ST.PAUL — Antonio Williams said when he was six years old, police officers put plastic zip ties over his outbursts at school, telling him he was “out of control.”

Fast forward 14 years and Williams went to prison in 2006 for a 13-year sentence on charges of second-degree aiding and abetting murder.

“It’s weird because it was a shock to the system, but it felt like a continuation of my childhood,” Williams said. “Everything was familiar in prison. Wearing the same clothes, being told what to do, when to do it, and being looked at as a criminal.”

Williams was born in Chicago and spent his early life in the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects. When he was three, his family moved to Minnesota, where he soon entered the foster care system.

Before turning 13, Williams had lived in 30 different homes.

“My dad has been in and out of jail, still in and out of jail, and my mom has struggled with addiction and been in and out of jail herself,” Williams said.

Williams is one of 57,000 ballots returned to Minnesota voter rolls in June after the Minnesota Legislature passed a law allowing people convicted of felonies to vote once they are released from prison instead of when their release is valid.

Williams said no one ever told her she was losing her right to vote, but that voting wasn’t really on her mind at the time. He said in retrospect he thought he already knew.

“I already knew, like, ‘There’s nothing I can do now, everything’s been taken from me,'” Williams said.

About seven years after his conviction, when he was in solitary confinement, Williams said he felt his attitude change. He even started writing poetry and said that poetry turned into books, books turned into education, and education turned into activism.

“One of the first books I bought was a dictionary,” Williams said. “I had to understand all the words that were used against me.”

Williams said he read books from the prison library or his visitors would bring them. The books ranged from self-help materials to civic texts.

“Once I started learning about how our democracy really affects and affects every part of our lives, that’s when it really clicked for me,” Williams said.

Williams began exploring the early stages of activism inside bars by holding focus groups. He advocated for prison reform while incarcerated and for the education of his fellow inmates.

Six years later, Williams was released in June 2020 — right after the death of George Floyd and following the Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis. Williams said she immediately became involved in protests and marches and began speaking at events.

“We’ve already done the groundwork inside,” Williams said. “I’m educating myself, getting stronger, healing from trauma and all that stuff. And so my ears were attuned to what was happening now. I could hear him.”

As he acclimated to his newly regained freedom, Williams moved into a halfway house in North Minneapolis and began working for a place called Second Chance Recycling. He spent his days picking up dirty mattresses around town, taking them back to a warehouse and tearing them down.

Williams would get home around 4 p.m. and spend the rest of the day looking for another job. Then some organizers contacted him and told him that the civil rights organization, the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reclaim the Vote campaign, was looking for phone bankers.

Williams took the job, spending his days calling people with prior felony convictions and telling them they could vote if their parole was up. He said many times people didn’t know, assumed they couldn’t vote or didn’t want to vote. Although Minnesota law still required Williams to finish his parole before he could vote, he said he wanted to help others exercise their right.

“It messes you up on another level, when I bring a resource to my people and people say, ‘I’m not hearing that.’ I don’t care about that,’” Williams said.

At the same time, Williams said he felt he understood where people were coming from because he said he had once been there himself.

“It was tempered by the fact that the system hurt us a lot,” Williams said. “We have every right to be suspicious, every right to be skeptical, every right to disconnect. And in so many ways, when you exclude someone from something for so long, people will focus their energy elsewhere.”

In 2022, Willaims received word that there was a chance to change the law and allow people with felonies to vote the moment they got out of prison, not after they finished parole.

“He started by telling people, ‘Hey, I can’t vote, but you can vote…Now, go ahead and vote for me,'” Williams said. “And then it went to, ‘Hey, we actually have a chance to change this law so we can all vote once we’re released.’

Williams said he testified for Minnesota’s Restore the Vote bill and was in the Capitol when the bill became law.

“I was ten feet away from Governor Walz as he was signing,” Williams said.

The first day the law went into effect, Williams said he knocked on doors in his St. Paul with Secretary of State Steve Simon to inform people about their newly restored voting rights.

Williams has published three books since its launch and is a leader in non-profit advocacy

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which he said is a continuation of the restorative justice work he has already done.

Williams said, in his mind, this law is just one piece of the puzzle. He said there is still work to be done to change the perception of incarcerated people.

“People look at people in prison like sometimes we’re not human … like we don’t have the same worries or concerns about our families, about where things are going with the country,” Williams said. “It’s like everyone expects you to do what you were originally convicted of and they expect you to be that person all the time.”

The fight now, Wiliams said, is getting those who don’t feel appreciated or motivated to get out and vote.

“Anything that the government or people in power try to prevent you from doing within their system means you probably should do it,” Williams said.