This Kentucky law destroyed his family. Now a son wants to break the cycle for others. (2024)

LA GRANGE, Ky. — Marcus Jackson stood naked in line witha half-dozenmen, arms raised at his sides, fingers extended, palms pointed forward.

He saw a guard holding a sprayer — like the ones his coaches used for water breaks during football practices — and for a moment Marcus thought it was considerate of the state to make sure the new prisoners at Roederer Correctional Complex were hydrated.

Marcus soon realized his naivete as the guard walked down the line, spraying each man with a chemical meant to kill lice.

The othermen freely chatted like old friends, seemingly unaffected, like they’d been through this routine before.

Marcus stayed silent. This was all new to him.

Back then, he was a 19-year-old from Paducah, Kentucky, a sophom*ore on a football scholarship at the University of Louisville whose promising future abruptly ended when he was convicted of wounding a teenager during a shooting that — nearly 30 years later — Marcus stillinsists he never committed.

The arrest ensnared Marcus in the sticky cycle of incarceration, eventually pushing him into the path of Kentucky’s persistent felony offender law.

Created in 1974, the law was expanded two years later into what its original author, Robert Lawson, once called “easily the most lethal weapon in the state’s tough sentencing arsenal.”

The persistent felony offender law “clearly heads the list of tough-on-crime measures that have filled prisons and jails beyond capacity,” Lawson, a retired University of Kentucky law professor,wrote in 2008.

Prosecutors argue it deters crime— that it makes sense to keep people off the streets for longer stretcheswhen they continue to break the law.

But The Courier Journal analyzed more than 140,000 persistent felony offender cases with the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice and found the law has mostly been used in the last four decades againstpeople accused of the state's lowest-level felonies.

Just over half of all PFO cases involved people facing class D felony charges — Kentucky's lowest felony class — while just over a quarter were levied against people charged with only a property or drug crime.

Moreover, it's being used disproportionately against Black people, adding years to their sentences.

Over the past four decades,Black Kentuckians were 3½times more likely to face a persistent felony offender charge, the analysis showed, another example of the inequalities that plague Kentucky'scriminal justice system.

The findings also revealed the leverage the law has given prosecutors, who often use it as a powerful weapon topressure people to plead guilty.

The law’s reach extends far beyond prison and jail walls, to families and communities across the commonwealth.

“The PFO law has so many other victims other than just the one who was behind bars,” said Marcus, 49, who is leading a push to narrow the law’s use as part of his work as an organizing coordinator with the ACLU of Kentucky.

“The impact of the sentencing on my family has been devastating.”

That impact began decades ago.

Along Interstate 24, a few miles outside Paducah, there’s a mural painted on a water tower — a Black arm and a white arm extended over an American flag, hands clasped, next to the words, “United We Stand.”

Leaders in this part of Western Kentucky solicited about $50,000 in community donations for a public art project they hoped would send a welcoming message to the tens of thousands of motorists who drive by it each day.

The reason they commissioned it can be found directly across the busy interstate, in the privately-owned Arant Confederate Memorial Park and its signature feature: a 12-foot by 18-foot Confederate flag towering above the tree line for all to see.

When Marcus’ father moved with his family to Paducahin the early 1950s, the vestiges of the Confederacy and Jim Crow were readily evident.

In one of Gary Jackson Sr.’s earliest childhood memories, he and his mom were walking along Broadway on a hot summer day. Through a department store’s giant bay window, he saw white families eating ice cream.

He looked up at his mom: “Can we get ice cream?”

“Boy, you know we can’t go in there,” she replied.

He was maybe 5 at the time, but the lesson was clear: There were two Paducahs, and he wasn’t allowed in one of them.

Gary learned not to look in those windows, to cross the street when a white person walked his way, to save his anger for the night — before integration — when his football team played the all-white school.

After high school, he went to community college and started working for the city, first as a trash collector and then as a mechanic. He met his future wife, Carolyn Whitfield, on the steps of a women’s college.

They had two sons: Marcus and, three years later, Gary Jackson Jr.

Gary Sr. owned a home and a small club nearby. He tookhis sons to little league practices and sat in the stands for their football games, and on summer weekends they all piled into his car and drove to watch him compete in drag races in St. Louis and Indianapolis.

“I was doing good,” Gary said. “And then up jumped the devil.”

