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Updated: Nov. 27, 2019
This week’s image comes from the Oct. 28, 2019 article “Leaving Prison at 72.” The photo didn’t include any caption, but the article tells the story of what’s going in on this picture. It begins:
In the pink-walled dormitory of the Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women, nearly all of the inmates had risen before dawn. Some sat on one another’s beds, applying makeup and sipping instant coffee. Geneva Cooley sat alone, having just put on her white uniform for the last time.
For nearly two decades, Ms. Cooley, 72, had assumed she would die in prison. She had been sentenced to life without parole on a slew of drug-related convictions, at a time when drug charges carried that stiff mandatory minimum.
She had accepted her fate. She got her own drug addiction in check, took some two dozen classes and eventually earned a place in the so-called “faith and honor” pink-walled dorm.
As she adjusted to the rhythms of life inside Tutwiler, a new normalcy took hold.
She crocheted and watched the news. And the women around her — many of whom had been convicted of violent crimes, including the rape, torture and murder of a teenage girl — eventually became her friends, people with whom she watched “The Young and the Restless.”
Outside the prison’s walls, an evolution in the criminal justice system was taking shape. Activists had gained momentum across the country as they argued that life sentences without parole for nonviolent drug-related charges were unjust.
In Alabama — where the state’s prisons are overcrowded, understaffed and, according to a federal investigation this year, have “a high level of violence” — lawmakers last year reduced mandatory minimums to include the possibility of parole, motivated in part by the reality that lifetime care for inmates is costly.
Last year, lawyers approached Ms. Cooley and said they wanted to take on her case. They argued that her sentence violated the Eighth Amendment, which protects people from unfair and cruel punishment. The district attorney did not oppose their claim for relief, and a judge reduced her sentence to life with the possibility of parole, which she was granted.
But Ms. Cooley would not let herself believe she would be freed, not until she actually walked out of the prison’s doors. As she waited on that last morning in early October, she could not restrain how eager, but also how anxious, she felt about returning to a world, and family, she had not seen in 17 years.
You can see a photo essay and read more about Geneva Cooley’s story in the original article.
