Former NBA star turned Miami Heat assistant coach Caron Butler is opening up about a dark chapter in his life amid the push for criminal justice reform.
Butler appeared at the Connecticut State Capitol in Hartford on Tuesday to ask Gov. Ned LaMont to sign into law newly passed legislation that would limit the use of solitary confinement and other forms of isolation for prisoners.
Now 41, Butler was locked up in juvenile prisons for over a year as a teen in Wisconsin. He says he spent a few weeks in solitary confinement after a prison fight, an experience that was especially desperate and trying.
“Being in those four walls and those four corners, it does something to you,” Butler told the Associated Press in an interview. “Mentally and spiritually, it takes away a lot. It dehumanizes you.”
Butler was arrested at least a dozen times as a juvenile on drugs and firearms charges, the story said. He turned his life around after discovering basketball in prison, and cited his strong network of family and friends for supporting him through his lowest times. After graduating from a Maine high school upon his release, Butler earned a scholarship at UConn, where he starred with the Huskies before making the jump to the NBA in 2002.
But the experience of solitary never left him, and with Connecticut on the verge of reforming its isolation policies and shutting down the controversial maximum-security Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, Butler says the time was now to push for sweeping changes nationally, with Connecticut serving as a model.
“Now I look back in hindsight and I want to tell my younger self to stay hopeful,” he said. “There are people out there that care. There’s going to be elected officials out there in the future that’s going to care about this community in real time. There’s going to be change on the horizon. They are going to come up with ways to rehabilitate that never dehumanize people.”
While Connecticut's bill would limit solitary confinement, there are exceptions, according to the Associated Press. Prisoners can still be isolated if they present a danger to someone's life. However, a review process would be implemented so that confinement doesn't go on indefinitely, the story said.
Barbara Fair, the leader of an activist group campaigning against solitary confinement, said it's important for recognizable people like Butler to speak out.
“This is somebody people can connect with,” she said. “That’s the biggest problem around our prison systems, is that often people have a hard time connecting with the humanity of incarcerated people.”
Butler joins fellow former UConn star Maya Moore in leading the campaign for criminal justice reform. Moore stepped away from her decorated WNBA career to campaign for the exoneration of a wrongfully convicted man, Jonathan Irons, whom she later married.
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