appeal and no credible basis to complain about the conviction or sentence—and was
permitted to withdraw from representing Joe. Joe, just one year into his own adolescence,
was sent to adult prison, where an eighteen-year nightmare began. In prison, he was
repeatedly raped and sexually assaulted. He attempted suicide on multiple occasions. He
developed multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced him into a wheelchair. Doctors later
concluded that his neurological disorder might have been triggered by trauma in prison.
Another inmate housed with Joe wrote to us and described him as disabled, horribly
mistreated, and wrongfully condemned to die in prison for a non-homicide crime at thirteen.
In 2007 , we wrote to Joe and discovered that he had no legal assistance and had spent the
previous eighteen years in prison with no one to help him challenge his conviction or
sentence. When I received Joe’s response to my letter, a scribbled note in the handwriting of
a child, he could still only read at a third-grade level, despite the fact that he was thirty-one.
He told me in his letter that he was “okay.” Then he wrote, “If I didn’t do anything, shouldn’t
I be able to go home now? Mr. Bryan, if this is true, can you please write me back and come
get me?”
I wrote to Joe that we would look deeper into his case and that we were convinced that he
had a credible claim of innocence. We attempted to prove his innocence through a motion for
DNA testing, but because the state had destroyed the relevant biological evidence, the motion
was denied. Disheartened, we decided to challenge Joe’s death-in-prison sentence as
unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment.
I drove from Montgomery through South Alabama to Florida and then along a tangle of
wooded back roads to get to the Santa Rosa Correctional Facility in the town of Milton to
meet Joe for the first time. Santa Rosa County borders the Gulf of Mexico at the western end
of the Florida Panhandle and had long been known for agriculture. Between 1980 and 2000 ,
the county’s population doubled in size as the coastal areas attracted beach homes and resort
properties. Many affluent families left Pensacola for Santa Rosa County, and military families
from nearby Eglin Air Force Base settled there. But there was another industry in town—
incarceration.
The Florida Department of Corrections built the prison to house 1 , 600 people in the 1990 s,
when America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between
1990 and 2005 , a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and
the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison
construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying
state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any
problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug
addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders,
managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from
legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money
been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new
crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the
last twenty-five years in the United States.
When I arrived at Santa Rosa, I didn’t encounter any staff who were people of color,
although 70 percent of the men incarcerated there were black or brown. This was a bit