Equal Justice Matters Wall (J)
Jackson, Dicky
Jackson, Timothy
Johnson, Alice
Johnson, Darrell
Jonas, Robert
Jones, Aaron
Jones, Sharanda
Anthony Jackson
ANOTHONY JACKSON
From Conway, South Carolina, Jackson has a sixth-grade education and worked as a cook. He was convicted of burglary for stealing a wallet from a Myrtle Beach hotel room in November 2011, when he was 44 years old. According to prosecutors, he woke two vacationing golfers as he entered the room and stole a wallet, then pretended to be a security guard and ran away. Police arrested him when he tried to use the stolen credit card at a pancake house. Jackson says that he did not commit the burglary but did attempt to use the stolen credit card. According to Jackson, because his court-appointed attorney failed to properly prepare for trial and did not even know the charges against him, Jackson chose to represent himself but did not understand anything during his trial. Because of prior convictions for burglary in 2006 and 2009, Jackson was sentenced to mandatory life without parole under South Carolina’s three-strikes law. He also had prior convictions for burglary and distribution of cocaine dating back to 1986, but these offenses did not impact his sentence. “I felt hurt and afraid [of ] the ending of life,” Jackson says of his sentencing. “You will think that I kill[ed] someone with that kind of time.” Jackson, who is now 46 years old and speaks weekly with his mother, a pastor, says his drug addiction motivated the crime for which he was sentenced to die in prison. When he requested substance abuse treatment while serving time for a prior burglary conviction, he reports he was denied treatment. Jackson says, “I begged them for help. They said no.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 104).
DICKY JACKSON
Jackson was born and raised on a dairy farm in Boyd, Texas. When he completed tenth grade, he left school to begin working in the trucking industry with his father. Jackson purchased his own truck when he was 27 and continued to work in the trucking industry until his incarceration. He says that he began to take speed when he was only 17 in order to stay awake during long truck routes, just as his father did. In 1988, Jackson was convicted of possession of one-half gram of methamphetamine when an undercover informant posing as a trucker asked to bum a pill from him at a Florida truck stop. In 1989, he was convicted of transporting more than one kilogram of marijuana, for which he served one year in county jail in Tylertown, Mississippi. Shortly thereafter, he lost his truck due to legal fees. While he was in jail, his two-year-old son, Cole Jackson, was diagnosed with Wiskott-Aldrich Syndrome, a rare immunodeficiency disease.
A year after his youngest son’s diagnosis, doctors determined that a bone marrow transplant was required to save his life, without which they said he would likely not live to the age of five. Jackson’s 11-year-old daughter, April Anderson, was a perfect match to serve as a bone marrow donor for her baby brother. According to Jackson, the family’s insurance company raised their monthly premium, and when an automatic deduction of their monthly fees did not clear the family’s bank account, the insurance company they had used for years terminated their coverage. Jackson says he made $20,000 a year, too much to qualify for government assistance, but too little to afford the $250,000 bone marrow transplant and other medical bills for his son’s care. Through fundraisers, the family was able to raise $50,000, not nearly enough to cover the life-saving surgery. According to Jackson, after the transplant, his son’s monthly treatments cost around $4,000, and the family remained uninsured. Owing $200,000 in medical bills and struggling to support his family and recently widowed mother, Jackson says he began driving his deceased father’s 18-wheeler truck.
Jackson transported livestock and produce from Texas to California. According to Jackson, the supplier—from whom he was purchasing small amounts of methamphetamine, which he says he took to stay awake while trucking—told him he was buying the methamphetamine in California and asked Jackson to assist with transporting the drugs back from California. He says his supplier offered to pay him well because he knew of his son’s medical expenses. He maintains he decided to utilize the family business to transport drugs to California and back in order to make the money necessary for the lifesaving surgery. He says he transported the drugs in his truck on a monthly basis for about a year.
In 1995, Jackson sold half a pound of methamphetamine to an undercover officer, and he, his younger brother Tommy, and the supplier were arrested and charged with participating in a methamphetamine conspiracy. The supplier testified against Jackson, claiming that he was the ringleader of the conspiracy, in exchange for which the supplier was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Jackson was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine, possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and possession of an unregistered firearm. The district court judge found that Jackson and his brother were responsible for 81.5 kilograms of methamphetamine and concluded that Jackson was the leader of the conspiracy. More than 40 members of the community wrote to the sentencing judge asking for leniency because of Jackson’s family’s plight. Jackson and his brother received mandatory minimum sentences of life without parole.
