9,008 days

Marshan Allen emerged from prison in clothes unfit for the midwestern winter: a standard-issue gray hoodie and sweatpants, a pair of slippers. He boarded a van that drove him to the front parking lot of Stateville Correctional Center. It was December 2016, and 40 miles northeast rose the orange glow of Chicago. The van slowed to a stop. The door opened. From the huddled welcome party of family and friends and lawyers came a shout: “Hallelujah Jesus!”

His mother was first to embrace him. It was different from all those times she’d held him in shadowless visitation rooms. To her, it felt like giving birth again. “Let’s go,” Allen said as they walked to his mother’s minivan, “before they change their minds.”

Allen had spent years imagining this night, the unshackled ride beyond the gates into some new future, the tremendous scrutiny he would fix on the landscape scrolling past as if that alone could somehow accelerate experience and offset the quarter century he had lost. Instead, he spent his time craned over a smartphone. He swiped the screen. He made calls. I’m out, he told people. In 1994, he’d been given two sentences of mandatory life without the possibility of parole for a crime he committed at the age of 15. He’d been condemned to pass adolescence, adulthood, and old age in maximum-security prison. Death would be his liberation. Now here he was.

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