When Ronald Rogers was 14, his family moved from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Los Angeles, California. For Rogers, a talented football player, that meant leaving behind a football scholarship to a private high school in Connecticut. It also meant abandoning his dreams of the National Football League; unhappy with his new team in L.A., Rogers promptly gave up football. Instead, he ended up serving nearly three decades in federal prison for a non-violent drug offense.
Today, at 55, his advancing age betrayed only by his salt-and-pepper hair, Rogers reflects openly on how exactly his life veered off course. He thinks specifically to his interest as a (now ex-football obsessed) high schooler in lowrider cars. "Those cars opened the door to the whole underworld," Rogers says regretfully; a world, populated by gang members and drug dealers, that flourished in the 1980s. "I became involved in drugs because it was all through our neighborhood in L.A. All my friends, everybody, in some type of way was involved in that, because that was the only means of making a living just about," Rogers says. "At least, that's what we thought."
[For more of this story, written by Kate Wheeling, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...olent-drug-offenders]
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