Jackson has been incarcerated for 17 years. His youngest son, Cole, who was only five years old and gravely ill when Jackson was incarcerated, is now 22. He says that he first understood his father’s sentence during the long drive home after visiting his father in a federal prison in Kansas, explaining, “I was about six years old and it took us so long to get there. We were driving on the way back and it hit me that he will never come home again, we’ll always have to drive to visit him, and I’ll never have a dad like my friends have.”
Jackson says he speaks with his mother, three children, and three grandchildren every two or three days. After he lost his last appeal, he says he divorced his wife of 19 years to allow her to get on with her life. He told the ACLU, “It’s like someone dying but not being put to rest, that’s what happened to my family. I would rather have had a death sentence than a life sentence. It’s just an ongoing misery for everyone…. I wish it were over, even if it meant I were dead.”
Jackson, who is 55, says he has never had a disciplinary report filed against him. He reports he has taken every drug and alcohol abuse program for which he is eligible and has not used drugs since he was incarcerated. He has completed more than 20 living skills and educational classes on business and other subjects. He volunteers as a companion for suicidal prisoners. He said, “When these guys get hopeless, I sit with them and talk to them—and this is coming from a guy who has no hope. They’ll get out in two years and I’m doing life and I’m the one talking them down.”
Jackson says that he knows he has done wrong and takes responsibility for his mistakes, but he would like “one more chance at life so I could be with my kids and grandkids.” If he were released, he says he would like to talk to youth about the dangers of drugs. His commutation petition was denied on February 28, 2013. The federal prosecutor who tried Jackson’s case wrote a letter supporting clemency for Jackson. The prosecutor, now a criminal court judge in Dallas, wrote, “I saw no indication that Mr. Jackson was violent, that he was any sort of large scale narcotics trafficker, or that he committed his crimes for any reason other than to get money to care for his gravely ill child.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 79).
*Dicky’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Obama after serving more than 21 years behind bars.
Dicky Jackson with his wife and three children, April, Jon, and Cole, shortly after he was sentenced to serve life without parole 17 years ago.
Timothy Jackson
TIMOTHY JACKSON
Jackson, who worked as a restaurant cook and had only a sixth-grade education, was addicted to drugs and says he was on drugs when he walked out of the store without paying for a $159 jacket in January 1996. A store security agent followed Jackson, who put the jacket down on a newspaper stand and tried to walk away when he realized he was being followed.
At the time, Jackson’s crime carried a two-year sentence; it now carries a six-month sentence. Instead, the court sentenced Jackson to mandatory life without parole, using a two-decades-old juvenile conviction for simple robbery (from 1979, when he was 17) and two simple car-burglary convictions (from 1986 and 1991) to sentence him as a fourth-strike offender. The Louisiana Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal initially decreased the sentence, calling it “excessive,” “inappropriate,” and “a prime example of an unjust result.” Stating that Jackson “is a petty thief, but he has not shown himself to be a violent criminal,” the court noted that he had not used a weapon when he committed the 1979 robbery, during which he took $216.
However, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled that judges may not depart from life sentences mandated by the habitual offender law except in rare instances. The life sentence was reinstated despite the objections of Judge Bernette Johnson, who wrote, “This sentence is constitutionally excessive in that it is grossly out of proportion to the seriousness of the offense.”
“I’m locked up like I killed someone. They’ve got people who killed people got less time than I did,” Jackson said. “A $159 jacket. If somebody had told me I could get life for that, I wouldn’t believe them.” His sister, Loretta Lumar, recalls of his sentencing, “When I heard ‘life,’ only thing I was thinking, [was] ‘death.’ And I just broke down crying and just ran out of the courtroom…to me, that’s death.”
Of his sentence, Jackson says, “A life sentence without parole, it take all hope from a person and their family.” Sobbing, his sister told the ACLU, “It’s like he don’t even exist no more because they took his life from him. He never been married. He don’t have no kids whatsoever. And it’s a shame to see his life is just gone to waste. I try not to think about him dying in there.” She adds, “It’s a hurting thing. It just hurts to even just talk about him.”
Jackson has served 16 years in prison. He is 52 years old and suffers from various health problems, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and blackouts. He has learned woodworking in prison and makes rocking chairs, dining sets, and grandfather clocks, all of which are sold at the Angola prison rodeo. He has earned his GED and has also participated in Alcoholics Anonymous and other self-improvement programs. Jackson reports he has an excellent disciplinary record and has achieved “trustee” status at Louisiana State Penitentiary, a classification granted to prisoners who have served at least 10 years with good conduct and are trusted to work outside the prison’s secure perimeters.
