An 82-Year Old Juvenile Offender
By Albert B. Kelly
If you’ve never heard of Joe Ligon, it’s because he has spent most of his life behind bars. I imagine that if there is one thing that might help give him the sense that his life was not completely wasted, it’s that his story is part of a larger narrative that might change how we handle juvenile justice going forward. When Joe Ligon walked out of prison recently, he was the oldest juvenile “lifer” in the country having spent sixty eight years in prison.
Joe Ligon began his life in prison at the age of 15 in December of 1953. Joe Ligon was no angel, he was convicted of first-degree murder after he and several other teens attacked multiple people killing two and injuring six in South Philly. They were accused of being in a gang, one that went on a crime spree that included robbery, assault, and ultimately murder.
Joe Ligon maintained throughout that while he was guilty of taking part in the robberies and assaults, he did not take a life even as the prosecution said he alone was responsible for both murders. He was given life without parole. In 2017, the Supreme Court ruled that automatic life sentences for juveniles was cruel and unusual punishment and his sentence was changed from life without to 35 years to life.
Though eligible for parole after the ruling, Joe Ligon did not apply because he did not want to be on parole with all of the conditions that attach to parole. His lawyer continued to argue that juvenile life without was unconstitutional and a District Court judge agreed ruling that the prosecution had three months to either resentence him or release him. He was released and he now begins life outside of prison at the age of 82.
I know there are people who will argue that you do the crime, you do the time. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I also know that not all time is equal- there’s black time and white time and my point is that when it comes to crime and punishment, especially involving juveniles, the discussion needs to be a lot more nuanced that many care to admit and one of the biggest obstacles to reform has been the tendency to see the crime as the only thing that is true about the offender, especially when they’re black..
In Joe Ligon’s case, he grew up in the Deep South in Alabama and dropped out of school in the third grade. Functionally illiterate when he arrived in Philadelphia with his family as a young teen, he couldn’t cut it in school and got caught up on the streets doing goodness knows what until December of 1953. This kid never stood a chance.
I am astounded to think about the time that has passed and the changes that have taken place between his arrest in 1953 and his release in 2021. The year he went into prison, Dwight Eisenhower, our thirty-fourth President, was wrestling with how to get us out of the Korean War. Civil Rights as we know it had not yet begun and no one knew the names Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr., Joe McCarthy was hunting communists.
But it’s the smaller things, the changes in the daily things of life that astound even more. It’s the changes that occurred over those years that while known, were never experienced. Whether riding in a car, using the devices of modern life, the computerizing or digitizing of just about everything, the temperament and posture of people generally and just how far removed the life of 1953 is from the life of 2021.
If it’s astounding to think about the history and the changes in society over 68 years, then what about the changes in someone’s life, someone like Joe Ligon? If we can ever get to a place where we consider that prison, especially for juvenile offenders should be as much about rehabilitation as punishment, then we have to allow for the possibility that these juvenile offenders can be rehabilitated to society’s benefit.
The Supreme Court considers life without parole for juvenile offenders’ cruel and unusual punishment for the individual and I think they’re right, yet I also believe that if we cut off all possibility of rehabilitation and redemption and simply have lives rotting behind bars like Joe Ligon’s, it becomes cruel and unusual for society whether we realize it or not.