After 10 years in prison, Michael Lemons was released in 2017 and returned to his hometown of Jackson, Tennessee. He got a job at a steel mill, reconnected with his now-adult daughter and bought his first new car.

“I did better at 45 than I've ever done in my entire life,” Lemons said.

But three years later, in September 2020, he had to report back to federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia. He hadn’t broken any rules or committed another crime.

Lemons was one of about 20 men who had been sent home from prison, only to be locked up again — all because of a court fight over whether they should be considered “armed career criminals.”

In his 30s, Lemons bought a hunting rifle from a neighbor, despite several burglary convictions when he was a teenager. Federal law says you can’t own a gun if you’ve ever been convicted of a felony. Authorities found the rifle while searching his home on an old warrant dating back to his time on probation in his early 20s.

All of Lemons’s burglaries were committed in the course of a single year more than a decade earlier, when he was homeless. He had not been in any trouble with the law since. Still, under a 1984 federal law, he was considered an “armed career criminal.”

People convicted of being a “felon in possession of a firearm” spend about five years in prison, on average. But the 1984 law requires an automatic 15-year sentence if someone with a record of three or more violent felonies gets caught with a gun. In the years since, the Supreme Court has struggled to define violent crime in the context of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

The Supreme Court’s reversal was a “profound and arbitrary legal flip flop,” wrote lawyers for Tony McClurg in one recently filed legal brief. McClurg, like Michael Lemons, committed a string of burglaries and thefts when he was young and homeless — “a 60-day splurge he went on when he was 21,” his lawyers said at his sentencing hearing. Later, when McClurg was in his 30s, police discovered guns stashed in his trailer.

Critics point to mandatory minimum sentences like this one as an example of the excesses of the tough-on-crime 80s and 90s. Public opinion seems to have soured on mandatory minimum sentences, which can lead to decades or even life behind bars for possessing or selling tiny amounts of drugs. President Biden has said he regrets supporting laws from the 1980s that created such sentences. He pledged to end them as president, but has not yet indicated how he will keep this promise. Dozens remain on the books, and more than 60,000 people in federal prison continue to serve them, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Read the full article about returning to prison by Beth Schwartzapfel at The Marshall Project.