Locked Up for Life After ‘Two Strikes’

The FRONTLINE Dispatch

Two Strikes, a documentary from FRONTLINE, The Marshall Project, and Firelight Media, tells the story of Mark Jones, a former West Point cadet serving a life sentence in Florida after an attempted carjacking.

The film’s director and producer Ursula Liang, a 2021 FRONTLINE/Firelight Filmmaker Fellow, and reporter Cary Aspinwall of The Marshall Project, join The FRONTLINE Dispatch to unpack the story behind Jones’ sentence — and a law that increases prison time for certain repeat offenders. Florida’s so-called “two-strikes” law allows prosecutors to seek the maximum sentence for people found guilty of felonies within three years of a prison release.

In some cases, like Jones’, that can mean life in prison for crimes in which no one was physically injured. Florida has virtually abolished parole.

“Florida has almost a quarter of the nation's population of life-without-parole prisoners,” Aspinwall told The FRONTLINE Dispatch host Raney Aronson-Rath, a statistic she calls “staggering.”

Two Strikes is streaming on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, and the PBS App.

Want to be notified every time a new podcast episode drops? Sign up for The FRONTLINE Dispatch newsletter.