Mohammed Khalid was one of the youngest people charged with terrorism in U.S. history. His story shows what we’re getting wrong.

Her name was Jihad Jane. Blue eyes, eyebrows like slash marks, the pale bridge of her nose peeking out from a black niqab — that’s what Mohammed saw in a photo on-screen. She was a fellow soldier in the YouTube Smackdown wars and therefore had many noms de guerre: Fatima LaRose, Extreme Sister, Sister of Terror. Under the name Beyond Princess, she introduced herself: “I live in the states (Pennsylvania). It is my dream Inshallah to be a good Muslima & live in an Islamic country. I support the Palestinians & prey they regain their homes & their country & get rid of the parasites that occupy their lands now.” Jane was one of the few women on jihadist YouTube, but she never shied away from blistering online foes. Even her profile taunted, “Do I pose such a threat to you that you have to collaborate to try to get me off YT? First let me tell you, I AM HERE TO STAY!!” Mohammed admired her bravado — the exact quality he lacked offline. They talked almost every day. She told me, “He didn’t want to go back to school because he wanted to stay online.”

In reality, Jane was a woman in her 40s named Colleen LaRose. Her education stopped at seventh grade, and her life had been a blur of drugs and toxic relationships. When she met Mohammed on YouTube, she didn’t have a job, and her live-in boyfriend traveled frequently for his. She was as hooked as Mohammed was on extremist videos; a survivor of child abuse, she was particularly enraged at images of bloodied Palestinian kids. “The blood and the bodies and the children — it was just so much,” she later told the documentarian Ciaran Cassidy. Online, she mused that her fair coloring could allow her to melt into Western crowds and seek revenge.

Early in 2009, a user named Eagle Eye, who claimed he was an al-Qaeda operative, contacted Jihad Jane and proposed a real-life target: a Swedish artist whose blasphemy was drawing the prophet Muhammad’s head on the body of a dog. “Go to Sweden,” Eagle Eye instructed. “Kill him.” She told Reuters later, “I just loved my brothers so much, when they would tell me stuff, I would listen to them, no matter what.”

Jane enlisted Mohammed, though she knew he was only a teenager. “I never looked at his age. I looked at his heart,” she told me. He was flattered. “I felt that I wasn’t doing anything for J,” he told a friend online later. “so it was a blessing from Allaah that I took steps to help her.” All of 15, he tried to raise money for the plot online, but he said no one gave him any. He circulated a questionnaire seeking recruits: Are you a woman who can travel freely in Europe? “Also if you have any contacts to other sisters [ ] (only the ones whom you extremely trust…!!!), please forward this message to them.” He got few responses. When the FBI questioned Jane, she sought his help, and Mohammed pleaded with forum administrators to scrub her posts “so they can’t use it as evidence against her.”

“but I am not so foolish that I thik they are done with me yet not by any means,” she told Mohammed one night.

“insha’Allah, don’t worry as soon as you stay out of this country, our brothers will shelter you,” he replied.

“ok akhi” — brother — “i am going to finish cooking.”

That August, Jane boarded a plane to Europe. She’d already sent Mohammed a package of valuables she feared airport security would confiscate, including her boyfriend’s passport. Mohammed mailed everything to one of Jane’s contacts overseas — almost. He kept the passport, he told a friend online, and “vowed that I would give it to the mujaahideen when I joined j.” Meanwhile, Jane ended up in Ireland, smushed into a one-bedroom apartment with a user named the Black Flag, another blond American woman and the woman’s young son. And then — nothing. No training camp, no attempted assassination. In the fall, Jane flew home. She was arrested at the Philadelphia airport.

When Jane’s indictment was unsealed in 2010, her searing stare dominated national newscasts. Mohammed was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator: CC #4. As he rode the bus home, a classmate noticed several official-looking adults outside and shouted, “Cops!” Mohammed went into his apartment, sat down to lunch. A knock at the door. The FBI agents outside, he later told a friend, were smirking, “pig-like.” They rifled through the apartment. Asked about Jihad Jane. Despite his sisters pleading, “Hassan, tell them everything!” he stonewalled. The agents came back to interview him about a half-dozen times without his parents present. At least once, they bought Mohammed food from Wendy’s. They grilled him about the identities of his online friends. “They said that by helping them he was helping himself,” his brother said later.

