Death After Prison: How Freedom can be Deadlier than Prison

For almost three hours his lifeless body sat slumped against his still-running car. Though his killers had long since fled, the scavengers had not. Under an inner-city street light, they picked his pockets, ransacked his Ford Focus, and had even been so macabre as to steal the pizzas he had been there to deliver. 

With dead eyes, his bullet-riddled corpse seemed to watch it all take place around him. There he waited patiently until a random police patrol car happened by. He was a convict, one we called Stone. 

Do I have your attention?

For us, men who have done a long stretch of time incarcerated, getting out of prison is more dangerous than going in. While this may seem unimaginable to the average citizen, it's a fact we were all well aware of. 

A man being released from prison is 17.4 times more likely to die in the first two weeks than our law-abiding counterparts and even 8 times in greater mortal danger than the men we left behind inside those walls.

When a man got out, we celebrated his leaving and then held our breath once he was gone. News of a convict's death in the real world, while not the majority of cases, was still common enough that none among us were ever surprised. The longer he was locked up, the greater the odds he was on his last road. 

This phenomenon is for a host of reasons, the laziest explanation being "overdosing on drugs". People out here love that one because it just shows that we did it to ourselves. It is true though, that is one of the causes. I don't deny that. The drugs inside are so heavily cut that we simply don't have the tolerance for the purer versions available out here. 

However, that's not the doom that scares us. That's a threat we can avoid. It's the ones we can't see coming that make us paranoid. Dangers we can't plan on because we can't even fathom them.

Imagine driving a car in your 40s when you haven't been in one since you were 19 years old. It's not just learning how to get a car to move but trying to navigate a congested highway with the experience of a teenager. Many of us die in car accidents. Now apply that inexperience to everything in your life. 

We look and act like adults yet have no concept of how basic things work. I almost died of asphyxiation because I didn't understand how the burners on a gas stove work. I was in my thirties and had literally never used one before. It can even be as simple as slipping in the shower. You may laugh but our bare feet haven't touched a shower floor in years, sometimes decades. We always wore shower shoes without exception, so "slippery" didn't even occur to our sense of balance. 

Not to mention the vertigo many of us experience given we were never high up or had seen tall structures. Or how the stimuli of a mall or large store can overload our senses causing dizziness and leaving us overwhelmed. I literally had to balance myself the first time I walked into a Walmart. I immediately left as if the building were filled with toxic fumes. 

Or even something as simple as colors. I had people blaring their car horns at me because a traffic light turned green and I sat behind the wheel almost mesmerized because it felt like the most vibrant green I had ever seen in my life. While not accurate, these all feel factual in the moment. The longer we're locked up the worse this can be. Things you never consider are things we can't conceive. 

Then there's the matter of The Game itself. Not death by accident but rather death by another man's hand. Such as with my friend Stone. There's a statistic no one will ever research. Sure, they record murders, but no one records if the victim was fresh out of prison himself. Almost as if the universe is using him to select who will fill the bunk he'd recently left vacant. This is not to say that we get out and immediately dive back into our criminal ways, those guys are actually safer. They're prepared. 

It's the ones trying to leave it in our past that are caught unarmed and flat-footed. That's the thing about The Game, the criminal life, it has a long memory. That life doesn't need our participation or consent to exist. We're in the middle of it regardless. Nearly all men have no choice but to return to the neighborhoods that created us in the first place. Neighborhoods where you're a victimizer or a victim.

Stone did 18 years for a string of burglaries and one assault. He did his sentence like a man and never once pretended that his time with us was unjust or undeserved. Yet he also got to know his daughter during his time there and spoke of her often to us. He was so proud of her and considered himself so lucky she wanted him in her life. She was his inspiration to do things right. When he was released she gave him a place to go home to. She only had a couch and he was grateful. 

The same day Stone got his license his daughter's boyfriend got him a job where he worked as a pizza delivery driver. That's how I knew he was legitimate. Stone lived like an absolute king inside those walls and he knew very well how to apply that to the real world. He chose to deliver pizzas instead. For his daughter, he chose a meager life living right rather than the one he'd always known. One that lasted until he was ambushed one night. 

The police caught his killer, which they often don't, so we know how it went down. A local gang had called in a fake order for the sole purpose of giving a teenage kid the opportunity to murder someone as a prerequisite to joining their gang. A stranger whom they would've all feared at any other point in his life, shot to death from the bushes he parked next to. Dying slumped next to the car his daughter let him borrow so he could work like a regular person. Stone, who had survived unimaginable odds while living a criminal lifestyle, died a tax-paying citizen.

In this time we live in, everyone knows someone who's been locked up. If it's someone you care for or love, your concern for us during our incarceration is appreciated but it's your attention when we get out that we need. 

While Stone's fate may be an outlier, one I shamelessly used to grab your attention, the majority of us are little more than children when being released and are in danger from far less interesting threats. You don't pretend that you know how to live in there, don't fool yourself into thinking we know how to live out here. Sometimes our lives depend on it.

Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.