For Some Prisoners, Finishing Their Sentences Doesn’t Mean They Get Out

After serving a year and two months for a probation violation, Landreaux Yantz should have been able to walk out of a New York state prison on June 26, 2015. But officials would not let him leave.

“When I laid in my bed every night I was thinking, ‘I’m free. Why the hell am I still here?’”

Yantz had nowhere to go. In 2011, he was convicted of rape in the third degree for having sex at age 26 with a 14-year-old and was sentenced to six months in jail. His sex offender status now meant he could not live within 1,000 feet of a school — which, in his home of New York City, ruled out almost everywhere.