Indeed, when investigators started tracking Jane, they didn’t expect “Hassan” to be too young to obtain a driver’s license. To them, their meetings with him served as a warning of sorts: You’re smart. You’re on the path to college. Leave the forums for your own sake. Mohammed did not. He told a psychologist later, “I tried to give them a false sense of who I am — giving them all sweet sugar — but I had hatred for them. I didn’t like being controlled.” Online, he wielded the encounters as proof of his devotion, and kept translating jihadist videos.

“i said that I was not the same person that I was before … and those people who are in j forums are misguided and i am an ex-jihadi blah blah,” he told a friend in the fall of 2010.

“…and at one point they” — the FBI — “even got pi55ed off at me for not revealing anything. HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE YOU IF YOU DON’T TELL US ABOUT SIMPLE THINGS THAT WE KNOW YOU DO! and I just sat silent”

“at another point they even asked me if I would like to go to the jail.”

You could almost see him rolling his eyes.

He woke up. His mother hovered over him. Someone’s at the door, a postman — in the fog of sleep, Mohammed didn’t quite process what she said. He hoisted himself up, put on his glasses. It was July 5, 2011. Nearly two years since Jihad Jane’s arrest. He hadn’t heard from the FBI in forever. Maybe they’d moved on? Mohammed had graduated from high school with a 3.66 grade-point average. Good enough to get into Johns Hopkins University, where he planned to study computer science and writing. His brother said later, “I believe that he thought whatever he did in the past was past.”

Mohammed lazed away the weeks before college. Logged on to the extremist forums, but not as frequently, in the way teens tire of high school haunts. Still in his white undershirt and purply-green pajama pants, he opened the front door. A blast of sticky summer air. A man outside with an envelope like the one his acceptance letter had arrived in. Suddenly, he was pinned to the wall.

Sit, authorities barked at his parents. They rousted his sisters, who joined mom and dad on the couch, he told me. His family was murmuring in Urdu and English and crying, even his dad. Mohammed’s mind stopped working. The agents let him change clothes; they watched as he threw on a school outfit — a striped shirt and jeans — and brushed his teeth. Before they took him away, someone reminded him to tell his family goodbye. Take care of yourselves, he said. His dad made a terrible sound, a sort of heave-cry. That cut something inside him. He looked away.

Outside, the agents sat him in the back seat of a sedan. Neighbors were starting to mill around, and he sank down in hopes they wouldn’t see him. As they drove off, the agents strained to make small talk: Want something to eat? Fast food? No — because it’s not halal? What’s the difference between halal and kosher, anyway? He stared out the window, at his sneakers — anywhere but at the agent beside him. His thoughts drifted to college. Maybe I can still go?

He was 17 years old — one of the youngest people charged with terrorism in U.S. history.

II.

Islamist extremists romanticize prison as a noble, and perhaps inevitable, fate. The idea is baked into hymns called nasheeds, such as “Ghuraba, Ghuraba,” which means strangers — as in, what jihadists are to everyone else.

We never care about the chains of prison, rather we will continue forever

So let us make jihad, and battle, and fight from the start

Ghuraba, this is how they live free in the enslaved world

The Berks County Youth Center was in Leesport, Pa., 120 miles from Mohammed’s home. It had the bland maroon-and-beige exterior of a suburban office park, but the young people inside were accused of everything from gang crimes to homicide. Mohammed was greeted with a duffel bag of yellow jumpsuits and underwear. Correctional counselors escorted him to his cell; instead of bars, it had a sliding door with a window so staff could glance inside. There were two bunks, but Mohammed had no cellmate. The counselors took his glasses — apparently, a potential weapon — and his head started to throb. They asked if he was a student, and he told them he still hoped to enroll at Hopkins. You were accepted to Johns Hopkins? one asked, disbelief clouding his face. What are you doing here?