“I am much older and…I am a changed man,” Jackson says. “I would like to get out of prison at an age that I could be able to work and help myself and others.” His sister told the ACLU that she prays her brother gets a second chance: “He done paid his dues…I pray, every day, that he come home. That’s all I want to do, is see him walk through them doors upstairs. Or be here before I get off from work and just surprise me. That’s all I want. That’s all I want. I don’t want a million dollars— I want none of that. I just want to see my brother walk home.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 116).
ALICE JOHNSON
One of nine children, Johnson was born and raised in Olive Branch, Mississippi, by a family of leaders in their African-American community. Johnson married and had her first child, Tretessa, when she was only 15. Though she recalls the school board tried to force her to drop out of high school, she refused to do so and graduated with honors two years later before going on to complete some college. She says she had always worked since she was 11. She held numerous professional jobs and worked for the FedEx Corporation for 10 years, including seven in management. She went on to have four more children, later divorcing their father in 1989.
A single mother trying to raise five children with no help from her ex-husband, Johnson says she struggled financially. When she lost her job of 10 years in December 1990 due to her gambling addiction, she recalls her life began to spiral out of control. In 1991, she filed for bankruptcy and her house was foreclosed on; she says she did not know how she would be able to pay her bills. After months of unemployment, she found a job as a factory worker at a Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, but she says her wages were insufficient to support her family. She began to associate with people involved in drug dealing and says she became involved in their drug conspiracy out of desperation. Her youngest son, Cory, then died in a scooter accident at age 12 in 1992.
Johnson was arrested in 1993 and accused of participating with 15 others in a drug trafficking and money-laundering operation that transported cocaine from Houston and distributed it in Memphis from 1991 until September 1994.277 She was linked to her co-conspirators primarily through numerous unrecorded telephone calls made to and from her phone, and also through the testimony of 10 of her co-conspirators who testified against her and others to avoid prosecution or receive reduced sentences.278 At trial, she and one of her co-defendants were found to have received numerous deliveries of cocaine from Houston, directed the distribution of large quantities of cocaine in Memphis, and controlled the shipment of drug proceeds back to Houston.
Johnson says that she never personally made drug deals or sold drugs. She admits that she relayed messages and allowed others involved in the drug conspiracy to use her telephone. According to Johnson, when conspirators came to town, they called her, and she contacted her co-defendant to inform him what telephone number to use to reach them. She says she would give him coded messages such as, “Everything is straight.” Occasionally, she says she temporarily held money for her co-defendant. At the time of her arrest, she had recently purchased a commercial cleaning company franchise; she had also purchased a house, for which she structured a $26,000 down payment by purchasing three separate money orders for less than $10,000 each.
Johnson was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine, attempted possession of cocaine with intent to distribute and deliver, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and structuring a monetary transaction.280 It was her first conviction. She was sentenced to a mandatory sentence of LWOP plus 25 years in 1997. The cooperating co-defendants who testified against her received sentences ranging from probation without prison time to 10 years.
Johnson’s incarceration has been extremely difficult for her family. Her son spiraled downward without his mother and is now incarcerated himself. She says, “When I was snatched away from my son, two years later he dropped out of school. He just went crazy. There was no guidance. He started living with friends in the neighborhood; he said, ‘I just want to be in the last place that my momma left.’”281 To help pay her mother’s legal bills, her eldest daughter, Tretessa, took on a second job, extra student loans, and an extra car loan.
Johnson is 58 and has served 16 years of her life-without-parole sentence. She says of her sentence, “It feels like I am sitting on death row. Unless things change, I will never go home alive.”282 According to Johnson, a close family member recently told her, “Visiting you in prison is like going to a grave site. We can go to the place where your body is located, but we can never take you back home again.”
Tretessa says of her mother’s sentence, “There is no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s like a waking death, it’s like the person is alive but they’re not. They’re not there; you can talk to them, but they’re not there. There’s never a point of closure, ever. Never. It never ends. It never stops. And this is life for you. It’s heartbreaking for me.”284 She adds, “You can’t get closure, because it’s not like someone died. I feel bad saying this, but it would have been easier if she had died.”
Tretessa says of her maternal grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s, “She went through a really, really hard time. She would call me upset and crying quite a bit. My grandmother was so deeply upset about my mom’s incarceration, and it’s like her mind shut down. I wonder if her mind just wanted to forget. She doesn’t even remember who my mom is now. It’s like a protective thing. It’s ironic she was in so much pain and she got this forgetting disease. She cried more than my mother did, and my mother was the one in jail.”
