Man who was wrongly imprisoned for 21 years speaks out about difficulty readjusting to normal life

"Being in prison felt like hell. It felt like a strange land that I was forced to get accustomed to. What I realized early on was that I was fighting for my survival. From the day of my arrest to getting out, I was fighting for survival in prison on a daily basis and fighting for my freedom. My feelings were loneliness, frustration, a lot of anger, feeling like I was a nobody. Feeling like I had no one in the world that I could depend on. My main fear was that I would come out of prison and still be labelled a murderer."

"What I found out and I probably didn’t realize before I went in, was how scared people were. Scared about everything. It threw me back because I never saw it in people before. On a small matter, the use of cell phones. I don’t remember people talking like that so I was asking my wife “Who are they talking to?” Even the geography of Crown Heights where I came from, it seemed like it was sunk in, not expanding and growing. The streets looked dark and bleak to me, so it was hard to try and re-organize things in my mind."