Brad Yule

We'll get to know each other more.

I didn't know prison.

I knew by then, but I didn't know initially prison had email.

You can email people in prison.

So we were emailing, calling, and I was already thinking, okay, it's going to be another visit pretty soon.

Instead, less than a month later, the dad that had raised me my whole life died.

Three weeks after my dad died, that little COVID pandemic started, and there was no prison visitation anymore.

The upside to COVID was they suddenly instituted video visitation.

So instead of just talking to him on the phone and writing emails, I could see him once a week for 10 minutes at a time as we got to know each other, which kept him a real person in my head because I could see him all the time.

The more we got to know each other, the more I found myself liking him more and thinking I couldn't really understand why he was still in prison.

I knew he took another man's life.

I knew what his sentence was, but

It didn't seem to be serving anybody any more purpose.

He had rehabilitated.

I felt like he was nowhere near the man that he was in 1972 when he walked in.

And I started wondering about what would be the possibility of ever getting him out.

While I was going through that, the Louisiana state legislator was also working on some bills that would help men like him have the eligibility for parole that they had never had before.

While we were getting to know each other, one of the things that happened was he and I kept talking back and forth.

I called him Jim.

Jim was his name.