It’s One of the Hardest Parts of Getting Out of Prison and Nobody Ever Talks About It

What information can strangers find out about me at the click of a button? As a prisoner, I don’t have direct access to Google search, but occasionally when I’m on the phone with my sister Angela I ask her to search “Robert Lee Williams journalist.” She’ll complain about me needing to find a secretary before rattling off the results, links to Slate articles and a recent award. The more articles I publish, and the more publications that showcase my work, the deeper the old negative press gets pushed to the bottom.

But last year, a Slate piece of mine was syndicated by Apple News. I was published in the New York Times. Then I noticed a footprint that I didn’t make, at least not directly, had crept back up onto Page 1 of the search results. It’s the reason I’m sitting in Eastern NY Correctional Facility, in Napanoch, New York, serving my 17^th year for manslaughter.

In 2009, my girlfriend and I had been drinking and arguing. She stabbed me. I stabbed her. She died. I was taken to the hospital for my injuries, and a few weeks later, I was taken to jail and then prison.

A reporter at the Times Herald covered my crime, stripped of context, affording neither of us humanity. The publication of my crime is not what floods me with anxiety: It’s the thumbnail, taken inside Orange County jail after I’d spent close to a month recovering from a collapsed lung in the hospital. Unshaven. No haircut. No sleep. I was told not to smile.

That slanted coverage, the unflattering image, is attached to my name. When you get locked up, your digital presence is the total sum of your activity on social media, and its footprints continue stepping without you.

There are approximately 450,000 to 600,000 people returning home from federal and state prison each year, according to Prisonpolicy.org. Why is protecting a digital presence uniquely critical for someone with a criminal record? How does its weight differ from that for an average citizen? What dangers does it invite?

In 1981, Richard Rivera went to prison for killing an off-duty officer during a failed robbery. Inside, Rivera knew in order to be successful when he saw the board, he’d have to take education seriously. He was released on parole in 2022, after serving 39 years, armed with his bachelor’s degree. Today, Rivera is the director of special initiatives and innovations at the Center for Community Alternatives in Syracuse, New York.

When I first asked him about his digital footprint, he simply told me: “I never paid attention to any of that stuff. And when I got out I didn’t have a plan. I just registered for Cornell.”

Eventually, education and advocacy work earned him a place on a police reform panel called the Reimagining Public Safety Collaborative in Ithaca, New York. For Rivera, at the time, it was a dream position. But this dream was short-lived. When the Police Benevolent Association learned that not only was he formerly incarcerated, but he’d killed an officer, the backlash was swift. The New York Post ran an op-ed titled “NYC Cop-Killer Now Helping Reform Police.” The writer argued that Rivera did not deserve that platform, and eventually he was forced to resign.

But that’s not all that happened; the op-ed acted as a dog whistle, bringing out a torrent of abuse.

“They tried to burn my house down,” he said. “They vandalized my car.”

After about a month and a half, the harassment ended when he was interviewed by Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition, which expanded his digital presence to national proportions.

I was surprised by how indifferent he sounded about the entire ordeal. Maybe it’s because he was lucky enough to have his footprint cleansed a bit.

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Rivera was just one of a number of former inmates I spoke with whose stories illuminated just how impactful a digital footprint is for the formerly incarcerated. Leroy Taylor, 52, resembles “Tiger Woods’ daddy,” as a friend always jokes. He rocks black frames and speaks carefully, as if choosing his words from a mental teleprompter. Convicted of murder in the 1990s, he’d recently been granted parole. When I told Leroy about the article I was writing, he immediately remembered a guy he’d met in Green Haven. He would draw these amazing portraits. The guy’s case was overturned in 2022, and when he went home, Leroy’s daughter, TeAna Taylor, director of Release Aging People in Prison, a nonprofit of legislative advocates that works to affect public sentiment around parole issues, wanted him to speak at events. But years of awful press had turned him into a recluse.

“And you can’t remember his name?” I asked.

“Nah,” he said, looking half at me. “I’ll have to ask TeAna.”

Did Leroy worry about his past digital footprint making trouble for him? Until his victim’s sister read his apology letter, visited him, and advocated for his release, he told me, “I used to worry about that all the time.”

I’m not due for release until 2030, but my digital footprint caught up with me back in the mid-2000s. I’d gotten a job at a nursing home. I only worked there for about three months before my background check flagged me for a reckless endangerment charge: I’d destroyed someone’s property as a teenager. But because of the nature of the crime I couldn’t be trusted to work at a residential home for seniors.

A few weeks after my conversation with Leroy, TeAna provided him with the name I needed, but not the guy’s contact info. This presented me with another problem. Leroy advised me to reach out to professor Steve Zeidman, the director of CUNY Law School’s Second Look Project. The law school had once represented the guy I was looking for. Paul Herbert is 56 years old, and he’s famous. I scroll through the portraits he’d emailed me: two women laughing, a family smiling, and my personal favorite, a pop-artish rendering of Gigi Hadid. While some of his portraits have appeared in art galleries in Fishkill, New York, he is more known under his actual name, for two homicides he committed when he was 15 years old.

“I was an angry kid,” he said. “I was getting abused.”

In 1986, and throughout his incarceration, the press didn’t focus on that. They sensationalized it: “The Pelham Homicides.” The national media coverage was ruthless, unrelenting, and irresponsible.

In 2022, after the court found that the sentencing judge failed to properly consider Paul’s age, his case was reversed. He’d served 36 years. Anticipating that his digital footprint would create potential social and economic obstacles for him, Paul changed his last name. It worked. He obtained a college degree, is employed as a drug counselor, and still finds time to give back to the people through his illustrations.

When I told him I had reservations about putting his real name in the piece, Paul Herbert, whose actual name today is Paul Leon, reassured me that he was ready now: “If people don’t want to deal with me after they find out about my past, then they are not for me.”

Paul changed his name and figured out a way to have a normal life. Still, the initial fear of the stigma—of what people would think about him after they learned that he was incarcerated—brought me to my last question. What about prisoners who make it home, why should they be extra careful when shaping their footprint?

My friend Susan Slotnick taught modern dance to incarcerated men inside New York state prisons for over 20 years. Her old-Brooklyn accent is thick as she shares stories about “my guys,” as she calls them. The men were released, and she wanted them to perform with her dance company on the outside, Figures in Flight, which consisted of a dozen teenage girls. Of course, that meant, among other things, reassuring concerned parents and citizens that none of the men were sex offenders.

The performance went off without a hitch.

Some time later, two of the men started posting sexually explicit and disparaging images of women on Facebook. Susan’s friends immediately told her about it—before they unfriended and blocked them.

With a few posts, they alienated the very supporters who championed them as living proof of redemption. But the real tragedy was that the men likely had no idea how loud their digital echoes actually were. Having been locked away before the internet became our collective second skin, they didn’t understand that, online, a reckless moment looks like a permanent identity.

In the end, our digital presence isn’t etched in concrete; it’s an ever-evolving story. Our criminal records will always be searchable, so formerly incarcerated people have to be extremely careful of how we’re presenting our digital selves. But there’s a fine line between being careful and being hidden.

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