MY TIME WILL COME

An unsparing memoir about the cruel, long-unexamined policy of sentencing juveniles to life in prison.

Manuel’s account is both heart-wrenching and uplifting. An impoverished, disturbed youth, he received a life sentence for a nonlethal shooting during a robbery attempt, and he spent 18 years in solitary confinement, starting at age 15. As legal activist Bryan Stevenson, who aided Manuel through his Equal Justice Initiative, notes in the foreword, “His abusive isolation was justified by misguided protocols and a devastating lack of understanding about adolescent development, mental health, or behavioral science. What happened to Ian is beyond cruel but sadly not unique.” Manuel chillingly portrays his deprived upbringing in a high-crime Tampa neighborhood. “I hurt someone very badly during a time in my life when I was blinded by my own hurt,” he writes. Although pressured by older boys, the author was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14. The prosecutor, he writes “was advancing a prevalent view at the time about boys of color”—that they were “super predators.” Manuel vividly captures the terror of an adolescent thrust into adult incarceration and the added trauma of solitary confinement. He portrays the prison bureaucracy as arbitrary in its amplification of punitive measures, including routine beatings and tear-gassings. While in prison, the author began corresponding with the woman he’d shot, who ultimately forgave him. During his time in solitary, writing poetry helped maintain his sanity, and his sharp verse punctuates his narrative. In 2006, EJI reached out to Manual as part of an effort to overturn the life sentences of 73 children for nonhomicide crimes. The EJI, writes the author, “sought to base its case on the unconstitutionality of cruel and unusual punishment…a Hail Mary pass, as I saw it.” Surprisingly, the Supreme Court concurred, leading to Manuel’s release. “The world was all before me now,” he writes, “but what exactly did that mean?”

A disturbing, vital, necessary eyewitness addition to debates about the mass incarceration epidemic in the U.S.