‘Prison kind of changed my mentality’
Ex-inmates rebuilding lives on outside after being locked up for years
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. – At 13 years old, Joe Sullivan was told he would die in prison.
The then-teenager’s life came crashing down around him after he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for robbing and sexually assaulting a woman with a group of friends.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” said the 48-year-old Sullivan, who has a documented mental disability, in an attempt to console his mother while she cried at his sentencing hearing. “I’ll be free real soon.”
And after a lengthy appeal that made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – a ruling that later set precedent for all juveniles facing similar – Sullivan got a reprieve from a life behind bars, being freed 28 years later.
But not before being scarred by Florida’s state prison system.
Statewide statistics show that more and more children across Florida are being thrown into the adult criminal justice system each year. According to the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice’s Delinquency Profile, 798 juveniles were arrested and treated as an adult at least once in 2022-2023, up from 769 in 2021-2022.
Children can enter the adult system either by a judicial waiver, which is when a child starts in the juvenile system then is transferred to the adult system, or is “direct filed” by prosecutors, meaning their case is heard in adult court from the start.
“It is something that is pervasive in our community right now,” said Jessica Yeary, the elected public defender for the Second Judicial Circuit.
Typically, children in adult prisons are locked away in solitary confinement until they turn 18 as a means to protect them from other inmates. But while being housed separately may sound safer, it is severely restricting and mentally detrimental, Yeary said.
Every time Sullivan rolls up his sleeves, the scars lining his forearms from when he cut himself “trying to get away” serve as reminders of the darker years he lived through.
Punishment vs. rehabilitation
Children sometimes make decisions based on a lack of maturity, Yeary said, but the goal of the system can’t be to ingrain in children’s minds that they aren’t good for anything other than spending their life in a cell.
The juvenile system is supposed to be rehabilitative through counseling and programming, she said. But the adult system is punitive in nature, and the goal is punishment.
“They’re just so much more vulnerable and susceptible to the harsh reality of incarceration,” she said.
Locking up a child increases the chance of delinquent behavior. In fact, Yeary said, children filtered through the adult system are 34% more likely to end up back in prison with more violent offenses than those prosecuted in the juvenile system.
In Florida, the state attorney has sole discretion over whether the child will be directly filed into the adult system or retake main in the juvenile system.
“So we do our part to very much advocate for children in this way to acknowledge the harsh reality of the adult system and to advocate for the trauma that they’ve gone through, the adverse childhood experiences in their lives,” she said.
‘I am a vessel’
During his trial, Sullivan took responsibility for his role in the robbery, but his attorneys argued his innocence in the assault, saying his friends also involved in the crime were the ones who committed the assault and pinned it on Sullivan.
But a six-person jury decided in a day he was guilty on all counts.
From that point on, life would never be the same, as prison slowly drained his physical and mental well being. Sullivan saw violent beatings, stabbings and even murders in prison, each one leaving a lasting impression.
And over time, Sullivan developed multiple sclerosis that doctors attributed to the trauma of prison and the wrong prescription of anxiety medications, eventually leaving him bound to a wheelchair.
At his lowest points, Sullivan tried to his life by cutting himself and hanging himself. But with every failed attempt, Sullivan said he heard God speaking to him: “That’s not going to work.”
In 2009, it all changed. The high court agreed to hear Sullivan’s case after an appeals court upheld his original conviction. His attorney argued that sentencing a juvenile to life in prison without the possibility of parole was considered cruel and unusual punishment and violates the Eighth Amendment.
A year later, the SCOTUS justices agreed.
His case was one of two landmark court cases that successfully argued a life sentence was unconstitutional for a juvenile that committed a non-homicide offense.
“I am a vessel” for greater change, he said.
Changed lives and second chances
When Sullivan was released from prison in 2017, he said it didn’t feel real.
A few years later, he became the first resident to move into the Joseph House, a Catholic ministry and reentry home for former prisoners in Tallahassee, Florida, when it opened in 2019.
And within the last month, “two new brothers” moved into the home who were recently released from adult institutions after going into the system as children just like Sullivan.
Martez Royal, of Jacksonville, Florida, got out of prison April 18 after being sentenced to 10 years for robbery and battery on a first responder at 16 years old. Elijah Pippin, of Tallahassee, got out of prison April 26 after being sentenced to four years for robbery, kidnapping, grand theft of a motor vehicle and burglary of an occupied dwelling at 17 years old.
Royal, 25, was in and out of solitary confinement throughout his 10 years. Pippin, 21, started out in solitary confinement for four months, and he said it drove him crazy. He said it was inhumane and like putting a dog in a cage.
But they both said there were good people in prison who they each looked to as mentors during the time they served.