Man who spent 68 years in prison reacts to new modern world he entered after release

A man who spent 68 years in prison remarked on how different the world around him was once he became a free man again.

88-year-old Joe Ligon was a juvenile when back in 1953 he was part of a group of five teenagers who started robbing people to try and buy alcohol, resulting in the deaths of Charles Pitts and Jackson Hamm from stabbing as well as six others being injured.

Ligon said he stabbed a man named Clarence Belvey in the chest but denied being responsible for either of the deaths, and though he wasn't an adult he was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole.

Offered clemency in the 1970s, the others took the offer but Ligon didn't as he didn't want to spend the rest of his life on parole and it wasn't until 2021 that he was released.

In 2012 the US Supreme Court said life sentences without parole for juveniles was unconstitutional, and in 2016 it ruled this was retroactive so applied to Ligon's case as well, and the following year he was re-sentenced to 35 years behind bars a few years later he was released without parole.

Joe Ligon said the old streetcars were gone and replaced by modern buses (CBS)

When he left prison a free man he told CBS about some of the changes in the world, saying he 'almost cried' when he went free but 'broke down with a big smile on my face'.

"A free man, free at last," Joe had said in relief to be free from prison.

Walking around with their reporters, he pointed out 'those buses there they didn't exist because they had streetcar lines', and some of the changes the modern world made are things he said he expected.

"I looked out and seen all these high buildings, but I expect to see that," he said, as even though he was in prison he'd have seen what the outside world was turning into.

"They locked me up, they did, they didn't lock my mind up."

Joe spent 68 years in prison (CBS)

While Joe expected to see some skyscrapers once he was on the outside there are other details people who've been incarcerated for a long time don't expect to change.

When Otis Johnson was locked up in 1970 and spent 44 years behind bars he wondered if everyone walking around with headphones were CIA agents, since the decades of technological progress had passed him by and he had no frame of reference for it.

He was amazed by advertising screens, saying: "On the windows?! I ain't never seen anything like this before! Look! On the windows?

"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."

He also didn't realise that when he saw 'the majority of people were talking to themselves' it was everyone on their iPhones, and marvelled at people's skills to walk and talk without really seeing where they were going.

Johnson was glad to see that some of his favourite foods were still around, but not everything had made it.