from 2016 to 2020, 374 people, wrongfully convicted of murder, 61% african-americans, have reunited with their families. together they spent over 6,000 years in prison. years they will never get back. that's all for this edition of dateline. i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching.

i'lester holt: i hadd thso many thoughts" leading up to this assignment as to what it was going to be like. try to imagine going down this road knowing it's a one way trip. you know, this moment where you get your last glimpse at the world around you, but that glimpse is through steel mesh. louisiana's highway 66. its beautiful countryside is undoubtedly not lost on the countless men driven to the place where they'll most likely die. that road ends here, the louisiana state penitentiary. a former plantation the size of manhattan, 28 square miles. most people call it angola, named after the african country that was home to the slaves who once worked these very fields.

now, angola is the largest maximum security prison in the country, where today i'll be housed with about 5,500 men. i'm heading into ground zero of mass incarceration. there's certainly a heightened awareness as i walk through here with no guards. lester holt (voiceover): for the next couple of days, i'll be staying here exploring key issues of the prison reform debate, juveniles sentenced to life without parole-- we were children when we got incarcerated. lester holt: --the lasting effects of the war on drugs-- my sentence was 150 years. lester holt: --the power of rehabilitation-- you know that you've done something. your life is worthwhile. lester holt: --and the demand, by many, for punishment. personally, i think he's where he needs to be. lester holt: i'll also be staying in a cell, not to play prisoner, but to better understand the purpose and experience of prison, all

from the inside. hello, and welcome to "dateline." we have all heard the saying lock them up and throw away the key. critics say that has been our country's approach to crime for far too long. they question whether mass incarceration is keeping us any safer, and what lengthy prison terms mean for many of the more than 2 million americans behind bars. lester holt spent three days in one of the nation's toughest penitentiaries, and this is what he witnessed. here's his special report "life inside." lester holt: life at angola prison isn't what you might imagine. the vast majority live just like this, more than 80 men in open dorms sleeping on bunk beds.

but i'll be staying on a unit next to death row for high risk offenders, or as in my case, a high profile guest. we're going to go down the tier here. lester holt: my home for the next two nights will be on a tier called ccr, or closed cell restriction. the men here are locked in their cells 23 hours a day. i'm given sheets, slippers, and some toiletries, and shown to my cell. cell 11. go in here please. go ahead close. lester holt: naturally, phones aren't allowed. all i have is my journal, a pen, a novel, my watch, and an am/fm radio. i also have cameras all around me that were installed by our crew to record my experience and my thoughts. you know, as journalists we know that to get to the heart of something, you have to get inside it.

the closer you are to something, the more is revealed to you. i soon meet my neighbor, william curtis, who is serving a life sentence for second-degree murder. he tells me he's locked in ccr because he's tried to escape multiple times. how far did you get? not very. lester holt: he's only allowed out of his cell one hour a day. do you go out? not very often. the last time i went out there was probably about four years ago. you haven't seen the sun in four years? four years. it's hard to imagine. i just want to get through the night. all right, man, you take care of yourself. we'll be here a couple days. all right. lester holt: i quickly learned that falling asleep in prison is challenging. the toilet's flush loudly and often, cell to cell chatter lasts well into the night,

and my bed is attached through the wall to curtis's. so, believe it or not, when he moves around, i feel it. bed's not much for comfort. it's kind of a plastic mattress, but it did the trick. i slept ok. breakfast arrives at 5:30 am delivered by a prisoner. in case you're wondering, it's scrambled eggs, grits, and biscuits to the sound of a flushing toilet. no country on earth locks up more of its citizens than the united states. while we make up less than 5% of the world's population, we lock up more than 20% of the world's prisoners. politicians, academics, and activists say mass incarceration is an american crisis. we've gone from $6 billion in spending

