Life After Life

Thousands were locked up for crimes they committed as teens. The Supreme Court has given them a chance at freedom. Now comes the hard part.

- Samantha Michaels

ON THE MORNING of his 47th birthday, his first outside prison in three decades, Antonio Espree wakes up around 5 a.m. It’s a cool February day in Phoenix, still dark outside, and his cousin Marlon Bailey is asleep on a bed about an arm’s reach away. Their bedroom has little space for anything but their mattresses, so Espree slips quietly out and heads up to the roof to watch the sunrise.

In the kitchen later, after he pours himself a bowl of cereal, his phone rings. An acquaintance who volunteers at a nearby women’s prison wants advice on how to support an inmate named Tasha Finley, who is about to be released after spending more than two decades incarcerated for a murder she committed as a teen. Soon she’ll live in a halfway house. “She’s like a baby all over again,” Espree tells the caller. “You have to be there to make sure she understands, and if she don’t understand, you kinda guide her. It’s real; there’s still shit I don’t know.”

When Espree was 16, he fatally shot an innocent bystander during a drug turf war near Detroit. The state sent him to die in prison. But in April 2017, he was paroled thanks to a series of Supreme Court decisions arguing that because their brains were not fully developed at the time of their crimes, kids should face more lenient sentences than adult perpetrators. The rulings, which took place between 2010 and 2016, have banned mandatory life without- parole sentences for teenagers, giving thousands of juvenile lifers around the country the chance of release.