Man reacts to seeing iPhones and Times Square after spending 44 years in prison
A US man who spent over four decades behind bars had an astonishing reaction after seeing how the world had changed.
In May 1970, martial arts teacher Otis Johnson, then 25, was sentenced for the attempted murder of a police officer - a crime which he has never admitted to - and handed a 25-to-life sentence.
It would be another 44 years before Johnson would see the wider world again, when he was released in August 2014.
At 69 years old, he was then handed an ID, documents discussing his criminal case history, two bus tickets, and $40 (£32.04) before being sent off into society once again.
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Something which would've been completely overwhelming for a man who would've been used to rotary dial phones and bell-bottom trousers.
Unsurprisingly, catching up on numerous major world events and an entire digital revolution was overwhelming for Johnson, who told Al Jazeera: "Prison affected me a lot. My re-entry was a little bit hard at first, because things have changed."
Now Johnson had been thrust into a world of iPhones, electronic billboards and tiny wired headphones, the latter of which made every passerby resemble stereotypical CIA agents.
"On the windows?! I ain't never seen anything like this before! Look! On the windows," Johnson said of the rolling billboards which paint New York's Times Square, something which is completely normal to a person who has grown up in the past couple of decades, but completely alien to a man who essentially time-travelled from the 1970s to the 2010s.
"We ain't seen nothing on no windows but people walking by, not no video," he laughed, before sharing his thoughts about the people who passed through the thoroughfare.
"I was looking at the atmosphere, the new things that was happening and I seen that the majority of people were talking to themselves," he continued.
Moving on to the topic of people appearing glued to their iPhones, Johnson went on to explain why they resembled secret agents to him.
"Then I look closely, and they seemed to have things in their ears. I don't know with those things, the phone things...iPhones they call them or something like that?" he said.
"I thought, 'What, everybody became CIA or agents and stuff like that?' Because that's the only thing I can think of if somebody walking around with wires in the ears. That's what they had when I was out during the 60s and the 70s."
Even a simple task such as buying food was completely baffling to Johnson, who was surprised by the 'crazy' amount of stuff available in his local supermarkets.
"I eat different things now because I'm looking at all this crazy stuff they got," he said. "The funny dinners, different coloured drinks.
"There's so many things that you can eat, so it's a hard choice to pick out the food that you want. For instance, the peanut butter - it had jelly in it?
"And I ain't never seen nothing like that before, it definitely wasn't in the prison system. Peanut butter and jelly in the same place, in a jar? That that was strange."
Topics: Technology, iPhone, Crime
Brenna Cooper