Gary was fixing a city dump truck when a line broke, he said, spewing hot fluid. He leapt for safety and landed wrong. Two days later, his knee was so swollenhe couldn’t get out of bed.

Despite three surgeries and a left kneecap replacement, the damage left him unable to work.

When his prescription pain pills ran out, he said he started to “street medicate.”

It’s a familiar narrative in Kentucky, where nearly 2,000 people died of drug overdoses in 2020 — a record high — many from opioid abusethat began with prescription painkillers.

In the 1980s, when Gary was injured, it was crack cocaine fueling an addiction crisis, one that particularly tore through Black communities across the country.

Federal lawmakers responded by escalating the “war on drugs,” passingtougher laws that included mandatory minimum prison sentences that were harsher for crack cocaine possession than for powder cocaine.

By the end of the decade, America's prison population more than doubled —from 304,000 to 683,000 — and one in every four Black men between 20 and 29 were incarcerated or on probation or parole.

Kentucky’s prison population nearly tripled in the decade, fueled in part by a tough-on-crime arsenal that included a powerful weapon: the persistent felony offender law.

In 1980, a mere four years after legislators broadened the law’s scope, only 79 people in Kentucky’s prisons were there on a persistent felony offender conviction, according to Lawson.

By 1984, that number jumped to 1,142.

At first, Marcus’s family couldn’t see the symptoms of Gary Sr.'saddiction. They became more visible as he inched toward his first felony conviction.

The three-wheelers and dirt bikes he bought his sons for Christmas vanished. Hisworker's compensation checks stopped arriving in the mail.

He’d tell his wife their car broke down and he needed to go back to fix it. Later, she’d find it for sale at a nearby pawn shop, along with the boys’ gifts or the trombone they bought Marcus for the school band.

Once, he sold the family dog.

When it wasn’t enough to feed his growing addiction, he started selling small amounts of crack. In the spring of 1989, Paducah police arrested Gary Sr.in a drug sting. He was charged with two counts of trafficking cocaine.

He said the drugs were worth $20and the guy who bought thempaid him with two beers.

“I honestly didn’t think I was going to jail,” he said. “I thought I’d make bond and get probation and get out.”

Instead,on Nov. 21, 1989, with his wife and sons watching through tears from the courtroom, Gary Sr. was sentenced to 10 years in prison.

His imprisonment plunged the family further into poverty. Many nights, Marcus’ mom searched the house for enough change to buy a pack of hotdogs she could cut up and serve with mustard for dinner.

Field Pro Leaguers, Marcus remembered: “I hate those hotdogs to this day.”

Marcus tried to focus on football. By then, he was a star defensive back at Paducah Tilghman High School, named second-team all-state his senior year.

Yet, each time a college recruiter visited the house, Marcus worried they’d ask about his dad.

They’re not going to accept me.

They’ll think I’m trash.

Marcus wanted to stay close to home at Murray State. But the University of Louisville also offered him a football scholarship, and that was his dad’s favorite school.

“Even though I was angry, I still wanted to make him proud,” he said. “I still wanted him to see me as somebody.”

One weekend in August 1991, Marcus, home for the summer after his freshman year of college, went to a high school dance with friends. He came home, said goodnight to his mother and went to bed, unware that in the next few hours he would be shoved down the same path to prison as his father.

"Are you Marcus Jackson?"

It was about 2:30 a.m. when the shadowy figure standing over Marcus’ bed pointed a flashlight in his face.

"Where were you earlier tonight?"

Marcus, then 19, was at the St. Mary's High School dance, he told the Paducah police officers in his bedroom.

And he could prove it. He and a friend were in a minor fender bender in the school parking lot, in her cherry-red Toyota Supra with a sunroof. Police showed up to take the report.

But that wasn’t why officers were at his house.

A 14-year-old white boy had been shot in the leg during a drive-by that night, the latest violence in an escalating feud between two neighborhood groups — one white, one black.

Witnesses said the gunman opened fire from the sunroof of a red sports car.

Exactly howMarcus' name surfaced as a suspect or how police built their case against himisn't clear. Clerks at the McCracken County courthouse could not locate the case file.But records provided by Marcus suggest that one of the alleged shooters — someone Marcus barely knew from the neighborhood — gave police Marcus' name as a possible suspect.

