Participant in Providence court recounts nearly 30 years behind bars and urges youth to ‘be a kid’

Unidentified Speaker 1 (participant) told the Municipal Court of Providence that he had been homeless and had ‘‘messed up in life,’’ but is trying ‘‘to get things right.’’ He said he has a longstanding summons for a temporary license plate that ‘‘goes back to, 2002,’’ and described decades of incarceration and recent reentry.

Unidentified Speaker 2 (questioner) asked how much time the participant had served; the participant said, ‘‘a total is almost 30 years’’ and noted he is about 45 years old. When asked how long he had been released, he said he had been out ‘‘about almost going out 3 years now.’’ The questioner observed the summons appears aged and flagged the citation’s roughly 20-year-old origin.

The exchange shifted from biography to counsel. After an invitation to address young people, Unidentified Speaker 1 said: ‘‘Honestly, I would tell them that that path that you're about to take, that path is nothing but destruction. You're not gonna get nothing good out of it.’’ He added that ‘‘the right path is just be a kid. Don't try to grow up too fast. Just be a kid and do the things that kids do.’’

Unidentified Speaker 2 closed the exchange by reciting lines from Robert Frost’s poem about taking ‘‘the road less traveled’’ and framed that road as ‘‘the road of honor and decency, law abiding, helping other people, and being a good member of society, and that makes all the difference.’’

The transcript records a personal account of long-term incarceration, a decades-old summons, and an appeal to mentorship and honorable conduct; it does not record any formal disposition, sentence, or additional court action in this excerpt.