I did 21 years for a crime that I committed at 17 years old, in which no one was physically
hurt, harmed, or injured and I was a first-time felony offender, and I've gained so much knowledge,
I've gained so much experience, and I've accepted responsibility for what I did wrong.
What other reason is there to keep me in prison?
When Dontie Mitchell was 17 years old, he was sentenced as an adult to 35-70 years in prison.
His sentence is comparable to that of a murderer, even though no one was injured in his crime.
Black youth are 9 times more likely to be sentenced as adults than white youth.
Dontie has now spent more than half of his life in prison and he's not eligible for parole
for 6 more years.
You know, when the judge told me he had 30 years I kind of like went in denial a long time.
Dontie who grew up in Albany New York, describes his childhood as traumatic.
He witnessed abuse, his father wasn’t around, and his mother was addicted to drugs.
It was very, very hard for Dontie, you know, but he was a good kid.
He would man up, you know, he would feed his sisters, he would clean the house.
He just did a lot more than a young child should have to do.
At 11 years old, Dontie was removed from his mother’s home.
For the next 5 years, he lived in various foster care homes
before aging out of the system at 16.
He ended up at a temporary shelter for homeless youth called Equinox.
Equinox was in Albany, New York.
It was just the staff there were pretty, just, pretty cool.
They were very responsive to the needs of the children there.
I just never had that, you know, having that level of adult support and caring.
There was something kind of striking about Dontie and that was how quick-witted he was,
how intelligent he was.
I mean, it was just obvious the first time he opened his mouth and talked about himself
was that this is a very, very bright young man.
Dontie bonded with the staff at Equinox and even flourished during his time there.
He got his GED and started working part-time.
But after 60 days, he had to move out due to state law.
Dontie moved in with an aunt and says it was there that his step-cousin introduced him
to the idea of breaking the law.
You know, I was always the one that wanted to work.
I wanted to go to school.
I wanted to do these things so I wasn't really exposed to that.
But when I did become exposed to it, it was just like, all right, let's try it.
And it just kind of snowballed from there.
First, Dontie and his cousin tried a few robberies,
then Dontie held up a Mcdonald’s where he had previously worked.
I went in there with two guns, a mask on, fired one shot over the sign,
told everybody, what did I say?
I can’t remember exactly what I told everyone, I think I said ‘freeze’, 'don't move', whatever,
some kid stuff.
Told one girl put the money in a bag, took the manager in the back, had him open up the safe,
and put the money in the bag.
Then I said, everybody go in the freezer, put a lock on it.
I knew they could get out because they have a safety.
You know, because people might get locked in freezers.
So they had a safety but that was to slow them down and I left.
I don’t know what I was thinking.
I couldn't have been thinking anything just being a kid thinking, you know, that's my
cousin, you're into it.
Why not?
You know, not really looking at the long-term consequences for that type of life,
it was just boneheaded.
Despite being 17 and a first-time felony offender, Dontie was charged as an adult and received
the maximum sentence, of 35-70 years, which was reduced to 25-50 due to state sentencing laws.
Nobody was hurt, nobody was injured, nobody was killed,
nobody was beaten, nobody was stabbed.
And here's a young man who may spend 50 years in prison.
All of this happened at a time when rising crimes among teens triggered a public fear
of juvenile criminals.
They are not just gangs of kids anymore.
They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredators.
No conscience, no empathy, we can talk about why they ended up that way.
But first we have to bring them to heel.
Thousands of juveniles across the country, mostly young men of color, were sentenced
to life without parole or given the death penalty.
The amount prisoners under 18 years old in adult prisons doubled and reached a peak of
5,400 on a single day in 1997.
We take people who do violent things because something violent has been done to them or
they've lived in some place where violence is part of life.
And we put them in a place to modify that behavior
that runs on violence, you can't survive unless you know deeply the power of violence.
Sentenced the day before his 18th birthday, Dontie entered the maximum security prison,
Great Meadow Correctional Facility.