A day or two after police questioned Marcus, they returned with an arrest warrant.

“I didn’t have a clue what was going on, but me being the nerd that I was, I was like, well, they’ll get it right,"Marcus said. “They know I didn’t do that. This is not the type of kid I am.”

Two months later, a grand jury indicted him on charges in theshooting and two other incidents in which shots were fired at white people.

Marcus’ family tried to hire a private attorney who told them he believed Marcus was innocent. But they couldn’t afford him.

The case was assigned to public defender Carolyn Keeley.

“I thought about this trial a lot,” Keeley, now retired, told The Courier Journal. “I was and still am convinced he was not guilty.”

The nearly all-white jury saw it differently and found Marcus guilty. He was sentenced to nine years in prison (it was later reduced to five years on appeal).

Even after the guilty verdict, Marcus kept believing someone would come forward to clear his name.

That day would eventually come, 20 years too late. Marcus received three sworn affidavits from people who said they were involved in the shootings he was accused of, and that he was innocent.

He’s still trying to clear his name.

Marcus barely slept hisfirst nightat the Roederer Correctional Complex— orthe second. Soon, though, he fell into a routine.

It turned out prison was a lot like school, Marcus learned. He was tall, strong, athletic. It made him popular.

“You can only scare a person with prison once,” he said. “Once you send a person to prison there’s no more fear there, because for the most part you left friends there. And it’s not unknown.”

He soaked up his new friends’ stories: How much money they made selling drugs, how they got caught, how they wouldn’t get caught the next time.

Marcus spent a little over two years in prison before he was released on parole, a resentful 21-year-old with a felony on his record.

He found few options on the outside.

He tried to go back to school but couldn't afford tuition and wasn't eligible for financial aid because of his conviction.Andalmost no Paducah employers would hire him once they saw his criminal record on a job application.

The arrest. The conviction. The years in prison. The second chances that never came. They warped his sense of identity.

“You think I’m bad? You think I’m that person? I’ll show you what that looks like for real," he told himself. "And then I got into the streets, and once I got into the streets, everything changed.”

Everything Marcus needed to know about being a drug dealer he learned in prison.

“It’s like a university to manufacture criminal behavior,” he said.

For two years after his release, he applied that knowledge. He wasn’t concerned about getting arrested, or prisonor being tagged as a persistent felon.

“You can’t afford to worry about things that are going to happen to you in the future when sh-- is happening to you now,” he said. “When you’re in hell, you don’t have the luxury of worrying about going to a deeper level of hell.”

In May of 1996, Marcus, then 23 and a father, rode his bicycle to a Paducah gas station and sold an eight-ball of crackcocaineto a friend — who turned out to be a police informant.

Marcus was charged with trafficking cocaine. McCracken County prosecutors offered him a choice: He could plead guilty and get 10 years in prison, the maximum time allowed.

Or, he could take his case to trial and they’d also charge him with being a persistent felony offender, doubling his potentialsentence to 20 years.

Marcus first heard about the PFO law in 1991. His dad, temporarily free on an appeal bond but still using drugs, was arrested a second time for selling crack.

Prosecutors added a persistent felony offendercharge but eventually dismissed it (Gary Sr.later wouldbe convicted ofitin 2001, after his third drug case).

Marcuslearned more about the lawduring his first stint in prison.

By then, Kentucky’s prosecutors had applied the PFO law in more than 18,000cases, filling prisons and jails with “persistent offenders.” A quarter of those cases involved drug crimes.

In 1996, Marcus’ case was one of nearly 2,400 persistent felony offender cases filed that yearin Kentucky courts. Roughly 40% were against Black people, who at the time made up just7% of Kentucky's population.

Marcus ran the calculations of the plea offer. Even if he fought the case and lost, he could still serve less than the 20-year maximum sentence by becomingparole eligible.

“I had a f--- it mentality,” he said. “I knew there was nothing the system could do to me that I couldn’t handle.”

Marcus went to trial. He lost. He got 20 years.

Back at Roederer, Marcus stood naked in line as the guard walked by with the spray to kill lice. His arms raised, he chatted with the other men.

Like he said, prison only scares a person once.

After four years, the parole board granted Marcus an early release. Back home, he opened an auto body shop and sold marijuana on the side to make extra money for his children.

