YSRP in The Washington Post: He Was Locked Up at Age 15. Now, at 83, He’s Finally Free — and Reentering an Unfamiliar World

YSRP’s work supporting Mr. Joe Ligon, and the tireless commitment of Reentry Coordinator John Pace and Senior Advisor Eleanor Myers, is featured in reporter Karen Heller’s Washington Post profile of Mr. Ligon. She describes Mr. Ligon’s visit to his new home in West Philadelphia, where John and Eleanor were there to greet him:

On the narrow side street of his new home,” she writes, “Pace met Ligon, who was still wearing his beaten maroon cap from the [prison] yard. This was not the attire befitting a free man, Pace told him. ‘That was a prison hat. What is Joe doing with that hat on?’ asked Pace, incredulous.

Ligon stopped, hurled the cap on the ground and commenced stomping, an act that would have never been allowed in prison. Team Joe all stomped on the cap. Later, Ligon tossed it in the trash and donned a new Flyers hat instead, a fresh start. ‘I’m telling you that was maybe the high point of my entire career,’ said Eleanor Myers, a YSRP senior adviser and law professor emerita. ‘Because it was freedom.’