In 2019, more than 600,000 men and women were released from prisons across the United States. William “Billy” Baggett was one of them.
Like most of the others, Baggett emerged with a toxic criminal record, little to no money and few prospects of anything else. He had spent 50 of his 68 years on Earth behind bars, and he left prison for the last time in a wheelchair, HIV positive and suffering numerous debilitating health conditions. He was impoverished and unwanted, with no close family or friends. He was dying, but he was free.
The life and death of Billy Baggett
After spending most of his life in prison, Billy Baggett was released into a world he no longer understood, contending with a lifetime of trauma and coming to terms with his imminent death.
Read the full special report.
So what happens to people like Billy? What happens to the hundreds of thousands of people just like him after they are processed through our criminal justice system and returned to our communities?
That’s what we wanted to know, because like Billy, approximately 95% of the people now in state and federal prisons will be released back to society.
In this special report, Managing Editor Emily Green immersed herself into the world of an ex-prisoner. Green’s epilogue provides her personal insight into the unconventional relationship that developed out of this project.
It cannot be stated enough that this exploration is not intended to soften the horrific nature of Billy’s crimes. He killed two men. And yet there is another story to tell, one that, while tethered to those crimes, speaks more about our society at large. As much as this story began on the day Billy left prison, it really started when Billy was a child, a long, long time ago.
Billy had lower cognitive functioning. He was the product of a teen pregnancy, grew up in an abusive home and was subsequently neglected as a child. His youth was burnished on alcohol and rebellion, having been failed early on by the education system. Juvenile detention facilities became his classroom. As he neared his death, he cried as he recounted being gang raped when serving his first adult prison sentence for robbery. This was all before he drunkenly killed two men months apart when he was in his early 20s. Prisons are full of stories like Billy’s.
Billy’s reentry into society decades later continued to be filled with numerous obstacles and dead-ends. His story shows how long-term incarceration makes it a near impossibility to thrive once free. It’s a system that intensifies a downward spiral, and it seems almost a miracle when there’s an exception to that plummeting fate.
Billy died, mercifully perhaps, before the pandemic took hold. Now, nearly 10 months on, COVID-19 is surging through prisons across the country, prompting a new perspective on the service rendered by our mass carceral system. It’s too early to tell the impact of early releases, but it’s well past time we acknowledge the false perceptions about what our prison system solves and act on the problems that it causes.
The United States locks up more people per capita than any other nation — a population that is statistically less educated, poorer and less healthy than the public at large. An estimated 1 in 5 prisoners has a serious mental illness.
Once inside an American correctional facility, prisoners are offered little in the way of rehabilitation. Instead, they face violence, dehumanization, humiliation and in many cases additional psychological torture wrought from solitary confinement.
No matter how much time they serve, for many, the sentence never ends. As they exit the system, each faces extreme barriers to employment, social integration, housing and a stable life. Those instabilities often contribute to reincarceration, as it did in Billy’s case. Recently released prisoners also face a greater likelihood of homelessness — nearly 12 times that of the general public.
All of these obstacles are steeper for women and people of color, who face even more severe “prison penalties,” as the Prison Policy Initiative describes them. Prisons have always been integral to systemic racism, and today the depth of research on this and related issues makes the personal and societal damage incurred by our prison system undeniable.
There is so much wasted energy and lost potential in systems like this. Billy’s life tells that story well. It also tells the story of the network of social services and individuals who worked to reconstruct a life in the final few months he had left.
Given the intimacy of some of the details in Billy’s story, we took some special considerations in telling it.
One is our use of first person. It’s unconventional for newspaper journalists to refer to themselves in an article, but there were several instances in this story where sticking to that rule felt disingenuous. The reporter shadowing Billy was a significant presence in his final months. First person was used in several instances where using “Street Roots” instead would have downplayed that fact.
Additionally, publishing details of trauma inflicted on a vulnerable person is not something Street Roots takes lightly. From the outset of this reporting project — back when this article was intended to focus solely on reentry — Billy was eager to reveal the abuse he’d endured as a ward of the state. Slowly, records revealed he was speaking the truth, and it became clear we could not report on the end of his life without acknowledging the toll his incarceration had taken on his well-being.
Billy reviewed much of the contents of this piece with the reporter before he died. This was done for accuracy but also to ensure that he was comfortable with the level of personal details included. He did not feel pressured to reveal everything; he asked certain things be off the record, and we obliged. While some details are horrifying and others humiliating, this was his life, and he wanted the world to know.
Please take the time to walk a mile in Billy’s shoes. It is not all sad, we promise. But neither is it a sentimentalized journey. It is, however, incredibly and honestly human.