Lifestyle
Hes looking forward to a better everything
Locked up at age 15, Joe Ligon became the nations longest-serving juvenile lifer. Now, at 83, hes finally free and reentering an unfamiliar world.
By
Karen Heller
Photos by Michael S. Williamson
FEBRUARY 19, 2021
PHILADELPHIA On a snow-flecked morning earlier this month, Joe Ligon stepped from his lawyers car, his gait deliberate yet steady, his hair as white as down. A few hours before, he had eaten a breakfast of pancakes, two bowls of cereal, no milk, his final meal in prison.
This is no sad day for me, he said. Feel real good. Like a dream come true. I anticipated this from Day One. ... What was Ligon looking forward to? A better everything.
The son of Alabama sharecroppers, Ligon entered prison when Dwight D. Eisenhower was president. During the 68 years he spent incarcerated in a half-dozen penal institutions, the world outside moved on. At the one-day trial in 1953, Ligon and his co-defendants were referred to as colored. At school, his special-education classes were designated for the orthogenically backward. He was incarcerated in a facility named the Pennsylvania Institution for Defective Delinquents, the inmates classified by the courts as mentally defective with criminal tendencies.
Ligon, 83, has never had his own place, paid a bill, cast a ballot, earned the minimum wage, lived with a partner, fathered children. ... While he was locked up, almost all of his family died; many of the men were murdered. A sister, some nieces and nephews are all he has left. This was his central sadness: It would have been much better if I had come out when my parents were still alive, he said.
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