At first, Mohammed clung to his fundamentalism the way you tighten a winter coat against the cold. He was deep in enemy turf. He said he spent his first night in custody at a rotting adult jail. There were bugs — maybe roaches? He asked for a utensil to eat the meatloafy gunk passing as dinner. Use your hands, the guards said. Like an animal, he thought. By contrast, the juvenile facility allowed movies, volleyball, card games. But Mohammed had no Internet access — no YouTube, no forums, and therefore no fire hose of ideology. He felt pangs of withdrawal. What’s happening online? Are they talking about me? He stewed. Did I really do anything wrong? It’s not like they killed that cartoonist. Late at night, he would kneel and pray and linger on his mat, warring with God. I did everything for you. Everything. Where’s my reward?

He braced himself for cruelty from the staff. He was fortunate: It never came. Andrew Glass was a counselor at the facility, and he told me many staffers saw their role as rehabilitative. Often, these kids messed up because they were so easily influenced; he recalled two brothers whose family draped their Christmas tree in red to show their allegiance to the Bloods street gang. Mohammed’s actual family hadn’t failed him, but his online family had, and in that sense, he was as adrift as the others. He was just quieter. Brainier. Wrote pages and pages of letters that, when Glass skimmed them for security reasons, startled him with their sophistication. “I assumed he’d be ready to fight everybody and not talk to me because I’m an American or whatnot,” Glass told me. “I was expecting a lot of hate and anger, and he didn’t seem to have the hate and anger.”

Mohammed felt whiplashed by the staff’s small kindnesses. The kitchen made him vegetarian lasagna, as close as he could get to a halal, or religiously acceptable, meal. The counselors pulled him aside, asked how he ended up there, and listened — really listened — to his answers. He didn’t think anyone of a different faith would care. They also prodded him to read the Koran in its entirety, something he’d never done in either Urdu or English. Leafing through the pages, he realized the online jihadists had cherry-picked the most incendiary-sounding passages and presented them wildly out of context. He’d been indoctrinated to believe that their interpretation of Islam was Islam. But now, talking to people they’d caricatured, that crumbled. That included his peers in the facility. Still wary of conversation, he eavesdropped as they confided in one another about the traumas they’d endured: beatings, abortions, sexual assaults. One day, another boy blurted to the staff: You guys are the only family I have in the world. As Mohammed shuffled back to his cell, he couldn’t quite believe how lucky he was.

He’d expected his family to disown him. Instead, his parents drove those 120 miles every week in their minivan. They met for about a half-hour, a counselor hovering near the table. At the end of each visit, his mom wrapped him in her arms, holding him a little longer, a little longer, until his father gently separated them. One counselor told Mohammed: Your mom really loves you. “Despite everything that I’d done to her,” he told me, his voice softening. In his darker moments, this was the memory he reached for.

When an extremist’s resolve falters, it’s often because he sees the fallacy of the story he bought into. Reality is messier, more perilous, less rewarding. Michael Jensen is a senior researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. He oversees a database of about 300 homegrown extremists who, based on news reports and court records, have not repeated their crimes. If they had strong social ties to fellow militants, as Mohammed did online, their path out often started with befriending a perceived enemy. “They start to question the ideology and the beliefs that they’ve adopted,” Jensen told me. “And that usually causes the initial schism that starts them turning away from extremism.”

Islamist radicals embraced Mohammed when no one else had, though none had reached out since his arrest — and none ever would. But this forced immersion had scrambled his sense of the world. Counselors noticed Mohammed cracking open. He told me, “I wanted to do the right thing, but at the same time, I didn’t want to lose the only belonging or the only sense of support that I felt that I had.” In the hush of night, he often wondered: What was true? What wasn’t? Who was he, and was that whom he wanted to be? His eyes would well up. He would hear a counselor shuffle by, pause in front of his cell. He’d turn toward the wall, swallowing his sadness.

How could life get any harder? That fall, he turned 18 and was transferred to adult prison. There, he was no longer treated as a kid who could be rehabilitated — he was treated as a terrorist.