Tretessa says of her maternal grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s, “She went through a really, really hard time. She would call me upset and crying quite a bit. My grandmother was so deeply upset about my mom’s incarceration, and it’s like her mind shut down. I wonder if her mind just wanted to forget. She doesn’t even remember who my mom is now. It’s like a protective thing. It’s ironic she was in so much pain and she got this forgetting disease. She cried more than my mother did, and my mother was the one in jail.”
Johnson reports she has maintained a clean disciplinary record throughout her imprisonment. She became a hospice volunteer to help sick and dying prisoners, helped coordinate the prison’s Special Olympics event for inmates with disabilities, tutored other prisoners to help them obtain their GEDs, and served as a mentor with the prison’s Choosing Healthy Alternatives and New Growth Experiences program. She has taken numerous educational and vocational training programs, including clerical and computer skills courses, Spanish language classes, and self-help programs. She has held jobs with the prison’s business office, hospital, chapel, and food service administration. She has written and directed many plays, including a 100-person play about Jesus Christ that has been performed annually for the past decade, and directs her prison’s Protestant praise dance ministry. While incarcerated, she has also been ordained by proxy as a minister. She says, “Even though I have had no out-date, I have still worked toward bettering myself and preparing for a future outside of prison.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 56).
*Alice’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Trump after serving more than 21 years behind bars.
Alice Johnson with her living children and grandchildren.
Darrell Johnson
DARRELL JOHNSON
According to Johnson, a self-described crack addict who worked at Popeye’s, he was approached by an undercover officer about purchasing cocaine and referred her to someone who sold her two crack rocks. He says he never sold the officer anything himself. He was convicted of distribution of cocaine in 1998, when he was 34 years old. He was initially sentenced to seven-and-a-half years but was subsequently sentenced to LWOP under Louisiana’s three-strikes law, because of prior convictions for simple burglary of a vehicle in 1991 and possession of cocaine in 1988.889 Johnson recalls of his sentencing, “It felt like my life was sucked right out of me.”890 When he began serving his sentence at Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, he reports he continued to struggle with drug addiction. He says, “Words cannot explain the heartaches I have endured being in Angola because of my drug addiction.”891 Now 49, he has been incarcerated for 15 years, during which he has completed substance abuse, anger management, and faith-based programs. Johnson is presently studying for his GED, as he had only completed the eighth grade prior to his incarceration. “It feels as if there is no hope or life for you whatsoever,” he said of his sentence. “I would like a chance to prove myself to the world.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 132).
ROBERT JONAS
Jonas had one prior conviction, for sale of one kilogram of cocaine in 1985, at age 46, for which he served five years in prison.
Jonas says he has struggled since 1963, when, at age 25, he was wrongly diagnosed with cancer. The misdiagnosis led to unnecessary surgeries and radiation treatment that has left him, in his words, “‘half-sick’ ever since.” After graduating from college in 1966, Jonas gradually descended into alcoholism. He began a career as an accountant and, after receiving treatment, quit drinking alcohol for good in December 1982.
Around this time, Jonas became involved in marijuana smuggling. In early 1991, under suspicion that Jonas and others were tied to the Cali drug cartel of Colombia, customs agents set up a reverse sting operation in which agents and two confidential informants transported 7,000 pounds of marijuana and 4,700 pounds of cocaine from Colombia to New Jersey in exchange for $9 million. On May 30, 1991, Jonas and three other men who were also targeted were arrested after driving to the pre-arranged site for the drug sale at a Comfort Inn in Elizabeth, New Jersey. The court found that Jonas and one of his alleged co-conspirators, Eduardo Mantilla, were the ringleaders behind the largest cocaine and marijuana importation scheme in New Jersey history and sentenced both men to LWOP. At trial, Jonas asserted that he was a mere “go-betweener” in an international drug conspiracy. According to Jonas, he was a low-level employee, primarily keeping accounting records, and he never possessed a weapon or did his own drug deal. He has taken responsibility for helping to set up the deal, but said that “the crime could not have happened but for the government and their agents provocateurs.” According to Jonas, the confidential informants were paid $400,000 and $250,000, respectively, for their roles in the operation.
Jonas has served 22 years in prison and is now 75. In his spare time, he helps other prisoners with their studies and teaches accounting. Jonas says he enjoys reading, playing the trumpet, solving puzzles, and taming wild cats. He has been written up for a single disciplinary infraction: keeping a cat in his cell. If released from prison, Jonas would “go home and adopt a few cats.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 176).
