Bonded out of jail by his grandmother, he was arrested a short time later for selling drugs to an undercover cop, and the two state charges plus a probation violation combined for a state-prison sentence of eight and a half years. His court-appointed attorney was overworked and “just wanted to get me over with,” Jones said; he didn’t answer the letters Jones wrote about his case from jail. He was encouraged to accept the prosecutor’s first plea deal, and to remain mum in court. This was 2001, a time when prosecutors across the country were doubling the number of felonies they filed in state courts despite declining crime rates. In his 2017 book, Locked In, Fordham Law School professor John F. Pfaff argues that it’s politically safer and economically cheaper to charge a person with a felony, which sends them to prison—on the state’s dime—than it is to incarcerate someone locally or put them on probation, paid for by local budgets.
“No matter where you turn in this epidemic,” East Tennessee State University public health professor Robert Pack told me, “there are systems in place to address the problems, but none of them are working together.” The biggest barrier to collaboration is the fact that everyone involved views the problem too rigidly—through the lens of how they get paid, according to Pack.
Ronnie finished high school in jail, then took computer-repair classes in the state prison system, earning a GPA of 3.6. He tutored other inmates working toward their GEDs and earned a certificate in computer-repair tech. His goal was to get a job as a certified network administrator, maybe land a government job.
His brother’s career was on a high when Ronnie got out of prison in 2008. Thomas, also known by the stage name “Big Pooh,” had been traveling in Asia on a contract with Atlantic Records, recording with the rap band Little Brother.
“I gave him five thousand dollars for a laptop and helped him get on his feet,” Thomas told me. Ronnie was working for T-Mobile, selling cellphones for a time, but grew frustrated that he wasn’t advancing in the company, a failure that he attributed to his record. He was too impatient, too clever by half. “I kept telling him, ‘Man, the system is set up for you to fail. Just be happy you found some employment because most people who are felons can’t,’” Thomas recalled. “Ronnie has a knack for quickly reading people and knowing how to talk to ’em and reel ’em in. I said, ‘You just got to work that opportunity till you get another one.’ But it wasn’t fast enough for him.”
Thomas was on the road in 2010 when he took another collect call from Ronnie. His brother had been locked up again, this time for credit-card fraud.
“I was like, ‘Come on, we just did all this stuff trying to help you get on your feet?’” Thomas remembered, exasperated.
Thomas rapped about devotion and disappointment in a song called “Real Love,” from an acclaimed solo album released in 2011:
Brother, wrong or right
The fact that you were incarcerated
After being free let me know you never made it
To that point where the old you is not outdated…
No matter how this picture looks
I’m still putting money on your books.
I told you…we family.
It was the credit-card fraud charge that landed Ronnie in the diversion program at George’s Chicken, and for a time following his release from it, his family believed he had turned a corner. He told his brother and mom he’d launched a computer-repair startup, which was certainly within his abilities, given the skills he’d picked up in prison programs. Thomas’s own business was in a lull at the moment, so Ronnie floated the idea of starting a joint venture. He wanted Thomas’s help opening a Caribbean jerk-chicken restaurant in Winchester. He didn’t turn to his brother because he needed the money; Ronnie needed Thomas’s help securing a liquor license, which wasn’t possible for a felon.
“I didn’t understand the urgency for him wanting to buy something legitimate,” Thomas said. “I just kept saying, ‘I don’t live in Virginia, and I’m not going to have my name on nobody’s liquor license and I can’t be there. And anyway, who’s going to come to a restaurant in this dead little small town?’”
Thomas began doubting his brother during their final visit, when Ronnie and a girlfriend drove to Charlotte to see him and his wife. “I’m like, I don’t know if the computer business is this good? He had a Mercedes-Benz truck. And he had a motorcycle that he couldn’t really ride, and another car back at home.”
Thomas said he wondered if the girlfriend, who worked at a federal agency, owned some of the vehicles but admits that he didn’t really want to know. Thomas now believes his brother was trying to phase out of drug dealing so that if and when he got arrested, there would be a legitimate revenue stream already established to help support his daughters.
Ronnie Jones has frustrated his younger brother his entire life—and that pattern of behavior included his initial refusal to cooperate with Bill Metcalf and Don Wolthuis, the ATF agent and prosecutor responsible for his conviction. Ronnie thought he deserved a ten-year sentence, so he fired his first court-appointed attorney, Sherwin Jacobs, who’d negotiated a plea deal of fifteen years with Wolthuis—a decision Ronnie regretted the moment it backfired.
Thomas was on a month-long European touring stint when a relative texted him the stomach-sinking news that Ronnie’s federal sentence was in: twenty-three years. “I told him, the last to talk is always the last to walk,” Thomas said.
Though he’s never been in legal trouble, Thomas said he is regularly profiled, pulled over ostensibly for speeding—presumably because he’s a thirtysomething black man with tattoos driving a Lexus through his middle-class Charlotte neighborhood. Though the experience is frightening, he always looks forward to the moment in the exchange when the officer runs his license, and it comes back crystal clean, with the vehicle registered to his wife, a third-generation operator of a successful bail-bonding company. “I don’t have the leverage to get smart or act crazy when I get pulled over,” he said. “My goal every day is to make it back to my wife in one piece so I can live to fight another day, so I’m just ‘yes, sir, no, sir,’ and all that.”
He feels for Ronnie and other ex-offenders getting out of prison. “They don’t rehabilitate you in prison, and they don’t make it easy for you to get a job. I truly believe they don’t make it easy because they want you back, and they want you back because that’s the new factory work in so many places now—the prison.
“You have to be very strong mentally when you get out to not make those same mistakes.”
*
Ronnie Jones said he initially felt welcomed in Woodstock. When he first landed there to work, in 2012, he found it charming that drivers waved to one another on the country roads, and his minimum-wage paycheck from George’s Chicken went further than it had in the city. “It was almost a culture shocker for me. I could count on one hand the number of black people. I loved it. I actually thought I couldn’t get into anything there,” he told me.
He didn’t even mind the early shift, he said, even though “you’re standing in chicken shit, and you be dealing with ’em while they’re live, and they be scared.” He kept working at George’s after his twenty-one-week diversion sentence was complete but lost the job several months later when he got sick and had to be hospitalized for a week. At the time, he hoped to open a small diner with ten chairs—he’d learned to cook from his mother, and his first job at the diversion center, where he worked before going to George’s, had been as a cook—but no one would rent to him. He said the same thing happened when he contacted a landlord about renting space for a computer-repair shop and was told the space was already leased. (“I got a white girl to call, and he was willing to rent to her, and I was like, ‘This is bullshit.’”)