Local man in Washington Post feature about former inmates

Staff Report
The first-person account of a Morgan City man whose sentence for drug dealing was commuted last year has appeared in the Washington Post.
James Nathan Walton was sentenced in 2004 to 20 years in prison for possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine. President Barack Obama commuted Walton’s sentence last summer.
“The judge told me I wouldn’t come out until they had spaceships, and I made it before the spaceships,” Walton told the Post’s Katie Zezima.
The Post describes Walton as being from Morgan City. Local media reports at the time of the commutation last July say he’s from Thibodaux.
In the Post story, Walton said that during his first 24 hours in prison, he saw a man stabbed to death on his bed.
Walton said he read more than 5,000 books in prison, “anything that had to do with strengthening the mind or making you a better person.”
He got a safe food-handling certification and a business restaurant management degree. Walton spent 72 days at a Baton Rouge halfway house and says he likes his current job at a Sonic restaurant.
Walton finds texting difficult to understand.
“I’m from the old generation where you work and don’t worry about no phone,” he told Zezima.