Endless Retribution

Richard Nixon showed that there really are second (and third) acts in American life, but Congress didn't get the memo, and so Jean Montrevil may be denied his own American Dream. A Haitian citizen who came to the United States legally at age seventeen, Montrevil had a green card when he was arrested on drug charges in 1988 at age nineteen. He served eleven years of a thirty-three-year sentence and was released early for good behavior. But a law passed after he went to prison requires that non-citizens convicted of felonies be returned to their country of origin after completing their sentence. "Prison saved my life," says Montrevil, who believes he would have died in the drug trade had he not gone to jail.