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People who’ve been in prison for a long time come out to “a whole new world,” said Sean Ellis, cofounder of the Exoneree Network at the New England Innocence Project. Ellis was freed in 2015 after serving nearly 22 years in prison when his murder conviction was overturned because of police misconduct. And the prison mindset was hard to shake. “You have to ask for a roll of toilet paper,” he said. “You spend decades having to ask for things and not necessarily be able to take control of your own being. ... That adversely affects you.” William Allen served 28 years on first-degree murder charges for participating in a robbery in Brockton in which a man was killed by someone else. Following a campaign to have his life sentence commuted following a change in the law, he was released from prison in 2022. But at first, he said, “I was lost.”