But he grew tired of that life and fearful his children would grow up without a father — just as he did.

He quit selling pot and started coaching his son’s football team, turning them from winless to undefeated in a season.

There were family vacations and dirt bikes and four-wheelers for Christmas to ride around their four-acre home outside Metropolis, Illinois, across the river from Paducah.

“It was the happiest period of my life,” Marcus said.

But his past was never far behind him.

On Nov. 30, 2007, he went to see an old football coach’s team play at Lone Oak High School in Paducah.He ran into an old friend in trouble.

Marcus' friend said he needed money fast to pay down his child-support debt. If Marcus could tapold connections for a couple of pounds of marijuana, the friend could sell it and clear an easy $2,500 in profit.

Feeling a sense of loyalty, Marcus agreed to help.

The next day, with 6 pounds of pot stashed in a duffle bag on the floorboard of his car, Marcus drove to his friend's house.

Paducah police were there waiting.

The arrest once again put Marcus in the crosshairs of Kentucky'spersistent felony offenderlaw.

In 2008, Marcus was convicted of trafficking marijuana and first-degree PFO, extending his prison sentence to 15 years. His childrenwould be without their dad for at least 10 years – the minimum before parole eligibility.

They're still paying for it today.

Marcus'children dreaded those days when their mom Valerietold them to get in the car for the nearly hourlong drive across the Ohio River to see their dad.

The imposing stone walls of Kentucky’s oldest prison — Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville — gave Jordan Troutman, then 12, an anxiety attack the first time he saw them.

The way the guards looked at Dyaas she took off her shoes and earrings to walk through the metal detector made the 5-year-old feel like she had done something wrong.

Life without her dad would have been easier, she sometimes thought, if he was dead.

“Because then it’s a reason that he’s not around,” said Dya, now 18. “That’s more of a reason. Not to say that he chose this life and that he’s not around because he chose something over me. That’s what it seems like to you. But when they’re dead it’s not like they chose to die. They still would be here if they were alive.”

Valerie moved the family to a small apartment in Metropolis, Illinois — less expensive, but still a place she needed two jobs to afford. Relatives tried to fill the gaps left by Marcus’ absence.

Cousins helped with school pickups. Valerie’s dad coached their baseball and softball teams.

Still, the children struggled.

Marcus had another son, Aaron Aikens, born four months before his half-brother Jordan.

At 15, Aaron was convicted of stealing a gun and unintentionally shooting a friend.

Four years later, he violated his probation by pointing a gun at a crowd outside a concert in Bowling Green.

His suspended sentence of 13 years for the shooting was reinstated, plus an additional five years for the Bowling Green gun incident.

All the while, Marcus sat helplessly in his cell — watchingthe cycle of incarceration claimanother generation of his family.

Around 2013,fiveyears into his prison sentence, Marcus had an epiphany. It came in two waves.

The first was a visit from his 92-year-old grandmother, threeyears before her death. Betty Topp was the family matriarch. Birthday parties, holiday dinners, they all happened at “Aunt Betty’s house,” as it was known to extended family and friends.

When Marcus’ dad was first imprisoned, she was the family’s backstop. She was the one who walked pots of chicken stew 30 minutes each way every other week to make sure they were fed.

She sat with Marcus’ mom in the living room during his college recruiting visits and in the courtroom during his trials.

Marcus adored her.

She looked frail sitting at one of the small tables in the prison visiting room. Before she left, she looked her grandson in the eye.

“Don’t never let nobody make you feel any way about yourself,” she told him. “Don’t let people’s thoughts of you make you see yourself differently.”

A week or two later, the second wave came in the form of an affidavit signed and sent by a man who swore that he — not Marcus — was responsible for the shooting Marcus was convicted of when he was 19.

The letter shook in Marcus’ hands. He sobbed. No one believed his innocenceback then. They labeled him a criminal, irredeemable,and it stuck.

In that moment, a plan crystallized.

Marcus knew better than most how unjust the criminal justice system could be. The damage it could inflict. Its irongrip.

When he got out, he’d work to fix its flaws. And he’d start with what he considered the worst: the persistent felony offender law.

Marcus sat at a computer inside Western Kentucky Community Technical College, scrolling through paralegal job openings.

It was November 2018, and he was living at a Paducah halfway house — serving out the rest of a 15-year sentence for sellingthat 6 pounds ofmarijuana to his friend, marking him once againas a “persistent felony offender.”

