The castaways: how alabama’s habitual offender law threw away the least among us

Published by The Daily Beast September 6, 2020

By Beth Shelburne

Ronald McKeithen was trying to beat a clock he could not see.

He’d gathered close to 100 certificates from programs completed during his three decades in prison: meditation, anger management, visual arts. He wrote a court petition by hand, then asked a friend to type it. He needed three copies, but the prison administration charged $1 a page, money Ron didn’t have. So, he bartered with a fellow prisoner who had access to a copy machine inside the prison, paying him with a pouch of tobacco.

This petition was Ron’s one remaining avenue to freedom, and he’d heard a rumor that lawmakers might take it away. The year was 2014. Ron had been locked up for 30 years and had come to expect that the system would let him down. Every appeal he’d filed over the years had been summarily denied. “These prisons are like modern day plantations, and Alabama don’t want to let their slaves go,” Ron wrote to me in 2020, about how the system had indeed let him down. “This is how many of us feel. Guys have killed themselves and others are committing slow suicide with the things they do in here.”