Melvin is a free man. He’s also serving a life sentence inside an Oklahoma prison.
“Freedom, to me, is more than just physical,” he explains. “I was more imprisoned when I was out on the streets than I am now, because I was imprisoned by alcoholism and drug addiction and anger and racism, and all these reasons that brought me here.”
Melvin’s rough past initially followed him into prison. For the first 10 years of his incarceration, he was still addicted to drugs and alcohol. “The cycle kept continuing. I was getting in trouble over and over,” he says.
The cycle wore him down.
