For at least two hours of the ride home, Charles Collins feared someone was following his father’s car, looking to take him back to prison for the rest of his life.
At an interstate rest stop between Western Illinois Correctional Center and Chicago, Collins said the reality of his freedom settled in and he let go of the anxiety. He would be with his family for Christmas for the first time in 14 years.
“It’s going to be a party, that’s for sure,” he said during an interview on Monday.
Collins, 49, was sentenced to life in prison without parole in relation to a 2010 charge for cocaine possession with intent to sell. It was his third felony, making him eligible for an enhanced sentence under the state’s habitual criminal, or “three-strikes,” law. He had two prior felonies on drug trafficking charges from 1998 to 2007 that made him eligible for the enhanced sentence. The judge told him she had no choice, he recalled, before she sentenced him to life without the possibility of parole.
“For a minute, it didn’t sink in. I was shocked that the judge went through with it,” Collins said.
The three-strikes law allows that if a defendant is convicted more than three times of the same or similar offenses, the judge can aggravate the crime to one that is eligible for a life sentence. The law was designed to combat recidivism, but advocates argue it was draconian and unfairly targeted minority defendants.
Jennifer Soble, the executive director for the Illinois Prison Project, an advocacy group for incarcerated people, noted in 2020 that 75 percent of people serving life sentences in Illinois were African American and 94 percent of people serving life sentences in Illinois for a third strike for armed robbery or drugs were African American or Latino.
Collins was the last man serving life in the Illinois Department of Corrections under the three-strikes law for drug offenses, Illinois Prison Project legal director Candice Chambliss said.
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