Thirteen days after Sept. 11, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft went to Capitol Hill to sell the Bush administration’s proposed legislative response to the terrorist attacks. In written testimony, he cleaved the world in two: “On one side of this line are freedom’s enemies, murderers of innocents in the name of a barbarous cause. On the other side are friends of freedom; citizens of every race and ethnicity, bound together in quiet resolve to defend our way of life.” With few exceptions, we still use this either-or framework with suspected terrorists: We arrest, we lock up, we move on.

When researchers at the Center on National Security at Fordham Law analyzed more than 100 Islamic State-related federal cases, they found that the majority of defendants were no older than 25. They were more likely to be American citizens and less likely to have a criminal record than other federal defendants. On the whole, these were not members of sophisticated networks. Mitchell Silber, the former director of intelligence analysis for the New York City Police Department, told me, “They made poor decisions. They were young. They were impressionable. They were vulnerable to being radicalized. They weren’t terrorist masterminds.”

At sentencing, they often face a so-called terrorism enhancement that, in effect, makes it more likely they’ll spend a long time behind bars. The Fordham researchers found that, on average, the Islamic State defendants were sentenced to 14.5 years, triple the average federal sentence. In 2012, Mohammed pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to provide material support. Yet he still faced the possibility of 15 years in federal prison — an extraordinary punishment for someone who had no criminal history and hadn’t committed a violent act. Jennifer Arbittier Williams, who prosecuted him, told me she couldn’t address the specifics of the case. Regarding national security investigations in general, she said, “The hope is to prevent something bad from happening. If there is a terrorism act that occurs, we’ll be able to investigate and hopefully prosecute and convict. But in many ways, that’s too late.”

In a 2017 piece in the Yale Law Journal, legal scholar Sameer Ahmed drew parallels between the war on terrorism and the war on drugs, with young Muslim men treated as “super-predators” (though, since the mid-’90s, the far right has been responsible for the majority of terrorist acts). They’re disproportionately targeted by counterterrorism policies, and many serve lengthy sentences for nonviolent crimes. We treat them in a mostly punitive manner, Ahmed argued, with little thought as to how they might reenter society.

That’s not the case everywhere. There are at least 40 to 50 programs around the globe, mainly in detention settings, that try to help extremists stop participating in violence (“disengage”) and shed their beliefs (“deradicalize”). Many are relatively new and have not undergone thorough scientific vetting, but the most respected efforts try to address the issues that made zealotry appealing in the first place. In Sweden and Germany, voluntary exit programs offer a range of services to former extremists, including counseling and help with job searches.

Compared to Europe, in the United States, such programs have gained little traction. In part, that’s because our need was not as immediate: In the late ’90s, for instance, the United Kingdom and Ireland were already sorting out how to reintegrate members of paramilitary groups imprisoned during the so-called Troubles. But America is also a more carceral society. “I think it’s going to take a change in the cultural mind-set for us to really consider these sorts of programs,” said Horgan, the Georgia State professor and author of “Walking Away From Terrorism.” “It’s fundamentally about rehabilitation, and I don’t think the U.S. does rehabilitation very well.”

In 2016, the U.S. District Court of Minnesota set up a program to train staff to assess extremist defendants and, via an intervention process that in some cases starts after arrest, offer them tailored services similar to what European exit programs provide — the first of its kind in the United States. Though it’s still too early to draw broad conclusions, it has allowed for nuance in how defendants are treated: Of 54 Islamist, white supremacist and anti-government extremists, 27 qualified to await trial at home and only five violated their release conditions. At sentencing, five defendants received probation. So far, no other federal districts have replicated the program. However, some U.S. attorney’s offices have started experimenting with diversion-style programs for young offenders, said Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

As for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, it does not offer extremists specialized help, preferring, it said in a statement, to use “traditional programs.” In late 2019, it had identified about 500 people in custody as international or domestic terrorists. By 2025, more than a third of them will be released.