in 1980 on jails and prisons to $80 billion today. lester holt (voiceover): civil rights lawyer bryan stevenson is one of the nation's leading prison reform advocates. i think we have hundreds of thousands of people in prison who are not a threat to public safety. but is it about safety or is it about punishment? i think we've created a culture that makes it entirely about punishment. lester holt: and you might be surprised who else thinks mass incarceration is a problem, the people who run louisiana's prison system. yeah, i think nationwide, we lock up people too long and too many of them. lester holt: seth smith is the director of operations for louisiana's department of corrections. it's not working. it's not giving us the results that we want. it's costing a lot of money. and we send people to prison that aren't necessarily a danger to society. and then we keep people their time as the danger's over. they're no longer a threat. lester holt (voiceover): he says it's time for americans to rethink the purpose of prison

from simply punishment to rehabilitation. you say it's about rehabilitation, but i think a lot of americans think it is about punishment. this should be hell. sure. they've done some awful things, but it's just punishment. we can make somebody worse. lester holt: but as i'm about to hear, plenty of the incarcerated do believe it's just about punishment. another day in the field. if you take or have taken humira for moderate to severe crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis and still have symptoms... you don't have to settle. ask your gastroenterologist if switching to rinvoq is right for you. it's one of the latest treatments from the makers of humira. rinvoq works differently than humira and may help. rinvoq is a once-daily pill that can deliver rapid symptom relief, lasting steroid-free remission, and helps visibly reduce damage of the intestinal lining. rinvoq can lower ability to fight infections. before treatment, test for tb and do bloodwork.

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♪♪ lester holt: much of angola prison is farmland. thousands of cattle are raised here to be sold on the open market, and a variety of crops are grown here as well all of it happening with inmate labor. that's one of the many hot button issues in the mass incarceration debate. another day in the field. lester holt: i'm on my way out to the fields, riding on this truck they call a hootenanny. many of the men are convicted killers, including the ones sitting on either side of me. javonte sanders beat a woman to death and stole her car. what's your sentence? life without parole. without parole. lester holt: terry mays shot a man in the neck during a drug deal. you've been here how many years? 30. 30 years. lester holt: here, like prisons everywhere in america, most inmates get paid pennies per hour.

how much do you get paid to come out here? $0.02 an hour. so this job is not one of the more desired ones? no, it's like-- this is the bottom of the barrel, the field. - yeah? nobody wants to be in the field. lester holt: angola is not like any other maximum security prison i've ever been to. all of this, as far as the eye can see, is angola. it's a series of prisons. they call them camps. these guys-- you guys from camp d? yes, sir. they're from camp d and then doing work like this. today, we happen to be picking carrots. so should i be worried about my safety here? well-- if it was an inmate, yeah. yeah? if you was an inmate, most definitely. lester holt: a majority of the inmates here are people of color. in fact, black men in america are six times as likely to be

incarcerated as white men. i certainly can't escape the optics. look around. mostly black men working on a former slave plantation under the watch of armed guards on horseback. it's unsettling to many. i know this is a sensitive subject, and it troubled me a little bit, made me uncomfortable talking to the guys. looking around, most of them look like me, african-american. the history of this land as a as a slave plantation-- do you see that as an issue? you know, i can see where someone could have an issue with it. any piece of farmland in the state of louisiana was a slave plantation at some point. and these guys were sentenced to hard labor. at least when they're working in the field growing vegetables, it's something that's giving back to the prison itself. lester holt: smith tells me the crops not only provide the inmate population fresh food, but he says it also saves taxpayers' money. it costs $1.70 a day to feed each offender.

this will be the life for many of these men for decades to come. and some have left young children behind, who are among the 5 million kids in america who have had a parent in prison. javonte has two of them. i mean, you know the way it works sometimes is you're in prison because your daddy was in prison, and your kid will be in prison. are you afraid for your children? yeah, i definitely am. i mean, when i grew up-- see, i didn't know my father. my father got murdered when i was three years old. i never knew him. lester holt (voiceover): it's hard to imagine knowing that you'll be spending the rest of your life here, especially if you were convicted as a teenager. advocates like bryan stevenson say juvenile offenders should never be treated the same as an adult. we put thousands of kids in adult jails and prisons, and we started prosecuting these kids. and even today, we have states with no minimum age for trying a child as an adult.

