Roy Walker was 18 years old when his crime occurred and arrested in 1999. He was sentenced to LWOP in 2004, and did 25 years and 1 month exactly. Roy came home in October 2024.
Note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Joe: When were you first sentenced to life without parole (LWOP) and how much time did you spend away from your family and community?
Roy: First off, I was arrested in 1999. I was sentenced to LWOP in 2004, and I did 25 years and 1 month exactly.
Joe: Okay, and what 2 or 3 accomplishments are you most proud of since your release?
Roy: First is getting my driver’s license. I have never had one before, so I was very excited about that. Uh, enrolling in college and being productive with that and like I told my Pops when I was in prison, if I’d have been this motivated and dedicated when I was out in school, ain’t no telling where I’d be [now] because I’m getting As and Bs right now. Well, I got my first B ever so… in Political Science.
Joe: And what is a significant challenge and how did you overcome it?
Roy: The most significant challenge that I’ve faced since I’ve been out is being in LA and not knowing anybody, not knowing my way around. How I’ve faced it… where I work at is very inclusive. A lot of my coworkers include me in a lot of the things that they do, so they invite me out to a lot of different places and then I feel like I’m a people person, so the relationships that I’ve built since I’ve been out [have helped]. Um, yeah that’s the most significant challenge, and it continues to be a challenge, but I’m not discouraged or nothing like that.
Joe: Alright, what was your greatest support since you’ve been released?
Roy: My greatest support is my sister. If I didn’t have her, I ain’t going to lie, I’d probably be lost right now. My father passed away and that changed the dynamic of my supposed support network. A lot of the people that I thought were going to be in my corner they uh… I’m just gonna say it was a challenge. Like I said, if I didn’t have my sister, I’d be lost right now.
Joe: And what would you like to say to others that are coming home? Suggestions on how to succeed?
Roy: First of all, throw that plan sh*t out the window. You [are] planning that you’re going to do A, B, C when you get out, [but] you gotta be like water, you gotta be able to flow with whatever comes your way. And don’t be too proud to use the resources that are around you, the people that are around you, the connections that you’ve made, other LWOPs that are out here because there are LWOPs in position to help you. You just have to reach out and speak. And take it slow. Don’t be so fast to get up and go. You gotta take your time and just enjoy the scenery. Stop and smell the roses sometimes as they say.
Joe: How have you freed yourself from the trauma of incarceration, if you have?
Roy: That’s still been a struggle because I still move and live… I have a single occupancy room right now and if you look at it, it almost looks like a cell without the lines and stuff, but I have everything close by to where I don’t really have to go nowhere and that’s how we used to live when we were in the cells. It’s still a struggle, even when I’m in a big group setting, I still feel uncomfortable. I was at a birthday party Sunday night, and I ended up leaving early because… it was cool, but I… it was just certain elements at the party that I really wasn’t feeling, so I got up out of there. So, it’s still a struggle, and like I said before, it might have something to do with my support network. My family, my friends I don’t have them around me to even mingle with or go out with or you know loosen up. It’s like I’m always on guard.
Joe: How do you see ending of LWOP?
Roy: For me, I think LWOP in that sense is useless. At the end of the day, people go to the [Parole] Board, so the Board is deciding whether you get out or not. So, if you go to the Board, and you haven’t been doing anything while you’ve been in prison, the Board isn’t going to let you out. But if you’ve been doing A, B, and C while you’re in prison, then 9/10 you have the opportunity to get out of prison. So, you’re telling me at the age of 18, when I was arrested, and sentenced at the age of 22/23, you’re telling me that I have no redeemable qualities and that I should spend the rest of my life in jail. And then when I got to prison, even COs (Correctional Officers), when they found out that I had LWOP, they couldn’t believe it because it wasn’t in my character. Mistakes that we made as kids, you know we think differently as adults. To give someone LWOP, basically you’re saying that there’s nothing redeemable about this individual.
Joe: So, how do we end it?
