Portraits of a New Beginning: Jonathan Edgar

«Prison changed me a lot. I am one of the few who came out of it well, and it was because I wanted to. I got my act together and made the most of my time; I changed careers. It all depends on you — on your desire to improve yourself.»

The first time Johnathan Edgar won a hearing was in his own case, in front of the same judge who had sentenced him to seven years in prison for violating his probation rules. Johnathan was born in 1971 in Hyannis, Massachusetts. He went to prison in 1996 and was paroled after five months. After two years of freedom, he fled to Mexico. In 2014, police found him, and a judge gave him a new seven-year sentence. He studied law in Arizona state prison and, as his own lawyer, managed to reduce his sentence to five and a half years.

“I have reduced the sentences of many people, not because they are innocent, but because they were unfair to them [because] they had no one to defend them,” he says. Since his release from prison in 2019, he has worked as a paralegal, although he its that the transition was initially difficult. “I felt up in the air, lost, numb, like when you go to the dentist,” Johnathan says. He plans to study law at the Universidad Valle de México.

^{* The testimonies in "Portraits of a New Beginning" were collected and edited by Ana María Carrano, María Gabriela Méndez, Olivia Liendo and Tamoa Calzadilla, under the coordination of Olivia Liendo and Ana María Carrano.}

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