In North Carolina, Juvenile Lifers See a Pathway to Freedom
April 17, 2025 at 12:17AMAt Bolts Magazine, Phillip Vance Smith II introduces us to Joseph Jones, Sethy Seam, April Barber Scales, Leo Swain, and Jhalmar Medina. They were all incarcerated in North Carolina, sentenced to serve life in prison with no chance of parole for crimes they committed as children. While Seam and Scales have since been released, Jones, Swain, and Medina remain among the 100 people in North Carolina still incarcerated, decades later.
Some of Joseph Jones’ earliest memories are of visiting his father in prison. Then abandonment, when his parents left him in North Carolina and moved to New Jersey after Jones’ father was released.
That’s how Jones wound up living in abject poverty in Burlington with his young aunt and uncle, who led him down the wrong path instead of teaching him how to pop a wheelie on a bike or toss a football. Jones says that he was acting at the direction of his 16-year-old uncle and his uncle’s girlfriend in 1998 when he took part in the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl who lived in their neighborhood. Jones, who was 13 at the time, was later convicted and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of ever being released on parole.
Jones remembers being jumped by six other kids his first day at North Carolina’s High Rise youth prison, a towering 16-story building in between Asheville and Charlotte that the state would tear down decades later.
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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/04/16/in-north-carolina-juvenile-lifers-see-a-pathway-to-freedom/
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