Former inmate freed after decade urges youths to steer clear of prison life

At fifteen, Ricardo* went into custody after taking the life of a fellow student. When he walked out again, ten and a half years had gone by. Those years covered his adolescence, the early stretch of manhood, and any ordinary path through growing up. Even now, as he weighs what incarceration cost him, the person he harmed stays at the front of his mind.

“I lost years, but he lost everything,” he said. “That is why I don’t like talking about it too much. Somebody dead. A youth like me, somebody weh go school like me, never get to grow up. That is one of the biggest regrets of my life.”

His account lands as Jamaicans again debate what long sentences mean for people who eventually return home. Former prisoners have been sharing those feelings publicly online, among them dancehall artists Vybz Kartel and Shawn ‘Shawn Storm’ Campbell, who have described losing more than a decade of their lives behind bars. Ricardo says he knows that weight firsthand.

“Anybody weh spend years in prison know what time mean,” he told THE WEEKEND STAR. “You come out and the world different. People different. You different.”

His time began at the Rio Cobre Juvenile Correctional Centre in St Catherine. Once he turned eighteen, authorities moved him to the Tower Street Adult Correctional Centre in Kingston, widely known as GP.

“As a juvenile, you already feel lost,” he said. “But when you reach adult prison, you realise this is serious life now. You have to grow up fast and yuh affi understand where you are.”

Yet he said the harshest sentence was not the walls alone, but how confinement took over his inner life. “Prison nuh only hold you inna one likkle cell,” he said. “It hold you in yourself. And sometimes yourself is the hardest place fi stay.”

“Out here, time move and you busy. In there, time sit down beside you. Every birthday, every Christmas, every Mother’s Day, every little thing remind you say life a gwaan without you,” he said.

Dark hours brought the sharpest pain. “You can distract yourself in the daytime”. “But when night come and the place quiet, a different thing. A you, God and your conscience, and conscience nuh easy fi sleep beside.”

He warned that custody can “shrink your mind if you not careful”, leaving you to “start forget certain parts of yourself”, including how open space and everyday talk once felt.

Ricardo said he grasps why many people push for tough punishment when murder leaves families shattered. “Crime hurt people. Murder destroy family,” he said. “If it was my family member, I would feel the same way too.”

Since release, he has tried to rebuild without fanfare. He avoids conflict, keeps his company small, and talks with younger boys when the chance comes. Still, starting over with a serious conviction on record remains a uphill road.

“People tell you [to] change, but when you come out, nobody trust you,” he said. “Work hard to get. People look at you like you are still the same person. Sometimes you understand why, but it still hard.”

He does not expect pity from the wider society. What he wants is for young men to stop wearing prison like a medal. “The road will hype you up, but when you gone a prison, you alone,” he said. “The friend them gone. The girl gone. The money gone. Your mother crying. And the person you hurt, their family never recover.”

*Name changed to protect identity