There's no real rehabilitation, there's not even a goal of rehabilitation.
It's just, lock them up, keep them away for a few years, and then somehow, you know, they
expect you to be cured of whatever it was that you went to prison for and you're not.
This environment doesn’t nurture prosocial behavior, it doesn't nurture that type of
mentality or behavior.
It really nurtures you to be the thug, the gangster, the killer because those guys in this environment
get the most respect.
For Dontie, the road to redemption was not straight.
In 2002, he attacked another prisoner in what he says was self-defense and had
2-4 more years added to his sentence.
I'm not a model prisoner. I'm not perfect.
And I've had issues, disciplinary issues, adjustment issues.
I accept all that. I grew up in here though.
This is where I reached my maturity. I became an adult in prison.
What did you expect?
You’ve got to be insane to want this, and what this imposes upon your character.
Who wants to go back into society and come back to prison, who wants that?
And it's kind sad cause you’d think that any rational person would say, I don’t, I want to do better,
but a lot of guys are not going out there with the skills to be able to succeed.
And I realized that these institutions, they don’t provide that, so I had to provide it for myself.
Now Dontie says he spends his free time in the Law Library, takes college courses,
and mentors younger prisoners.
There's a couple of 18-year-olds under my tutelage right now.
There's one kid,
he's just, he's like a firecracker.
But he's easily influenced by all the negativity, like he feels like I gotta be the tough guy.
But imagine if you separate him from this environment where he doesn't
feel need to be the tough guy.
What would he do then?
What could he aspire to? Because you know he's a pretty, bright intelligent kid.
But sometimes escaping this reality it’s not easy.
He's a credible person to talk to young people because he's been there you know he's been
in their situation before.
Whether they recognize it or not, he has rehabilitated himself.
He's not the guy that is going to come out here and commit crimes.
You know he's the guy that's going to come out here and try to make a difference.
While Dontie has been incarcerated, new research has found that our brains are not fully developed
until our early 20s.
Researchers say that means teenagers are more susceptible to peer pressure, less risk averse
and more likely to be persuaded by their environment.
Two Supreme Court rulings, Roper v. Simmons, in 2005 and then Graham v. Florida in 2010
took into account this brain science when ruling it unconstitutional to give juveniles
the death sentence or life without possibility of parole.
They argued that for offenders under 18, ‘A state...must impose a sentence that provides some meaningful
opportunity for release based on demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.’
New York has made small steps to update their treatment of juveniles.
In 2017, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed “Raise the Age” legislation that raises the age
of criminal responsibility for nonviolent crimes from 16 & 17 to 18 years old.
This new policy does not affect Dontie’s case and he feels it does not go far enough.
You’ve got 18 year old kids in here now that don’t belong here, honestly I think
until you maybe turn 21 you shouldn’t be surrounded by this environment.
You have to do more for the youth that are coming in
and for the guys such as myself that already did time.
We need to do a lot more in terms of raising the age.
There are places that are trying to raise the age to 21, 24 trying to follow the science.
I think we're asking the wrong question about focusing on this age and we should be talking
about what do the facilities look like that we send people to, what are we doing in there
while we have young people there.
Dontie is now suing Governor Cuomo and the New York State Department of Corrections
and Community Supervision
arguing that they have not developed meaningful rehabilitative
treatment for juvenile offenders with long prison sentences.
With 6 more years on his sentence, Dontie has applied to the Governor’s office for
early release through clemency.
What does that six years really mean to us when you know we've got, we've got, 20.
That six years doesn't really mean anything to us anymore.
It means the world to Dontie like tomorrow means the world to Dontie.
I just want him to be free.
I think he's served,
I think he served his time.
In New York State it costs $60,000 per year to house, feed, and guard a prisoner.
That means over the past 21 years, the state has spent $1.2 million on Dontie’s incarceration.
I'm more of an asset out there than I am in here.
I learnt the lesson that I need to learn, I've learned it.