Exclusive: Man elected to public office while incarcerated, now a free man
(WASHINGTON, DC) Exclusive News: Advisory neighborhood commissioner Joel Caston was released today after 26 years behind bars. Joel Castón wakes up in his corner cell before dawn as he has for the last 26 years while incarcerated. The light from the thin rectangular window offers little illumination as he prepares for the day. He switches the radio to Praise 104.1. Gospel music fills his 5-by-10-foot white-brick room as he reads Psalm 43. He occasionally studies a copy written in French, one of the five languages he picked up while incarcerated.
Standing 6-foot-1 with a smile unbroken by the 16 institutions he’s called home, he neatly makes his bed, removing every crease in his gray blanket before the warden inspects his room. Castón, 45, gets ready for his day not as an inmate convicted of first-degree murder in a killing nearly three decades ago, but as a newly elected city official with a few months left behind bars. He is the city’s first incarcerated person to win an election.
Like most Advisory Neighborhood Commission members — who serve to connect and provide input from their community to the D.C. Council — the responsibilities are tacked on to other work. Castón’s public service is voluntary, dragging his day into the late hours of the night.
But unlike his colleagues who attend meetings or visit constituents, Castón can’t leave his housing unit and constituents can’t visit him. Instead, they contact him through the jail’s mailing system. He works on a schedule set by the jail.
His new duties behind bars and his release in a few months are a reflection of the District’s sweeping criminal justice changes since 2017. Castón is one of dozens of inmates who may have their sentences reduced under the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act. A subsequent amendment passed by D.C. lawmakers last year extended the law to inmates who committed offenses at age 24 or younger, which included Castón.