so i don't think we should ever put children in adult jails and prisons. lester holt: but what about ones who committed violent crimes, like murder? we were children when we got incarcerated. lester holt: i'm sitting in on a support group run by an assistant warden. all these men committed their crimes before they were adults and were given sentences of life without the possibility of parole. they're called juvenile lifers. i was 16 years old when i committed my crime. i was 17 years old. committed my crime at the age of 16. lester holt: there are about 2,000 juvenile lifers like them in us prisons today. i was a lot different in 17 than i am at 60 now. but still, at 17, i still knew right from wrong. so how do you reconcile that? you have to be accountable. there's no excuses for what i did, and there's no excuses for anything that any of us done. lester holt: they tell me they're no longer the boys they once were and say they are no longer a threat to society. but how do i know they're not conning me?

when we do get the opportunity to show that we are different, the people will be able to see. lester holt: and in the past few years, they've all gotten new hope to make their case for a second chance. what gives you that hope? right there. this man. that's our mount rushmore right there. montgomery, state of louisiana. lester holt: montgomery versus louisiana is a landmark supreme court ruling named after the oldest and longest serving member of this group, henry montgomery, who was 72 years old when i met him. you were 17 years old when you were sentenced. do you remember what it was like being 17? yeah. young, wild, stupid. lester holt: montgomery was indicted for murder in november, 1963, the same month jfk was assassinated. he's been at angola for 55 years. man, i'm behind 55 years. in technology, i'm 150 years behind time.

lester holt: in 2012, m the united states supreme court ruled that mandatory life without parole sentences for juveniles are unconstitutional pointing to science that says it's clear that adolescent brains are not yet fully mature. but that ruling didn't apply to people like henry montgomery who had already been sent away as a juvenile. so that's why montgomery took his case to the supreme court. and in 2016, he won. now, all juvenile lifers, no matter how long ago they were locked up, can make a case that they deserve parole. mostly older guys over here? lester holt (voiceover): 78-year-old clifford hampton is one of them. i went to see him in the dorm where he lives. this is my bed right here. this is your home? yeah, this is my aisle here. lester holt: he's been locked up 61 years. and since you've been here, we've landed a man on the moon. yeah. think about that.

yeah, there's been a lot of changes. lester holt: hampton says six decades in prison have changed him. and thanks to the man sitting next to him, hampton will now have a chance at freedom. why do you think you deserve parole? i wouldn't say that i deserve parole. i wouldn't use that word "deserve" because i took someone's life. i could say that i've earned parole. lester holt: in fact, both hampton and montgomery will see the parole board the same day, and i'll be there. how are you feeling? number one in. >> network coverage and. >> customer satisfaction. hi. my friend. linda has you guys. it gets. >> way better coverage than i do. >> sounds like. >> linda. >> has you. >> beat only. >> in coverage.

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to. >> recognize how. many of those things are getting announced. but they're not. >> happening at all, or at least not yet. >> just try to remember we are not looking at the final score. >> we are still in the first quarter. keep your pads on. the quarter. keep your pads on. the game has just begun. lester holt (voiceover): one of the things that struck me while walking around angola was how many men i met who seemed to be focused on changing their lives. one of them is dalton prejean jr. i just knew i had to do something different than just do time and die in prison. lester holt: since coming to angola back in 2004, he says he's turned his life around by taking advantage of the prison's programs. i graduated with a ba, a 3.91 average. lester holt: at the prison, he earned a master's degree from a bible college. he even became an ordained minister.

a couple of times a week, prejean gospel raps, his form of preaching, to the population. it's hard to square the man sitting across from me with the horrible crime that he committed. your actions caused the death of a baby? yeah. lester holt: when he was 21, he was watching his stepson. he says the child was inconsolable. prejean shook the baby so violently he died. now, he's serving a 60-year sentence for manslaughter. how do you move past that? how do you become a different person? at first, to be honest, i didn't know what i was going to do. it was sickening to my heart that i would actually have done something like that. lester holt: prejean says he was filled with anger, which had its roots in his childhood. this is a picture of prejean and his father, dalton