Robert Jonas in a photo taken in 2005.
Aaron Jones with his daughter, Joy Jones, whom he describes as “the apple of my eyes.”
AARON JONES
An electrician, Jones was working on renovating a motel in Kissimmee, Florida, in April 1999. According to Jones, he shared an employer-provided apartment with two other workers, one of whom had a truck that was used as a company vehicle by all the co-workers, and Jones decided to use it to drive home to Louisiana and visit his wife and four children. Jones’s co-worker woke up to find his truck missing and reported it stolen. Jones, who is Black, was subsequently found driving the truck by police, who pulled him over for driving through a stop sign. He was sentenced to mandatory LWOP as a fourth felony offender at age 34 because of prior convictions for issuing worthless checks in 1995, negligent homicide in 1989, and armed robbery in 1982. After he served two years in prison for the negligent homicide conviction, which stemmed from a knife fight outside of a bar during which Jones unintentionally killed his attacker, he had turned his life around. He earned an electrical technician degree, married, became an ordained reverend, and founded the Perfect Love Outreach Ministry. Now 49 years old, Jones has been incarcerated for 14 years. He says of his sentence, “You are just waiting for your number to be called, to heaven or hell.”
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 131).
PERCY JONES
In September 2006, Jones was found driving the Harvest Time Fellowship Church’s stolen van, which bore the church’s logo and had been stolen four days earlier. Jones claimed that he had gotten the van from a friend. After a one-day trial, he was found guilty of possession of a stolen vehicle worth more than $500. He was initially sentenced to 10 years in prison but was subsequently sentenced to life without parole as a fourth-strike felony offender in December 2007. Jones had pleaded guilty to the three predicate convictions used to sentence him to LWOP: attempted possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in 1996, theft in 1996, and manslaughter in 1997. He also had a prior conviction for attempted simple burglary in 1987. Jones, who is Black, is now 44 years old.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 122).
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Sharanda Jones (right) and her daughter, Clenesha Garland. Now 22, Clenesha was nine years old when her mother was incarcerated.
SHARANDA JONES
Sharanda Jones’s mother raised her family of five on a limited income in the small, rural town of Terrell, Texas. When Jones was only three years old, her mother was injured in a car accident that left her paralyzed from the neck down. Due to her mother’s severe health condition, from a young age Jones cared and provided for her siblings and paraplegic mother. Jones says she grew up in poverty and continued to face financial difficulties as she tried to support herself and her family. She worked as a licensed cosmetologist and later opened a restaurant with a friend.
Jones was arrested as part of a drug task force operation in Terrell, a majority white town (55 percent white, 32 percent Black) of approximately 13,500 people located 40 miles east of Dallas. A couple in Terrell was arrested on drug charges and became confidential informants, which triggered a larger investigation in the small town. All 105 people arrested as part of the conspiracy were Black. At the time of the operation, actor Chuck Norris was reportedly a volunteer police officer for the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Department and participated in some of the arrests.
The couple that was first to be arrested was friendly with Jones. While acting as government informants after their arrests, they asked Jones during a taped telephone call if she knew where they could buy drugs. According to evidence presented at trial, Jones in turn responded that she might know someone she could introduce them to so that they could buy drugs.
Jones was indicted and voluntarily surrendered to police in April 1999; at the time, she was 32 years old and raising her eight-year-old daughter. She had never been arrested before. She was eventually indicted on seven counts of drug distribution. In August 1999, she was acquitted on six counts of crack cocaine possession and found guilty of one count of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. There was no physical evidence presented at trial that connected her to drug trafficking with her five co-conspirators; no producible amount of drugs, video surveillance, or any other physical evidence. Other than the taped phone call, the allegations were based entirely on the testimony of co-conspirators.
Prosecutors claimed that Jones drove to Houston on several occasions to meet a supplier (one of the testifying co-conspirators), from whom she bought 30 kilograms of cocaine powder, which was never found by police, over time; she then drove to Dallas and sold it to two buyers, also testifying co-conspirators, who would turn the powder into crack and sell it. Each of these co-conspirators testified against Jones in exchange for reduced sentences, pleaded guilty, and is now out of prison. Notably, Jones’s supplier was sentenced to 19 years and released from prison in 2008. The trial court concluded that Jones had sold cocaine to the two buyers, who converted the powder cocaine into crack before selling it to others. The court also found that some of the the crack was sold out of Jones’s mother’s home.