A job ad caught his eye. The Louisville Urban League wanted someone to help people expunge their criminal records. Under qualifications, it read: Not concerned with criminal backgrounds.

It was achance for afresh start in social justice workto follow an example set by his mother and her family'sfight for civil rights in the 1960s.

They scheduled him for an interview in Louisville Dec. 20. But there was a problem.

Marcus already had served the 10 years his first-degree persistent felon convictionrequiredbefore he could see the parole board. Buthis hearing was scheduled after Thanksgiving.

Even if the board released him, it would be too late for the job interview.

Two days before the Louisville interview, Marcus wasmopping a staircase near the halfway house offices when his caseworker walked by.

“Hey man, when you want to go home?” he asked.

Marcus looked up at him.

“Stop playing with me.”

The caseworker shrugged his shoulders and continued toward his office. Marcus stood frozen for a second. The mop fell out of his hands, and he hurried after him.

Marcus’ parole date had been moved up. He just had to sign some paperwork, and he was a free man.

Marcus called his mom. He called his wife in Frankfort, Kentucky, 250 miles away, to pick him up.

Forty-eight hours later, he sat inside the Louisville Urban League’s office on West Broadway, trying to slow his rapidly beating heart.

Near the interview's end, Urban League CEO Sadiqa Reynolds asked a final question: "Can I trust you?"

Marcus paused, then looked her in the eye.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t you trust me?”

Christmas passed with no word about the job. So did the new year.

He was about to accept a job at a water treatment plant an hour north of Lexington when someone from the Urban League called.

Marcus got the job. His first day would be Feb. 4.

“It made me feel like I was somebody,” he said.

There’s a saying Marcus is particularly fond of, about the nature of patience and persistence.

If you want to understand patience, watch a tree grow.

If you want to understand persistence, observe the grass, because every week it comes back.

Long ago, after his second criminal conviction, Kentucky labeled Marcus a persistent offender. Heknows hecan’t change that now.

“But what I can do,” he said, “is show them what it means to actually be persistent.”

That means he keeps scheduling meetings with lawmakers and prosecutors, judges and community leaders — anyone he thinks will listen to how he wants to change the persistent felony offender law, and why.

He keeps collecting stories from men and women whose prison sentences were lengthened by the law, and from the families traumatized by their loved ones’ extended absence.

He keeps trying to repair the fractured bonds in his own family.

Marcus’ father, Gary Sr., tagged with the same"persistent felon" labelby the state,is nearly 70.

He still lives in Paducah. He still struggles with addiction.

“I have more good days than hard days,” he said. “I’m almost steady.”

Marcus’ mother, Carolyn, got tired of waiting. Eleven years ago, she left her husband and moved to an apartment in Paducah.

"When I opened that door, peace met me,” she said with a smile and a deep breath. “I went through hell. Now, this is me.”

Marcus' son Jordan keeps busy working construction but sees his dad when he can. As a kid, he bragged about his dad selling drugs. Now, he brags about Marcus’ advocacy work with the ACLU of Kentucky.

"To do something with your life instead of just going back to prison — that’s amazing," he said.

Dya, meanwhile, is still angry with her dad. She knows why he had to leave Paducah. But it feels like he’s not here for her — again. That he’s choosing something else over her — again.

“I feel like he doesn’t know who I am,” she said. “I guess I don’t really know who he is either.”

There are signs that’s changing.

Last fall, Marcus and Dya took a 2,100-mileroad trip, to Los Angeles. They saw the Grand Canyon and ate at Jack in the Box and took pictures in front of the Hollywood sign.

When they got back, they started sharing their morning run times from their smartwatches.

Marcus’ son Aaronis still in prison. They talk mostly by email — prison visits have been on hold because of the pandemic. Phone calls can cost nearly a dollar a minute.

In a recent email, Aaron asked his dad to help him break the generationalcurseof incarceration that claimed his father, his uncle and his grandfather.

It might take longer than they hoped.

Last summer, guards at Luther Luckett prison in LaGrange said they caught Aaron on surveillance footage holding what looked to be a cellphone in his hand.

Prosecutors charged him with having contraband behind bars — a felony. His case is pending.

Then they added another charge: second-degree persistent felony offender.