prejean sr, shortly before he was executed in the electric chair in 1990, in this very prison for killing a louisiana state trooper. you know, kids watch television all the time and they're like, well, you know, your dad is about to be fried chicken. and by me having the same name, you know, when people would call my name, you know, i would put my head down because i was ashamed of what i believed that name had meant. lester holt: but over the years, he says programs at angola helped change him, opportunities that weren't available when his father was here, and still aren't available at most prisons across the country. there's a whole movement around trying to revive the rehabilitation debate that we sort of abandoned. we've got people locked up with nothing to do, and we know that education is transformative. it reduces recidivism. lester holt: education and programs have also proven to reduce violence inside prison. angola was once known as the bloodiest prison in america,

but things began to change here in the 1990s when the prison began to focus on more than simply locking up people and feeding them. yeah, go ahead! lester holt: now, in addition to its popular annual inmate rodeo, there are a variety of programs. all right, ready? go. lester holt: these men are training service dogs for veterans. if you're tuned in-- lester holt: there's even a radio station run by incarcerated men. the only one in the nation, the station that kicks behind the bricks. i'm your host-- you can a lot more freedom here depending on your behavior. you know, we have a lot of programs that are mentor led, led by other guys that are here serving life sentences. and it gives them purpose. it looks like a shop. lester holt: yeah, no, it does. it looks like any auto shop i've been in. yes, sir. lester holt: i talked to john sheehan, a master mechanic at the prison's auto shop. i didn't know how to change a spark plug before i came the prison. lester holt: don't let the uniform fool you. sheehan has been incarcerated here since 1988 for killing

his wife with a shotgun. even though he was sentenced to life without parole, he mentors non-violent offenders in a reentry program. when you can see a man come in here, change his life, go back out, and stay out, you know that you've done something. your life is worthwhile. lester holt: many graduates of the program now work at a car dealership outside of new orleans. turns out, sheehan's life has been changed as well. in 2022, louisiana governor john bel edwards commuted his sentence making him eligible for parole. sheehan was released in february, 2023, after nearly 35 years in prison. but there are other offenders at angola who might never get a second chance. this man was sentenced to more than a lifetime. my sentence was 150 years. you'll hear his dramatic story next.

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of. >> flood alert this weekend. >> much of the eastern half of the united states is bracing. >> for severe weather. >> with life threatening flash flooding possible. snow is set to blanket. >> the upper midwest through to new england and israel, and hamas completed the sixth exchange of hostages and prisoners saturday, and israeli american is among the three. hostages that was released. more than 350 palestinian prisoners were also released. for now, were also released. for now, back to dateline. welcome back to "dateline." i'm craig melvin. does the punishment fit the crime? it's a question at the heart of the prison reform debate, especially when it comes to drug related offenses. for the man you are about to meet,

a parole board's answer could mean the difference between a second chance at life or growing old and dying behind bars. back to lester holt with "life inside." lester holt: in my three days at angola, most of the men i spoke with had committed violent crimes and received long sentences. your life without parole. yeah. lester holt: but like every prison, there are also non-violent offenders serving long sentences that might as well be life. john estein is one of them. john estein: i grew up in a middle class neighborhood, went to catholic schools. lester holt: estein is a gulf war vet who says he was lost and broken when he came home. well, i had no direction in life. lester holt: in 2000, he was found guilty of running a massive drug ring that moved kilos of cocaine between texas and louisiana. it was his second drug conviction. my sentence was 150 years.

lester holt: that's right, 150 years. he's served 20 so far. estein case is a prime example of harsh sentencing laws for both drug dealers and especially users. the legacy of the government's decades long war on drugs. more than 450,000 people in america are locked up for a drug offense. bryan stevenson says criminalizing drug addiction is misguided. we said, those people are criminals. and we didn't have to say that. we could have said that drug addiction and drug dependency is a health problem. is that why our jails are so full? absolutely. if you're looking for one explanation, this misguided war on drugs would be at the top of the list. lester holt: but things have been changing. thank you, everybody. lester holt: the first step act, which was signed into law by former president trump in 2018, had been projected to reduce the sentences of thousands of non-violent offenders in federal prisons.

