Exonerated Inmate Recounts Horrors of the Criminal Justice System

Anthony Graves is an activist, public speaker, and founder of the Anthony Graves Foundation, an organization whose mission to raise awareness about the need for criminal justice reform. Anthony Graves is also the victim of the horrors of the criminal justice system.

criminal justice
A solitary unit. (Photo by AP, via Daily Mail)

Graves spent 18 and a half years in prison, 16 of which were in solitary confinement. Twelve of those years were spent on death row, all for a crime he did not commit. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Graves was convicted in 1994 of assisting Robert Carter in multiple murders in 1992, despite no physical evidence linking Graves to the crimes. Graves’ conviction relied primarily on Carter’s testimony that Graves was his accomplice, which Carter would officially recant just before his execution in 2000.

Graves would not be exonerated until 2010.

In a recent article for Time, Graves told the world of the events that transpired in his life following the failure of the criminal justice system on his behalf. His story is bone-chilling and horrific, described by the man himself as “dehumanizing.”

“The routine was always the same: I would get up in the morning at 3 a.m. for breakfast, which could be a cold egg, a biscuit, and an expired pint of milk. Around 5:30 a.m. the guards would come, make me strip, handcuff me, and lead me 30 steps to a larger room for an hour of rec time by myself. Then they would make me strip, handcuff me again, and take me to the showers.

Lunch started at around 9 a.m. It was food you wouldn’t feed to your dog, even if he tore up your best pair of shoes. Then I’d write letters and work on my case. At about 3 p.m. I’d get my final meal?the last food I’d have until the next morning. As the death-row guards would say, they aren’t there to feed you; they’re there to keep you alive until they kill you.”

Graves mentions the psychological damage solitary confinement does to those within.

“Solitary confinement plays tricks on your mind. You’re bound by four walls, you’re cut off from society, and you’re left with just your own thoughts. Sometimes you start to feel like, if they treat me like this, I’m going to act like this. And then you risk becoming the kind of person that it seems like they’re trying to tell society that you are.”

Graves, true to his mission, calls for reforms in the criminal justice system and the abolition of solitary confinement as a practice.

“Solitary confinement is designed to keep you in it; it’s not designed to get you out of it. Sometimes you do need to separate inmates. But we need a system that’s designed to counsel them and help them transition back into society?not keep them locked up alone for years, driving them out of their minds.

Solitary confinement has no place in our criminal justice system. It’s time we acknowledge that. If we’re going to be a better society, solitary confinement has to go.”

If you would like to donate to the Anthony Graves Foundation and help reform criminal justice in America, click here.

Robert could go on about how he was raised by honey badgers in the Texas Hill Country, or how he was elected to the Texas state legislature as a 19-year-old wunderkind, or how he won 219 consecutive games of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots against Hugh Grant, but those would be lies. However, Robert does hail from Lewisville, Texas, having been transplanted from Fort Worth at a young age. Robert is a college student and focuses his studies on philosophical dilemmas involving morality, which he feels makes him very qualified to write about politicians. Reading the Bible turned Robert into an atheist, a combative disposition toward greed turned him into a humanist, and the fact he has not lost a game of Madden football in over a decade means you can call him "Zeus." If you would like to be his friend, you can send him a Facebook request or follow his ramblings on Twitter. For additional content that may not make it to Liberal America, Robert's internet tavern, The Zephyr Lounge, is always open