Roy: I mean, I feel like it should go back to the way it was I believe in the 70s/80s where after you’ve done 25 years, you automatically go to the Board. You go to the Board, and you let the Board decide. Because one thing that the Board commended me for doing [while in prison] before it was required of me was I was doing groups, anger management, denial management, relapse intervention, I was doing all these programs when I had an LWOP and LWOPs weren’t even going home. They didn’t even have the opportunity to go home, so they commended me for doing the work before it was required of me. Nobody forced me to do these groups. There’s a lot of LWOPs that are in prison right now that are doing programs, and they’re not required to do none of that sh*t. They just want to house us in prison. Their whole theory is that LWOPs are the backbones of the institution because we’re the ones that keep the bullsh*t down. But, then at the same time you want to keep us in prison because you say that we’re “the worst of the worst.” They’re not telling that narrative. I’ve sat in meetings with Associate Warden’s and Wardens where they’ve said that [LWOPs] are the backbones of the institution. They actually said that. They’re allowing LWOPs to go to Level 2’s now. So, if we’re the backbone of the institution, how can we be the “worst of the worst”? If you look at all the positive programming/groups that are in prison, I guarantee you that the majority of those programs were created by LWOPs. The strength of a lot of these programs that are in prison right now are on the backbone of LWOPs. How they walk everyone out there, how they promote all these different programs, I guarantee you they’re on the backbone of LWOPs. So, you sit up there and tell me how we’re the “worst of the worst,” when we’re the ones that are doing the positive programming. It doesn’t make any sense.
Joe: That’s a great point. So, that’s all the questions, but I think if you want to add anything about why you’re no longer an LWOP, or how you made it to the parole board, or anything that you want to share that’s near and dear to your heart.
Roy: The only reason why I got resentenced…I got resentenced in 2023 and the only reason why I got resentenced was because I work in R&R and my supervisor, like I said nobody could believe that I was an LWOP unless I told you or you went on the computer and looked. So, when I had a discussion with my supervisor, who was a 20 year vet CO, she couldn’t understand why I had a LWOP. And so, she sat back and watched me for a whole year do my job, not get caught up in the riff raff, and so based on one of the conversations that we had, she brought it up that she would write a letter of recommendation for resentencing for me. And she wrote a letter and sent a copy to my attorney and a copy to the Alameda County District Attorney’s office, and I was resentenced. And it’s crazy because even when I got resentenced and I was going back and forth to work, there were COs that wanted to shake my hand, give me a high five, and all this other stuff. I didn’t tell or do anything to compromise my integrity or who I am to get out of prison. Other COs saw that I was a good person and saw that I deserved a second chance. As long as you put the work in, you can’t straddle the fence… I used to tell people in the yard that you can’t pray to two gods. You can’t be getting high over here, but then going to church over there. It doesn’t make any sense.
Joe: That’s perfect.
Roy: Can I mention something about equal protection ?
Joe: Yes.
Roy: Because especially after going through this Political Science class and they came out with these juvenile laws saying that your brain is not mentally developed until the age of 26 unless you were sentenced to LWOP. To me, that doesn’t make any sense. So basically, you’re punishing me for practicing my constitutional right to face my accuser… and so basically, I was 18 years old when I committed my crime. And then you’re going to tell that person that, “Oh, you’re going to prison for the rest of your life, you’re not getting out” and a judge tells you that you’re going to die in prison based on one mistake that you made as a kid. That’s why I’m going to college for Addiction Studies because I want to become a counselor, a drug counselor. And that’s why I’m working with St. John’s Community Health’s RISE program.
I started off as a community health worker, so basically, I had a mandatory of 30 people on my case load where I assisted them, whether it was education, employment, housing, or medical.
If they had requirements for their parole, we assist them with that, as far as getting them into an AA/NA. If they had to do anger management, domestic violence classes, things like that, I assist them with that. I recently got a raise in August and got promoted to a Workforce Navigator to where now I’m answering referrals for employment, work clothes, work tools, legal services, and education. We’re doing live scans, record expungements on October 1st. I ran my first one last month, so this is going to be my second one.
This job has given me the opportunity to get out there and meet people because I just had an event last night, and at the end of September, I’ll be going to San Francisco for a job summit, networking for St. John’s RISE program. As soon as I get off parole, they might be sending me state to state…[laughs] I don’t know. This is the opportunity that I…you know you always hope for these types of things, but while I was in prison, I never… I wanted it to happen, but in actuality I didn’t think it was going to happen, especially with the way that I was living when I first got to prison because I wasn’t a model prisoner by any means. The dudes that was up in prison, f*cking up when they first got to prison… yeah, I was that dude. It’s never too late, start the work now. This is how I look at it, if you were f*cking up on the streets, and then you got to prison, you never got a 115 after that, then you go to the board, the board is going to think you’re manipulating the system. Personally, I feel like it looked better for me because I was f*cking up when I got there…I was f*cking up on the streets and then I was f*cking up when I got to prison. And then I slowly, but surely, made the change. I didn’t automatically just stop getting write ups because they were still coming, it was fewer and farther in between than they used to be. It used to be back to back to back, and then they started spreading out. It used to be 2 months, then 6 months, then a year, then my last write up before I got out was 7 years.
