connections. His uncle Petey Jones was a linebacker on the 1971 state-champion team memorialized in the movie Remember the Titans, which was set against a backdrop of racial tensions brought on by the integration of Alexandria’s high schools. In 1990, his maternal grandfather, Thomas “Pete” Jones Sr., was such a fierce fighter for equal housing that then–president George H. W. Bush met with him and other residents to discuss ways to rid Alexandria’s public housing units of drugs.
Ronnie and his brother grew up in Section 8 housing in northern Virginia, moving every few years as their mom worked her way up to better jobs. A no-holds-barred fight between the brothers when Ronnie was fifteen taxed his mother’s nerves to the breaking point. She sent him to live in Alexandria with his father, dropping his belongings on the curb in trash bags and telling his dad, as Ronnie recalled it: “He your responsibility now. I’m done.”
Ronnie’s father and uncle were regular drug users. He remembered them going down into the basement regularly to freebase powder cocaine. Six months after moving in with his dad, Ronnie moved in with his maternal grandmother, Rosie, his favorite relative. Her husband was an Air Force mechanic who took Ronnie to air shows at Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, and let him sit in the pilot’s seat. He was fascinated with airplanes and wanted to be an Air Force pilot. It was a short but happy time in a tumultuous upbringing: His grandmother helped him get a dishwashing job at a nearby retirement home, and he sold cookie dough for a door-to-door nonprofit organization on the side, developing an acumen for sales.
His grandmother gave him anything he wanted—as long as he stayed in school. But he had already switched schools ten times before his sixteenth birthday, often butting heads with his teachers. One memorable clash with authority came during a class discussion that spiraled into a debate about who had been persecuted most: African Americans, native Americans, or Jews. The exchange grew so heated that Ronnie was asked to leave the classroom, which he did, forcefully pushing the door on his way out in a way the teacher perceived as threatening. The incident culminated in a fine and his first juvenile probation stint.
“I play those incidents over and over in my head,” he said of his first few legal charges. “If I had never drove that girl’s car and then [the car with the stolen goods], I could’ve been probably in the military now and having a regular life.”
Jobs were hard to get. Because of Ronnie’s felony record, his applications were turned down by Burger King, McDonald’s, Walmart, and Lowe’s. For a time, he worked at Food Lion in Maryland, driving an hour each way to get there. A cousin introduced him to cocaine dealing, he said, whereupon Ronnie realized that he could stock shelves for two weeks and not come close to making what he could dealing drugs in a single day. The math was irresistible.
Ronnie said he hated hard drugs and didn’t want to end up like his dad. So he drank only on his birthday and New Year’s Eve, and eschewed marijuana entirely. But dealing drugs gave him the two things he craved most: money and respect. He says he was profiled in early 2000 when he and a black friend were pulled over on Interstate 66 near Herndon, Virginia, and naïvely consented to being searched, ostensibly for not having a county sticker on their car. (They were driving a car with Maryland plates, he said.) Police found 3 grams of crack cocaine tucked into his sock. “I was guilty. I did have the drugs.”
Bonded out of jail by his grandmother, he was arrested a short time later for selling drugs to an undercover cop, and the two state charges plus a probation violation combined for a state-prison sentence of eight and a half years. His court-appointed attorney was overworked and “just wanted to get me over with,” Jones said; he didn’t answer the letters Jones wrote about his case from jail. He was encouraged to accept the prosecutor’s first plea deal, and to remain mum in court. This was 2001, a time when prosecutors across the country were doubling the number of felonies they filed in state courts despite declining crime rates. In his 2017 book, Locked In, Fordham Law School professor John F. Pfaff argues that it’s politically safer and economically cheaper to charge a person with a felony, which