Willie Jones clutched his chest and gasped for air. Alone in his bed in one of Elite Houses of Sober Living’s facilities just south of Chicago, Jones, 56, dragged himself into the house’s common area. There he collapsed to the floor, clinging to consciousness.
When the virus spread from his housemate to Jones earlier this year, its course was swift. He began to cough in the afternoon, and by that night, he said, each breath was a battle.
“Legally, you just have to have some address where IDOC can verify and find you, in order to make it out the door,” said Phillip Whittington, corrections policy analyst at the John Howard Association, an Illinois prison watchdog group. “The vast majority of people being released, quite frankly, just have nowhere else to go,” he said.
He began selling marijuana and cocaine in and around the Robert Taylor Homes, one of Chicago’s since-demolished public housing projects on the south side, where he lived with his grandmother and two younger sisters.
Meanwhile, private capital’s infiltration of the penal system progressed, and Congress passed a series of draconian sentencing laws, lengthening mandatory minimums and establishing mandatory life sentences without parole for third-time felony offenders.
For Jones, his exposure to his girlfriend’s use sparked a slide back into addiction. For the next two decades, his life, he said, revolved around heroin. “I was staying in the streets, running around, hurting myself over and over. Then using took that pain away,” said Jones.
