Patrick Flaherty still dreams prison dreams.
It’s been that way since about 10 years into his nearly 22-year stay at the Jefferson City Correctional Center. When he has visions during the night, there are no schools or parks, no kids or suburban malls, just gray prison walls, a moment when he asks a guard to use the bathroom, then panic sets in as he realizes he’s late for a bed count, and, poof, he wakes up.
As of Friday, Flaherty, who is 44, has been out of prison for a week. He’s living in a Dallas, Texas, suburb with his mother. If not for a commutation of his sentence by Gov. Mike Parson, and the subsequent granting of parole, he would have been locked up for another decade.
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Now he dreams — when he is awake, at least — of getting a job, maybe even in the financial services industry, if he can find an employer to look past the felonies he committed as a young man and see the credentials he’s racked up since then.
As a 21-year-old, in 1999, Flaherty went on a crime spree with a BB gun, holding up four convenience stores in St. Peters and O’Fallon. He took $459 and was sentenced to four consecutive 10-year sentences for robbery. He was not eligible for parole until 2036. It was a massive sentence for a first-time offender, disproportionate to the crimes he committed.
Since then, he’s become a poster child for what’s wrong with the American prison system, with too many people locked away for too long for petty crimes, drug offenses or crimes of poverty, costing taxpayers billions of dollars and doing very little to improve public safety. I wrote about Flaherty last year when he wrote to alert me to a dichotomy in two arguments being made by the office of Attorney General Eric Schmitt, with the goal of both of them being to keep men who deserved to be out of prison locked up for several more years.
One case involved a man named Dimetrious Woods, who was sentenced to 25 years in prison without the possibility of parole. When state lawmakers changed the law, allowing parole in such cases, Woods, a model prisoner, sought and was granted parole. After the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the change in law couldn’t be applied retroactively, Schmitt was trying to put Woods back in prison. Eventually, Parson commuted Woods’ sentence, and he is free.
Flaherty’s case was similar. He was sentenced under a statute that allowed him to seek an earlier parole hearing in certain circumstances. But by the time he sought one, the law had been changed and such a hearing was no longer allowed. Schmitt argued the new law had to trump the old one. Again, Parson intervened, backed by a clemency request that included hundreds of pages showing Flaherty’s education in prison, his translation of a million pages of documents to Braille, support from corrections officers, and state lawmakers, like former state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, and Rep. Chris Dinkins, R-Annapolis. Nasheed, ironically, was appointed by Parson to the parole board just a few days after Flaherty was set free.
As he walked out of prison on May 28, Flaherty was met outside by one of his media champions, , and other supporters, including Ryan Ferguson, a former friend from prison whose murder conviction had been overturned. They headed to IHOP for his first non-prison meal. Flaherty had blueberry pancakes.
Last month, before he was released, Flaherty earned his MBA from Adams State University.
Getting a degree in prison is no easy accomplishment. Once, while taking a test, there was a dispute that had to be settled by corrections officers, who sprayed the area with mace. After the brouhaha died down, and Flaherty was able to get back to his test, he affixed a note on it to his professor, warning that he might want to wear gloves while grading it. Flaherty graduated with a 3.94 GPA, a solitary B-plus holding him back from perfection.
Once he gets his bearings on the outside — adjusting to cellphones, and AirPods, and, well, “everything,†he says, he plans to seek a job in the financial services industry. Whatever he does with the rest of his life, he hopes his experience will serve as an example to others that as views on the criminal justice system trend away from America’s status as the world leader in mass incarceration, that there is a better way.
“You can be smart on crime and tough on crime at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive,†Flaherty says. “I’m a firm believer that if somebody who is in prison for the first time in particular, there should be a mechanism to examine what they’ve done, and decide, should we keep this person here, or should we use their bed for somebody else? There comes a point where how much is enough?â€