sends them to prison—on the state’s dime—than it is to incarcerate someone locally or put them on probation, paid for by local budgets.
“No matter where you turn in this epidemic,” East Tennessee State University public health professor Robert Pack told me, “there are systems in place to address the problems, but none of them are working together.” The biggest barrier to collaboration is the fact that everyone involved views the problem too rigidly—through the lens of how they get paid, according to Pack.
Ronnie finished high school in jail, then took computer-repair classes in the state prison system, earning a GPA of 3.6. He tutored other inmates working toward their GEDs and earned a certificate in computer-repair tech. His goal was to get a job as a certified network administrator, maybe land a government job.
His brother’s career was on a high when Ronnie got out of prison in 2008. Thomas, also known by the stage name “Big Pooh,” had been traveling in Asia on a contract with Atlantic Records, recording with the rap band Little Brother.
“I gave him five thousand dollars for a laptop and helped him get on his feet,” Thomas told me. Ronnie was working for T-Mobile, selling cellphones for a time, but grew frustrated that he wasn’t advancing in the company, a failure that he attributed to his record. He was too impatient, too clever by half. “I kept telling him, ‘Man, the system is set up for you to fail. Just be happy you found some employment because most people who are felons can’t,’” Thomas recalled. “Ronnie has a knack for quickly reading people and knowing how to talk to ’em and reel ’em in. I said, ‘You just got to work that opportunity till you get another one.’ But it wasn’t fast enough for him.”
Thomas was on the road in 2010 when he took another collect call from Ronnie. His brother had been locked up again, this time for credit-card fraud.
“I was like, ‘Come on, we just did all this stuff trying to help you get on your feet?’” Thomas remembered, exasperated.
Thomas rapped about devotion and disappointment in a song called “Real Love,” from an acclaimed solo album released in 2011:
Brother, wrong or right
The fact that you were incarcerated
After being free let me know you never made it
To that point where the old you is not outdated…
No matter how this picture looks
I’m still putting money on your books.
I told you…we family.
It was the credit-card fraud charge that landed Ronnie in the diversion program at George’s Chicken, and for a time following his release from it, his family believed he had turned a corner. He told his brother and mom he’d launched a computer-repair startup, which was certainly within his abilities, given the skills he’d picked up in prison programs. Thomas’s own business was in a lull at the moment, so Ronnie floated the idea of starting a joint venture. He wanted Thomas’s help opening a Caribbean jerk-chicken restaurant in Winchester. He didn’t turn to his brother because he needed the money; Ronnie needed Thomas’s help securing a liquor license, which wasn’t possible for a felon.
“I didn’t understand the urgency for him wanting to buy something legitimate,” Thomas said. “I just kept saying, ‘I don’t live in Virginia, and I’m not going to have my name on nobody’s liquor license and I can’t be there. And anyway, who’s going to come to a restaurant in this dead little small town?’”
Thomas began doubting his brother during their final visit, when Ronnie and a girlfriend drove to Charlotte to see him and his wife. “I’m like, I don’t know if the computer business is this good? He had a Mercedes-Benz truck. And he had a motorcycle that he couldn’t really ride, and another car back at home.”
Thomas said he wondered if the girlfriend, who worked at a federal agency, owned some of the vehicles but admits that he didn’t really want to know. Thomas now believes his brother was trying to phase out of drug dealing so that if and when he got arrested, there would be a legitimate revenue stream already established to help support his daughters.
Ronnie Jones has frustrated his younger brother his entire life—and that pattern of behavior included his initial refusal to cooperate with Bill Metcalf and Don Wolthuis, the ATF agent and prosecutor responsible for his conviction. Ronnie thought he deserved a ten-year sentence, so he fired his first court-appointed attorney, Sherwin Jacobs, who’d negotiated a plea deal of fifteen years with Wolthuis—a decision