Otis Johnson stepped into Times Square in 2014 and felt as though he had landed somewhere unreal. The crowds moved quickly, faces fixed forward, thin white wires trailing from their ears. To Johnson, who had last seen the outside world in the mid-1970s, it looked less like New York than a scene from espionage fiction. He wondered, half-seriously, whether everyone had become a secret agent. Johnson had been almost entirely cut off from society since 1975. Arrested at 25 for the attempted murder of a police officer, a charge he has consistently denied, he was handed a 25-to-life sentence that ultimately kept him incarcerated for 44 years. When he walked free in August 2014, he was 69. His release had been delayed by a further eight months because of a juvenile shoplifting charge dating back to when he was 17. Freedom arrived abruptly and with little ceremony. Johnson was given an ID card, paperwork detailing his case history, two bus tickets and $40, then sent on his way. With no surviving family ties, he relied on the Fortune Society, a Harlem-based nonprofit that supports people leaving prison, for housing and basic assistance, as documented in a contemporaneous report by Al Jazeera. The scale of the adjustment was immediate. Johnson had left a world of rotary phones, payphones on street corners and shop windows that showed nothing more than reflections. Now the windows themselves moved. He stared at the digital billboards rolling across Times Square and laughed in disbelief. He had never seen video playing on glass. “On the windows?!” he exclaimed in the Al Jazeera film. “We ain’t seen nothing on no windows but people walking by, not no video.” The people fascinated him as much as the technology. Many appeared to be talking to themselves, eyes fixed ahead, fingers tapping small rectangles in their hands. Only after looking closer did he realise the wires ran from their ears to devices in their pockets. “iPhones they call them or something like that?” he said, trying out the unfamiliar word. In the 1960s and 1970s, he remembered, only intelligence agents wore earpieces. That was the frame of reference he had. Everyday routines were equally disorienting. Supermarkets seemed overwhelming, stocked with an abundance he had never encountered. He was startled by peanut butter and jelly sold together in the same jar, by shelves of brightly coloured sports drinks, by the sheer number of choices. Even payphones confused him at first. When he went to make a call and saw a $1 price displayed, he assumed it was a mistake; the last time he had used one, it cost 25 cents. Only later did he realise most people no longer used them at all.Johnson’s experience places him among a small group. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 3,900 people were released from US state prisons in 2013 after serving 20 years or more, accounting for less than 0.7 percent of all releases that year. For those who have spent most of their adult lives inside, the challenge is not limited to learning new technologies but extends to relearning how to make choices at all.That dynamic has been closely studied by Marieke Liem, a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School who has interviewed people released after decades behind bars. She has pointed to a shortage of resources for those leaving prison after long sentences and to the cumulative effects of institutional life. From learning to use public transport and opening a bank account to making basic decisions about food or daily schedules, she notes that many struggle because so much agency has been stripped away over time. “Prison decides when lights go on and when they go off,” Liem said. “Every moment of the day is scheduled. When you have been in the prison system the majority of your life, how can you be expected to function as a member of society? And make a plan?”
Yet Johnson’s reflections, captured near the end of the Al Jazeera film as he sat quietly in Central Park, were strikingly measured. He spoke about letting go of anger, about refusing the idea that society owed him something in return for the years he had lost. Holding on to resentment, he said, would only “stagnate your growth and development”. Survival, for him, meant facing forward rather than reliving what could not be changed.