Joe: What was your big, significant change that started making the write ups become less and less?
Roy: [Laughs] It’s kinda funny because you know me, Joe. I was validated, and then one of the incidents, I went to the hole, and people told on me. It only had to come from the people that I was representing, and that kinda like turned me off, but it still didn’t stop me from pushing. And then, I remember when I got to Solano, it was the individuals on the yard that I approached. I didn’t tell the group that I ran with, but I told my brother that I ran the streets with because it was some street stuff. So, me and him approached the individual…and some of the people that I ran with didn’t like that. So, I had just made it up in my mind… you know what, I’m cool…I’m going to do these groups and these jobs, and y’all can leave me the f*ck alone. It wasn’t an adversarial type of situation, but I still dealt with the people that I ran with, but they understood what I was trying to do. Some of them assisted me with it, some of them just left me alone. A lot of my folks helped me out along the way and assisted me and tried to do the positive programming. And then even when… because we all backslide, but even when I sometimes backslid, I had people around me that pulled my coattails and told me that I was tripping. It’s always positive to have those individuals around you that are going to hold you accountable because they understand what you’re trying to do.
Joe: And how old were you when that change started?
Roy: Um…it was 2015? I was 35.
Joe: Mm. So, you started maturing at 35? I started at 40, so I understand. [laughs]
Moneaya: It’s okay. At least you guys matured. [laughs]
Roy: I’m not going to say that’s when I started. I woke up that day and was like you know what I’m tired of this sh*t, but I was still… it’s like I said about praying to 2 gods, I was praying to 2 gods at that time. I had one foot in and one foot out. Part of me was like man, f*ck this sh*t I’m still thugging, and then the other part was like man, I’m cool. But, it was an incident that happened on the yard and it had to do with someone that I f*cked with, this was my partner, but there was some money involved, and he owed me some money, and was lagging on paying me. In the streets, there’s only one way…if somebody doesn’t pay you, there’s something that you have to do about it because if you allow this dude to slide with it, then other people will feel like they can slide with it too. I had to tell myself…I told you I was praying to 2 gods, so if I say that I wanted to go home, how am I going to be doing this over here too? So, then I had to tell myself, you know what it’s not worth it…I’m going to fall back from the hustling and that was the point… that was like 2017/2018. That’s when I was like you know what…because I had to realize that first of all, when you’re in the streets and in the gang, there’s only one way to handle disrespect. If you don’t handle it accordingly, then you’re going to keep getting disrespected.
Joe: So, how do you handle [disrespect] now?
Roy: The yard taught me how to read a situation and how to get the h*ll out of dodge.
Joe: But, how do you prevent [disrespect]?
Roy: I don’t have to answer a situation; I choose not to be in the situation. I’m not going to engage in it. If somebody yells at me and I talk calmly to them, that right there diffuses the situation because I’m not matching their energy. I’m going to bring the energy down and try to get them to come to my energy and calm down. I’m going to school for this now, but I didn’t learn any of this sh*t in school. I learned this by politicking in the yard. Because when you gotta talk to another person where it can be a potential war, you gotta know how to talk to people. Because if you say one wrong word, it can go up and you can jeopardize people that you say you love. I learnt that in prison. I learnt that by trial and error.
Joe: And that’s why they say that lived experience is so valuable out here. Since being out, what has lived experience looked like for you?
Roy: That’s how I got my job. One of the requirements for my job is lived experience. Some jobs you gotta have a college degree, or something like that, but for my job you gotta have lived experience. That’s how you get the job. Because you’re going to be dealing with people fresh out of prison that are hostile because things are not going their way. So, if you come to me and I tell you, brother believe me, I know what you’re going through, you might think oh man, no he doesn’t. Because first of all, I’ve been told that I don’t look like I’ve been to prison before, but then when I tell people I just got finished doing 25 years with an LWOP sentence, and I just got booted out of the place that I was staying at and had to find another place, took me 5 months to get this job and I only have 6 months in the program to find a job, believe me I know. I gotta ask for permission to go and see my family in the Bay Area, believe me I know. I get drug tested once a month, believe me I know. So, when I have these conversations with my clients, I try to let them know that I understand what they’re going through and that it’s not easy, but it’s all about being resilient and understanding that if you’re not trying to go back to [prison], sometimes you gotta eat sh*t to get to the promised land. I had one client who needed some work clothes, so I was giving her different resources, and she didn’t want to do it because it was used clothes and told me that I didn’t understand what she was going through. I told her that she’s only seeing the finished product. When I first got out of prison, I was wearing used clothes. Nobody is getting out of prison like that and jumping into new clothes.
