FORMER PRISON LIFER FINDS FREEDOM EXHILARATING

Detroit

In the darkness of her bedroom, JeDonna Young wakes and, with tears
welling in her eyes, relives the same moments over and over:

The last walk from her cell. The clank of the prison gates behind her.
The first rush of cold air and the warm embrace of her niece, who
handed her 20 red roses -- one for each year she had spent behind bars.

"I keep thanking God," she says. "This is such a blessing. I say to
myself, `It really happened!' and I'm just so thankful. Then I cry. I
think it's just kicking in, the reality of it all."

The reality is Young is free.

Two decades after she was sentenced to life without parole for heroin
possession, she was released because of a change in the law.

Young was the first inmate paroled after state lawmakers amended
Michigan's "650 lifer law," a throw-the-book-at-'em measure for anyone
convicted of delivering, or intending to deliver, 650 grams, about 1.4
pounds, of cocaine or heroin.

Young and her boyfriend were arrested in 1978 after they found nearly
three pounds of heroin in her car. She has always maintained she
didn't know it was there; he swore she didn't.

Young's plight -- a 24-year-old mother with no prior criminal record
doomed to die in prison -- had stirred sympathy over the years. Even
an appeals court suggested the law wasn't intended for her, writing in
1989: "The tiger trap may have sprung upon a sick kitten."

But it wasn't until last year that the law changed, making parole a
possibility for a handful of prisoners, including Young.

Young says a lot has changed in 20 years. The 7-year-old son she left
behind is now the father of a 7-year-old girl. And the everyday world
has become a strange, confusing, even overwhelming place.

In prison, she constantly wore radio or TV headphones to cut herself
off from her surroundings. Now, she wanders through groceries and
malls, gawking at everything, surprised at what is
commonplace:

Gourmet chocolate at $30 a pound. ("I almost fainted!")

Supermarkets stocked with ready-made sandwiches and mashed potatoes.
("Everything is so commercial!")

Though two decades have passed, she says she "felt like a little girl
on Easter" when she went shopping with her 71-year-old mother, the day
after her Jan. 29 release.

She spent gift money indulging in things she had longed for behind
bars: fresh vegetables, white chocolate, pecan-flavored coffee beans,
ice cream.

Her top priority now is to get a master's degree in social work so she
can work with troubled families. She earned a bachelor's degree in
prison and worked as a certified paralegal for legal services, making
about $3 a day.