned to rely on for support as we drove. I started a GoFundMe (please contribute if you can), but I am trying to maintain my sense of possibility.
I’ve also learned that the effects of institutionalization aren’t limited to prisons. Many Americans live with institutionalized minds—shaped by schools, workplaces, and systems that reward obedience over imagination. Formerly incarcerated people experience this most intensely, and with the fewest resources to address it.
I’m not taking my children on the road to teach them how to be free. Freedom, I’ve come to understand, isn’t the absence of bars. It’s the presence of agency, dignity, and the courage to live beyond survival.
The RV moves. The landscape changes. My children ask questions I can’t always answer. I’m learning how to live inside freedom without fearing it.
That, to me, is what decarcerating the self looks like.