but that doesn't affect more than 90% of the us prison population, which is locked up in state and local facilities. some states had already been relaxing sentencing guidelines, like here in louisiana, which started in 2001. but estein was sentenced under the older and harsher laws. so he sued the state and won, which earned him a date with a parole board. and now, he's just hours away. john estein: i'm not a trouble maker. i did everything possible to rehabilitate. and that's what it's about, rehabilitation. getting a little antsy right now, a little nervous. i went to bed kind of late. just thinking about things. just trying to get in my mind that the possibility of me being released. you leading the way. you're making a way for all of us here. you have made a way. y'all be blessed, my brothers. blessed. y'all be blessed. lester holt: his 31-year-old son, a law school graduate,

came to surprise him. a three member panel must vote unanimously to grant parole. our cameras weren't allowed inside the parole hearing room. about an hour later, estein's family walked out first. he made it. yes! he made it. made it. [laughs] lester holt: we were there for his first steps as a free man in 20 years. this my freedom pass. what? shall i go? man, lord have mercy. [sobs] very good, my son. lester holt: two other people are eager to follow him out that gate, henry montgomery and clifford hampton, who have served a combined 116 years at angola, are about to face

the parole board themselves. do you think you should be paroled? i should be because i ain't the same guy that 17-year-old guy. i'm 55 years older, and i'm mature enough to know i ain't going to do that again. lester holt: but that might not matter. this is montgomery's second parole hearing. he was denied just a year before, and it seems clear to many why montgomery is still in prison. you killed a cop? yeah. lester holt: the man montgomery murdered was deputy sheriff charles hurt from east baton rouge. in november, 1963, montgomery, then 17 years old, was playing hooky when deputy hurt, in plainclothes, approached him. montgomery says, as a black teenager living in the segregated south, he was startled and scared, was carrying a gun, and he shot him.

i know i had the gun in my hand, i know i shot it. i know i did it, and i'm sorry. lester holt: j.p. degravelles says it doesn't really matter how montgomery feels. what does matter is that he stays behind bars. an attack on a police officer is an attack on the very fabric of society. degravelles is the victim's grandson, and today he is a police officer himself. there's no parole for charles hurt. his life sentence is permanent, you know? and my mom, my aunt, my uncle, our belief in the system is that it's equal justice. lester holt: the family of clifford hampton's victim didn't want to speak to us on camera, but they did tell us they don't think hampton should get out either. in 1958, when he was 17, hampton got into an argument with his 18-year-old neighbor, albertha gibson.

he flew into a rage and brutally stabbed her to death. when i realized what i had did, i walked to the home of the deputy sheriff and turned myself in. lester holt: and hampton has another hurdle to overcome. in 1961, at age 20, he killed another inmate here. he told me it was self-defense. angola, it was like a jungle, you know? that's what you had to do, kill or go under. lester holt: hampton and montgomery will soon find out if they will be granted parole. but if they're denied, they could eventually end up where i'm heading next, the prison's hospice ward. i told myself i was ok with my moderate to severe rheumatoid arthritis symptoms... ...with my psoriatic arthritis symptoms. but just ok isn't ok.

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can discriminate against the citizens of the country. >> we are all. >> watching and waiting. >> to see who is going to hold the line. don't miss the. >> weekends. >> saturday, and sunday mornings. >> at. >> at. >> eight on msnbc. lester holt: like every maximum security prison, angola can be a dangerous place. on this morning, a knife is found. and when that happens, this is the response. a shakedown. what we have here is what appears to be crushed up medication. we've seen a couple of shakedowns since we've been here. what kind of stuff do you find? cell phones. weapons, drugs. little homemade shanks. lester holt: then captains, jarvis callahan and william rosso, along with assistant warden anne-marie easley said being a corrections officer is among the toughest jobs in the world. you've had things that have raised your anxiety here.

