Actually, Bobby Bostic from St. Louis, Missouri, was sentenced to 241 years in prison at the age of 16. But his sentence was shortened. He has been a free man again since November. In an interview he now explained what it’s like to live in freedom and which things surprised him the most.
Bostic spent almost 10,000 days in the maximum security prison at Jefferson City Correctional Center in Missouri. In fact, he should never leave it again. In the mid-1990s, Bostic was involved in a series of robberies that included a man being grazed by a handgun projectile. In 1995, the then 16-year-old was tried. And his judge Evelyn Baker showed no mercy at the time. The verdict: guilty on 17 counts. The sentence: 241 years in prison in Jefferson City. Earliest Parole Application: 2091 – Bostic would be 112 at that time. Today, however, Bostic is a free man and the woman who once put him behind bars is largely responsible for this.
Bostic changed in prison. He began to write books: prose, short stories, even his mother’s biography. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. And his positive development impressed many people in the United States – including Baker, who once sent him to prison for life. Together with other comrades-in-arms, she founded an initiative to have Bostic’s imprisonment time checked. “241 years is madness to think back on,” she said in a 2021 interview with reporter Erin Moriarty.
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The activists worked for years to get Bostic out of prison. And they were successful. In 2021, Republican Rep. Nick Schroer of O’Fallon successfully pushed through legislation allowing juveniles sentenced to 15 years or more to be paroled after serving 15 years in prison. The media dubbed it the “Bobby Bostic Act.”
Bostic was actually released in November last year – after almost 27 years. And the first woman he embraced in freedom was Evelyn Baker. On his first day free, he said he wanted to return to St. Louis — the city he last set foot in as a free man.
That was almost half a year ago and it had become quiet around Bostic. He and his sister volunteer to run the charity Dear Mama, named after his late mother Diane, who, as Bostic said, “gave to a lot of people, even though we never had a lot ourselves.” He provides the needy in St. Louis with the essentials: food, clothing, toys for children. He can hardly make a living from it, he admits. His income is limited to selling the books he wrote while in prison.
In an interview with the British “BBC”, he explained what surprised him most about his life in freedom. He still has to get used to certain things, says Bostic. For example, the fact that many people use their Bluetooth headphones to make phone calls: “Why are people all talking to themselves?”
In general, technical innovations that arose during his time in prison are very strange. For example language assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, to which Bostic only jokingly asked: “What is Alexis?” And digital vending machines, such as drink dispensers, amazed the 44-year-old: “You just move your hand and water comes out?” The world has really changed since he was imprisoned in 1995.
But the biggest change for him, according to Bostic, is the people: “How friendly the people are … When you go into a shop, they just say, ‘How can I help you, sir?’ In prison there is nothing but evil faces and harassment.” He had to get used to it, “Hey, how are you?” to hear and not “Don’t come near me!”
“Everything’s beautiful out here. People smiling. Little kids waving at you. It’s just like that, it’s normal. And that’s the way it should be.” The friendliness was strange for him, who was in prison for 27 years, but it was easy to get used to it because that’s exactly what he always wanted, Bostic explained: “Deep down you always wanted this humanity. You wanted this human Connection… that’s life. That’s beauty. That’s the joy of being human.”
What: BBC
