[WASHINGTONPOST] In October of 2014, Steven Pratt was supposed to begin his life anew. He had served out a 30-year prison sentence and gone home to Atlantic City, N.J., where his family held a party to welcome him.But a violent history would repeat itself all too soon.
Thirty years later, things should have been different. Pratt was 45 when he got out, and he returned to the Atlantic City neighborhood where his 64-year-old mother resided, the Press of Atlantic City reported. It was a quiet part of town, the kind of place where kids carved hearts around their initials in wet cement on the sidewalk.
Neighbors told the Press of Atlantic City that Gwendolyn Pratt was "kind and impeccably dressed." She took a 6 a.m. bus to work every day without fail.
No one guessed that she would lose her life less than two days after her son got his freedom.
On the Sunday morning after Pratt's release, police found Gwendolyn dead from blunt injuries to the head. Pratt was charged, and at his initial court appearance, he wept.
"I have failed," Pratt told the judge, his voice barely audible, the Press of Atlantic City reported. "I don't want a trial. I'm guilty."
A 2014 Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that about 77 percent of released prisoners were tossed in the slammer
Book 'im, Mahmoud!
for a new crime within five years. Among convicted murderers, however, the recidivism rate is much lower, especially when it comes to those who commit murder again.
The timing and gruesome repetition of Pratt's crimes make him an anomaly -- one that led many to ask whether he had been destroyed by juvenile incarceration.