absolutely. the reason why i'm 30 years old and on anxiety medicine. lester holt: he isn't alone. studies have shown corrections officers have a significantly higher suicide rate than the general population. can you give me some specific anecdotes of things that have happened to you on the cell block? an offender threw human waste out the cell at me. what can you do to that offender? he's already in the cell, he got life. lester holt: here, like in so many other states, the institution is understaffed, and the officers say they're underpaid. we start people off at $14 an hour. people in the free world can go to home depot and make the same amount of money and not get feces thrown on them. lester holt: these officers tell me that poor behavior is often the result of hopeless men. assistant warden easley says one of the things that's helped was something i was surprised to learn. that the majority of the officers here are women. i think there is value in the female officers.

ladies, we can sometimes talk an offender down a lot quicker just because we have a calming ability. lester holt: and something else i didn't expect to hear-- they believe that life without parole sentences make prison less safe for everyone. if a man has life and he has nothing to lose, if he knows there's no chance of going home-- lester holt: i heard the same thing for many people who work here. tonia faust works in the prison's hospice unit. i personally would love to see a lot of these guys get a second chance. i worry about backlash that i would get from that because i know that the outside public's perception is they're here, they're supposed to be here. do you surprise yourself when you say that? was there a period in your life that you would have been on the other side? oh, absolutely. my mother actually worked here as a security guard, and i used to tell her all the time, how can you work there with those people? but then when you actually get here and you do hear some of the offender's stories,

no one is the same person they are from when they were younger to now. lester holt: decades in prison would change anyone. there is an aging crisis in american prisons, a gray wave, as some have called it. more than 130,000 inmates older than 55 are incarcerated today. that's costing taxpayers more than $9 billion a year. experts say the aging and the dying are the most expensive people to keep incarcerated, and yet they pose the lowest risk to society. this is what a life sentence looks like when life is running out. dying prisoners being cared for in hospice by other incarcerated men. you got enough? lester holt: 63-year-old frank walgamotte has been in prison for 45 years. when he was 19, he and his younger brother robbed a store.

a crime that ended with the murder of the owner. now, dying of cancer, he's asked for a compassionate release. but the vast majority of petitioners for compassionate release are denied. and so was frank. frank how are you feeling? lester holt. frank, do you think you should go home? you need a candy? here, i can open it for you. let me open it for you. there you go, frank. all right, i'm going to let you rest, ok?

that's-- he's a human being. i'm not here to judge him, but i don't know how you could not have compassion. a few weeks later, i learned that frank died in his hospice bed alone. back in my cell, i had a lot of time to reflect about everything i've seen. i've personally wrestled with this question of "is prison punishment?" because if it's punishment, it's-- it's pretty bad. is it a place of reform? you could certainly see efforts to reform here. i can't help thinking as we're talking to men who were incarcerated when they were teenagers and i think of my own self at 16, 17 years old,

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lester holt: if there is one state that defines mass incarceration, it's louisiana, known for decades as the prison capital of the world. in 2019, the state's governor, john bel edwards, said that tough on crime approach hadn't been working. let's talk about mass incarceration. i suppose there was a time that that was a good thing. we're locking up all the bad guys. well, i don't know if it was ever a good thing, but we know now, because of our experience, that it was counterproductive. we had the highest incarceration rate in the nation for the last couple of decades, but our crime rate wasn't any better for it, the recidivism rate wasn't better. but the bottom line is, most importantly, we just weren't safer. it was costing us $700 million a year, just in louisiana. that's third only to education and health care. so we couldn't afford it. lester holt: in 2017, edwards, a democrat in the deep south, signed bipartisan criminal justice reform legislation,

the most ambitious in the state's history. you have actually reduced your prison population here. we have, but we are number two in the country at present, and it's a process. to see this happen in a deep red state, law and order south is pretty stunning too a lot of folks. would you agree? it is. and look, it's counterintuitive that you can over incarcerate and actually be less safe because of it. lester holt: the reforms are projected to reduce department of corrections spending by more than $260 million over the next decade. some of that money will be invested into reentry programs for those coming home. an important investment because every week, an average of 12,000 prisoners in america are released back to society. 95% of the inmates are going to get out. and when you do next to nothing to prepare them for successful reentry, then you are creating a future that is more riddled with crime. lester holt: but louisiana's reforms focus

on non-violent offenders. so what about violent offenders, like the juvenile lifer group i met, or the man dying in hospice. we clearly met people in that prison who don't pose a threat to society. but, in your opinion, do some people simply belong in prison because what they did was just reprehensible? well, because what they did was reprehensible, and there continues to be opposition in the community and among the victim's family. and look, whether someone continues to pose a threat to society is a factor to be considered in whether they get released. but not the only factor. it is-- correct. it can't be the determinative factor to the occlusion of all others. lester holt: both henry montgomery and clifford hampton face opposition from their victim's families. what will happen to them when they see the parole board? montgomery is about to find out. and someone has come to support him.

