35 years in jail for stealing a stinking tv set??? Original Article Ex-con finds freedom frustrating Elliott Minor Associated Press Jul. 2, 2005 12:00 AM GEORGETOWN, Ga. - As hard as it was to spend 35 years in prison for stealing a television, Junior Allen has found freedom frustrating, too. Despite extensive prison records in North Carolina, where he has spent more than half of his life as inmate No. 0004604, Allen has been unable to establish his identity in rural Georgia, where he now lives with his sister, or in Alabama, where he was born 65 years ago to sharecropper parents. The monthlong effort to get a birth certificate and photo ID only hints at the new challenge he faces: that of transforming himself from less-than-model inmate to average senior citizen. "It's like I never existed," Allen says. "I went to Columbus, Georgia, and they said I had to go to Alabama. I went to Alabama, and they said I had to go to Georgia." His most immediate goal is to get a driver's license. He has already revived a 1984 Dodge Aries that had been parked in his sister's yard. "I'd like to live the rest of my life at peace, maybe get some of the things I need: transportation and a job and maybe a hobby like fishing," he says. "I love to fish. I've already got two or three places picked out." Allen was a strapping 30-year-old in 1970 when he walked into the unlocked home of an elderly North Carolina woman near Benson and took her $140, 19-inch black-and-white Motorola. He hid the set in the woods and never used it. Police quickly arrested him at his labor camp by following his footprints. When Allen emerged from the Orange Correctional Center in late May, he had a slight stoop, prison bifocals on his nose, and flecks of gray in his mustache and protruding from beneath his Muslim skull cap. State records say Allen roughed up 87-year-old Lessie Johnson and stole her TV. Allen was not convicted of assault and denies he hurt the woman. Under the law of the day, a jury sentenced him to life in prison for second-degree burglary, a crime that today would carry a maximum punishment of three years. Bitter at his punishment, Allen admits he was not the best-behaved inmate. He was denied parole 25 times. With no infractions for three years, Allen's case went before the parole commission last year, for a 26th time, and he was finally ordered released.