The tunnel unfurled beneath Center City in Philadelphia, not far from Independence Hall. It had a gently sloping floor and otherworldly soft light. After Mohammed turned 18, correctional officers escorted him through it to the federal detention center. The sand-colored tower thrummed with hundreds of inmates: grown men in their 20s and 30s — bearded, tattooed, muscled, scarred. Mohammed was No. 67256-066. He stood about 5 feet 11 inches tall and was so gaunt that, when his parents visited, they made him eat vending machine chips and cookies. He was handed a bright orange jumpsuit, the uniform of “the hole”: the special housing unit, or SHU.

His cell was roughly 6 by 8 feet. A bunk bed, but at first no cellmate. There was a narrow rectangle of a window, but some type of covering blotted out the sun, giving the light a mottled and disorienting sameness no matter the time of day. It smelled like unwashed socks. Mohammed slept a lot. He often showered twice because it was something to do. He found himself pacing, and it reminded him of a passage in “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” a book he’d devoured in the juvenile facility. (“I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud to myself.”) Mohammed kept lucid by reading — mostly forgettable fiction, but it was better than stewing in his own thoughts. He learned to tell time by the rattle of the breakfast-lunch-dinner carts or the jangle of correctional officer keys; after a while, he could even discern gradations in the light. That’s how he knew when to pray.

He spent 23 hours a day in the cell. The 24th hour was recreation time. Each SHU inmate was corralled in his own outdoor pen, but the men could see one another and shouted: Hey! Whatcha in for? Mohammed ignored them. “They just looked dangerous,” he told me. He stopped going outside entirely. He said he met with prison officials to determine if he could join the general population. Sorry, they told him. Can’t move you. Security reasons. Weeks passed before they relented. “My boss would say, ‘Watch out for him. He’s part of that Jihad Jane case,’ ” said a former employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “But he was just a very confused child.”

In the general population, inmates nicknamed him Flaco, Spanish for skinny. “He was brilliant in the mind,” the former employee told me, “but the street thugs would prey on him, steal his commissary,” the food he bought from the prison store. Even worse, one cellmate was a brawler. One night, he and Mohammed started bickering over the lights, and his cellmate hopped off the top bunk and lunged at him. Mohammed didn’t fight back as much as try to not get injured.

This was no place for a kid, his attorneys, Jeffrey Lindy and Alan Tauber, believed. After Mohammed’s guilty plea, they asked the court to move him to a secure juvenile facility run by the state of Pennsylvania. The Loysville Youth Development Center housed young men whom a court had deemed delinquent until they turned 21. Therapists proposed a treatment plan for Mohammed that would include cognitive behavioral therapy, family counseling, meetings with the facility’s imam and the opportunity to take distance-learning college courses. It would allow him to get necessary psychological help, his lawyers argued, and make sure that “he does not return to a life of hostility and opposition to our country.”

The government balked. It didn’t want to pay for Mohammed’s treatment at Loysville, prosecutor Williams said during a hearing in 2012. She suggested that Mohammed’s family hire counselors to visit him at the prison instead — a luxury they could not afford. Mohammed remained in adult prison. He was ready to give up jihad but unsure what to do next. “Overcoming extremism became a problem I had to deal with and that I had to resolve,” he later wrote. Trying to keep from backsliding, he stayed away from more zealous Muslim inmates. If a correctional officer ransacked their cells, they grumbled: That guy hates Muslims — a conclusion high school Mohammed might have drawn. Joining these gripefests felt like quicksand. Without those transformative months in the juvenile facility, would he have gotten sucked in?

He sought refuge in the kitchen. A few dozen inmates per shift heaving boxes, boiling water, sudsing trays. Mohammed immediately distinguished himself. “Tries very hard to succeed,” an evaluation said. “Last one to leave.” That month, he clocked 150 hours and made $43.50. His bonus was $21. He grew close to his supervisor, a woman who jokingly called herself Mama Bear. “I considered her a second mom,” Mohammed told me. She teased him that he was too skinny, made him tuna sandwiches. She promoted him to vegetable chopper, among the most coveted kitchen roles. “I was just treated as this guy who’s charged with terrorism and who’s super-dangerous and should never be trusted with anything,” he told me. Mama Bear gave him knives, and that gesture meant something. “I lived up to their trust,” he said. “I lived up to their expectations.”

