In January 1999, siblings Curtis and Catherine Jones were found by police, frightened and hiding in a wooded area near their home in Port St. John, Florida. He was 12, she was 13, and together they had plotted to kill a male family member who sexually abused them, along with their father and his girlfriend, whom they felt didn’t do enough to protect them.
On Tuesday, now 29-year-old Curtis will be released from prison; Catherine will be released later in August.
“There’s so much I must learn to function like a normal person: how to drive, fill out job applications, text, dress for a job interview, build my credit, obtain life, dental, medical insurance,” Catherine wrote to Florida Today last year. “I’ll leave prison just as clueless as I was at 13."
The cards are stacked against their success outside prison. Studies of youths released from correctional facilities have found that an average of 70 to 80 percent are rearrested within two to three years. Because the Jones siblings grew up behind bars, they have never known adult life outside a correctional institution.
[For more of this story, written by Rebecca McCray, go to http://www.takepart.com/articl...urderers?cmpid=tp-fb]
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