his name is andrew hundley. he might look like a lawyer, but he's actually the first juvenile lifer in louisiana to be released because of montgomery's supreme court case. all right. all right. today's the day. oh, yes, sir. lester holt: hundley served 19 years in prison. at age 15, hundley was out with a teenage girl when they got into an argument. he became enraged and beat her over the head with a metal rod. and then tried to get rid of her body by burning it. you committed a pretty savage crime. it was a horrible crime. it's an unexcusable crime, and there's nothing i can do that'll be able to undo that. thankfully, they were able to look and see how i had changed. lester holt: so if the parole board said that he changed after 19 years, what will it say about henry montgomery after 55 years? you're the first guy that got out, and he's still here. yeah, there's a lot of guilt.

i went to prison whenever i was 15, a white kid, and got out when i was 34. henry went to prison, a black kid, at 17, and he's still here after 55 years. big day. big day. - big day. yeah. lester holt: the three members of the panel must vote unanimously to free him. they were behind closed doors for more than an hour. this is the audio from that hearing. parole board member: --for the reason-- lester holt: two yeses for montgomery's release. lester holt: then came the third and final vote. lester holt: i caught up with montgomery right after he heard the news. he told me that he had already packed his bag.

you were getting ready just in case? yeah. just in case they said you can go home? yeah. lester holt: but you're holding together. as long as i got life, i'm going to keep my mind on trying to get out. you got to keep your hope alive. lester holt: clifford hampton's hope remains alive. he is about to face the parole board himself. i'm realizing he has been in prison longer than i've been alive. that's-- i can't even wrap my head around it. it was a unanimous vote-- parole granted. i was there moments after a surprisingly subdued hampton learned the news. so now, a new adventure begins. yeah. life on the outside. yeah. can you even imagine what that might be like? imagine it gonna be pretty exciting. a few days later hampton walked free for the first time in 61 years.

we'll stop it and drop your stuff off at your apartment. lester holt: and andrew hundley is here to help hampton. because in 2016, hundley started a nonprofit called the parole project. by 2020, it had helped more than 40 juvenile lifers reenter society. andrew hundley: hit the spot? oh, yeah. lester holt: hampton's first taste of the outside world-- a fast food hamburger with everything on it. first apartment. this is for you. lester holt: his temporary apartment painted with bright colors to remind him that he's no longer in prison. i'm seeing so much that's really new to me. you know, i'm excited about it all, you know? lester holt: two and a half years later, hundley had the honor of assisting another juvenile lifer in his first moments as a free man. how you doing? lester holt: in november 2021, 75-year-old henry montgomery, the man who paved the way to freedom

for hundley and hundreds of others, was granted parole after serving nearly 58 years behind bars. in all honesty, henry probably should have been the first one of us to come home. however, he is home today. you're going to do great. all right. you're going to do great. it's a wonderful feeling. it is. lester holt: montgomery and clifford hampton left behind thousands of others who will never go home. their todays filled only with yesterdays, something my neighbor curtis knew all too well. who's this cool guy? that's my son who was killed in a motorcycle wreck in '94. oh, man. in my short time here, i learned a lot about the human ability to cope, to accept,

to survive. bye, curtis. bye. take care of yourself, man. lester holt (voiceover): as i wrote in the journal i kept, "it's too easy to look away from prison and prisoners. dignity is earned, but hope is essential." and that's all for this edition of "dateline." i'm craig melvin. thank you for watching. >> good morning, and welcome to this sunday edition of. >> morning joe. weekend. >> it was another fast moving. >> news week.>>