Head bowed, hands shaking, Mohammed sat at the defense table in a windowless courtroom. It was a spring morning in 2014. He was 20 years old and dressed in olive prison garb, a color he would recoil from for years to come. The reporters arrayed behind him described him variously as “gangly,” “gawky,” “hollow-cheeked.” He clutched two pages of hand-scrawled notes — his sentencing statement. His original draft had been pages longer, but he’d castigated himself so thoroughly that his lawyers told him to pare it down.

Awhile back, a fellow inmate asked Mohammed: Ever heard of Asperger’s? Mohammed asked his brother to find out more. His brother sent him info from the Mayo Clinic website, describing Asperger’s syndrome as a developmental disorder; characteristics included “social awkwardness and an all-absorbing interest in specific topics.” When Mohammed met with a psychologist preparing a report for the judge, he brought printouts of the description and said: That’s me. The psychologist assessed him. Poor eye contact, halting mannerisms, rapid speech, emotional immaturity, introversion. The psychologist told him: Bad news, you’re right. Good news, with therapy it’s treatable.

To Mohammed, the diagnosis was a revelation. It explained why he felt so alien next to his high school classmates; before his arrest, he’d envisioned visiting the Hopkins counseling center and asking: What’s wrong with me? “It is perhaps not surprising that he would be more comfortable with the more remote interpersonal contact found on the internet,” the psychologist wrote in his report. “Furthermore, because those with Asperger’s Disorder have trouble discerning social conventions and developing commensurate judgment skills, they can be naïve, credulous, and subject to exploitation by others.”

In a memo to the court, Mohammed’s attorneys asked for a sentence of time served. He’d been locked up for almost three years — long enough. They blamed his crime on “unscrupulous adults” who took advantage of “a socially isolated teenager’s thoroughly misplaced idealism.” Once Mohammed was arrested, he did everything the government asked: met with law enforcement officers about 20 times, tipped them off to new evidence and testified twice in front of a grand jury. In prison, he stayed out of trouble (save a thwarted attempt to steal commissary Kool-Aid) and volunteered to serve as a tutor for the high school equivalency exam. But it turned out he couldn’t become a GED tutor without taking the test himself. He was valedictorian of his GED class. He donned a royal blue cap and gown, spoke to his classmates in front of the visiting room vending machines and mailed his yellow tassel to his parents. Before his sentencing, the Baltimore Sun editorial board weighed in: “he was — and by many practical measures, still is — a kid, and should be treated as such.”

While prosecutors acknowledged Mohammed’s help in court papers as “impressive, long-lasting, multi-faceted, and genuine,” instead of time served, they asked for “less than ten” years. Jihad Jane was sentenced to 10. They said his sentence would deter potential terrorists; that it reflected the damage wrought by his translations, which still lived online; and that, possibly, Mohammed hadn’t entirely abandoned his fanaticism. “Khalid seemed still to take pleasure and even pride recounting his glory days as a jihadi,” prosecutors wrote. At one point, they filed dozens of pages of Mohammed’s online chats. The conversations hovered over the proceedings, a dark cloud of invective.

“where I live is the hotbead of US agencies,” he had written to a friend about four years earlier. “like nsa, fbi. so I would expect their parents to work there and hate muslims.”

“have u ever considered,” the friend replied, “shooting up ur schooling and taking revenge on those who wronged u?”

“so amazing would it be to spill their filth,” he said.

When it was his turn to speak, Mohammed abandoned his notes; his statement was seared into memory. “The upheavals of my life were distorted into a force of hate so strong that it trapped me in its claws,” he said. He turned to face his family. “I am struck with grief over what I brought you to. Nothing I say today can excuse the mistakes of my past.” His eyes stung. His cheeks burned with humiliation. The judge announced his sentence: five years, with credit for time served.

III.