Jones’s sister, mother, brother, and stepfather were also arrested. Her paraplegic mother, Genice Stribling, went to trial and was sentenced to 15 years in prison for selling crack out of her own home. Genice was incarcerated in the same facility as her daughter until her death in prison in late December, 2012, one year before she was to be released. Jones’s brother, who had a prior record, received an 18-year sentence and is still incarcerated. The charges against her stepfather were dismissed.
Even though Jones had no criminal record, she was sentenced to mandatory life without parole in November 1999. To arrive at Jones’s base offense level for sentencing purposes, the judge took the 30 kilograms of powder cocaine alleged by the co-conspirators and multiplied it by an arbitrary ratio to hold her accountable for a large quantity of crack cocaine because the conspiracy’s end product was crack. The judge then enhanced Jones’s offense level based on her managerial role; possession of a firearm (Jones was licensed to carry a firearm in Texas); and obstruction of justice for testifying in her own defense (the judge found that the jury, by virtue of it’s guilty verdict, had found implicitly that her testimony under oath was false). Jones says of her sentencing, “It was devastating and shocking to me, my body was silent and numb – I couldn’t respond I was so shocked.”
Jones has exhausted all of her appeals and has a petition for commutation pending. According to her attorney, if she had been convicted of the same amount of powder cocaine instead of crack cocaine, her mandatory minimum sentence would have been 30 years. However, she is not eligible for a sentence reduction based on sentencing reforms that have reduced the disparity in federal sentencing between crack and powder cocaine. Jones says of her sentence, “I will expire in the federal system. It is really a slow death.”
Jones has been incarcerated for more than 14 years. She is 45, and her daughter, Clenesha Garland, is 22. Even though Clenesha was only nine when her mother went to prison, the two remain very close and Clenesha calls the eight years she spent living with her mother “a definite gift from God.” She visits her mother at least once a month and corresponds with her weekly. Jones says she carefully apportions her allotted 300 monthly minutes for non-legal calls to speak with her daughter for 10 minutes each day.
Jones said of her daughter, “My sister brings her to visit, and every time she comes it’s hard. I see her like once a month. And to see her grow from a little bitty baby to almost a grown woman, it’s just like, God. My dream is to just show up at her school. I mean, I know they gave me life, but I can’t imagine not being at her graduation. I just can’t imagine me not being there.” She told the ACLU of her daughter, “She didn’t even want to graduate because I couldn’t be there to watch her walk across the stage. I told her to do it anyway and imagine I’m there in the audience…I told her pick your spot, look at that seat, and say that’s me sitting there.”
“I miss my mother dearly. Even as a young adult it is very difficult for me to fight back my emotions during visits and phone calls with my mother,” Clenesha says. “Being without my mother for over 14 years of my life has been extremely difficult. But the thought that she is set to spend the rest of her life in prison as a first-time nonviolent offender is absolutely devastating. All I pray for every day is the blessing of being able to spend my life with my mother outside of prison walls.
While in prison, Jones has taken numerous courses related to personal development and self-improvement. She says, “When I first came to prison I told myself, ‘You can be bitter or you can be better.'” Accordingly, she has taken dozens of educational and vocational training courses such as data entry, typing, math, grammar, banking, filing, and office technician training. She has completed courses on building self esteem, health, and parenting. She also took a six-month cosmetologist instructors’ program in order to help other inmates with an interest in cosmetology, and she has helped train numerous inmates who subsequently obtained their cosmetology licenses. She also actively participated in the SHARE program, a program for at-risk teenage girls aimed at deterring them from a life of crime. She recently completed at 18-month faith-based program through which she has completed community service, participated in activities to help bring reconciliation to the community, and established re-entry goals and action steps, even though her sentence means she will not have a chance to prove that she can reach her re-entry goals.
In her more than 14 years of incarceration, Jones has maintained a spotless disciplinary record with the exception of a single disciplinary violation dated more than 10 years ago when one of her visitors was involved in a verbal altercation with a corrections officer regarding coins that were lost in a vending machine. In addition, Jones has maintained continuous employment throughout her incarceration; she previously worked in food service and laundry, and for the past ten years she has provided hair care for inmates in the maximum security and hospital units. If she is released, Jones says she wants to work with children and adults and use her struggles and the lessons she has learned about the consequences of drugs and crime to deter others.
Click here to view original ACLU article (Page 41).
*Sharanda’s sentence was ultimately commuted by President Obama.