Mohammed was unraveling. After being moved to a prison in Connecticut, he finished his sentence in late 2015, with time off for good behavior. But he couldn’t go home: He was transferred to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a Massachusetts jail while the government tried to deport him. Like the other detainees, he felt stranded: His was a purgatory with no definitive end. Would he be transferred? Released? Deported? If so, when? Because he cooperated with U.S. law enforcement after his arrest, sending him back to Pakistan was tantamount to sentencing him to torture, either by Pakistani authorities or terrorist groups, his immigration attorney, Wayne Sachs, argued. That would violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture. All when, as a government attorney conceded at a hearing, there was no indication Mohammed was a threat. “That uncertainty was enough to kill your mind,” Mohammed told me. His mood darkened.

In the spring of 2017, Mohammed’s parents got a call: Congratulations! Your son will be released tomorrow at 11 a.m. His case wasn’t over, but he could await the result at home. That day, the clock passed 11 … 12 … 1. Mohammed fidgeted in a courthouse holding cell, convinced the promise of release was as solid as vapor. And by 3, authorities told his parents he was headed back to jail. Though they’d driven more than 300 miles to pick him up, Mohammed said he wasn’t allowed to say hello, or even wave from a distance. Later, he found out they’d decorated his room with welcome-back balloons.

Mohammed once thought of his crime as victimless: Who was really harmed by Internet venom? Then he participated in a victim-impact program. He realized: his family. All these years, they’d never stopped writing letters and taking his calls. He knew it pained them to visit. His parents often asked: When you go back to your cell, will they chain you? “They’d seen me like that in segregation, with the chains, with the waist belt around my waist, and my hands cuffed and everything,” he told me. “I think that image never really got out of their heads.” The victim-impact group would gather in the prison chapel and listen to a speaker: a sexual assault survivor, the mother of a murder victim, and so on. Mohammed sent them follow-up questions through the program facilitator. Speaker No. 4 was a woman whose son had been locked up.

“You did everything to raise your son the right way. Do you still blame yourself for his incarceration, thinking that maybe you missed doing something?” he asked.

“As a mother, what exactly goes on in your head when you visit to see your son in prison? When you have to leave him behind the razor-wire fence? When you talk to him on the phone?”

“Will there ever be relief for you as long as he is incarcerated? In other words, do you feel as if you can move on?”

A week after his snafued release, Mohammed returned to the courthouse. It was May 5, 2017. He was 23, and swimming in a thermal shirt and gray sweatpants. In the holding cell, he told me, he waited with the petrified new arrivals. Finally, a sour-faced woman arrived. Which foot, she snapped. Left, he decided. She attached a bulky GPS monitor to his ankle; ashamed, he stretched his pant leg over it. He was escorted to a waiting area. There — his mom, dad, sister. At the sight of him, his mom teared up. He was too overwhelmed to emote. They walked outside. Overcast sky. Cool air caressing his face. Weird how everyone was lost in their phones. On the way back to Maryland, they pulled into a rest stop. Go inside, his parents encouraged him. He did, reluctantly. Swarms of people, zigzagging to the restroom, to the cash register. Chatter. Babies wailing. Conditioned to the regimented nature of prison, Mohammed panicked. He ran back to the safety of the van.

The next morning, he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. His bedroom sharpened into focus; it was almost exactly as he’d left it. For nearly six years, his mom had treated it as a sort of Mohammed museum. Folders, notebooks, pencils — she hadn’t touched anything. Even when she noticed a box of M&M’s, she dumped out the presumably stale candy and returned the box to the floor. Like the moments after waking from a nightmare, the sameness reassured him. His mattress somehow felt softer. The air conditioner hummed. He inhaled. No sweat stench, no industrial disinfectant. Not prison. Home.

An oppressively hot day in Washington, D.C. Sweat buttered necks and backs. Inside the air-conditioned cocoon of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, Mohammed walked to the front of a room with the gilded lettering and dark wood of a legislative chamber. Though 25, he didn’t look much older than his high school yearbook photo: glasses perched on his nose, Adam’s apple protruding, a dusting of facial hair. He wore a dark suit, a light blue shirt, a striped tie. No more ankle monitor; he’d won his immigration case and become a U.S. citizen.