MACON — Jeremiah Canty is sitting in his new house on his new sofa, thinking back to his old life and the two decades he spent in prison.
“I was one of them bad apples,” he says.
But, for the first time in a long time, he is looking to the year ahead with a sense of hope, courtesy of a program aimed at fighting homelessness.
Back in 2001, when Canty was 18, he was part of a stickup crew convicted in a string of high-profile armed robberies in Bibb and Clayton counties. The bandits, sometimes armed with toy guns, on occasion wore Halloween masks while holding up restaurants and other establishments.
“The money was coming so quick,” he says. “I was like, ‘Wow.’ It’s like a disease when you start robbing.”
Later that year, Canty pleaded guilty to robbing two Waffle Houses, a Mrs. Winner’s Chicken & Biscuits, an Arby’s and a liquor store. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and 20 more on probation.
When he was released from prison in January 2023, after having two extra years tacked onto his sentence because of transgressions behind bars, Canty moved in with his brother in east Macon. The place wasn’t far from where he was raised.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
The Fort Hill neighborhood of his youth was a nexus for the city’s crack-cocaine trade and the crime that flowed from it. During a four-year span in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 18 people were killed there within a 1-mile radius of historic Fort Hawkins, which from its prominent hilltop perch overlooks the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park and, in the distance, downtown Macon.
When Canty left prison, he stopped receiving the medicine he’d been prescribed to treat paranoid schizophrenia. One night at his brother’s house in early 2023, he thought some people outside had come to kill him. There was no one there, but Canty’s violent outburst shocked his brother.
“I was tripping,” Canty says.
After that, his brother allowed him to stay in a shed in his backyard.
Canty recalls, “He was like, ‘I ain’t gonna kick you out the house, bro, but you can’t be around my kids. You’re unstable.’ … He didn’t know when I was gonna go off.”
Canty sought help about a mile away at River Edge Behavioral Health, a support organization for people with mental health disorders and substance-abuse problems. He received counseling and other assistance, and applied for a permanent-housing program. He explained his predicament, that he was sleeping in a shed. His brother allowed him inside his house for food, to use the bathroom and to shower, but for two months he had been more or less living outdoors. He showed the people at River Edge the bug bites on his legs to prove it.
He says a counselor there told him, “I’m gonna help you.”
Before long, he moved into an apartment. Then he was encouraged to apply for housing in a new complex of roughly 10 “tiny cottages” just downhill from Fort Hawkins. The 650-square-foot cottages, partly funded by Bibb County and River Edge, were designed to help low-income people who have been homeless and have drug or mental health problems.
“You might as well say I was homeless,” he says now. “I was in the shed.”
When he first learned of the furnished, new housing, the word “tiny” did not appeal to him.
He wasn’t about to give up his apartment, his safe harbor. But this past summer, before the cottages opened, he agreed to take a peek.
“I look at the living room,” he says, “and I look at the granite countertops and all this. I didn’t even have to look at the bathroom or the bedroom. I’m like, ‘Sold. I want to move in.’”
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
Credit: Joe Kovac Jr.
He pays about 30% of his monthly income in rent, and the housing is permanent.
While he was in prison, he began writing stories and earned his GED certificate.
On a recent morning in his living room, Canty’s fiancee, Classica Billingslea, recalls first meeting him at River Edge. Now she types up his handwritten stories.
“I saw something in him,” Billingslea, 53, says. “He said he liked to write and I love to read. … He’s a gentleman. He’s a good man. I see a lot of potential in him.”
Canty figures his adjustment to the free world after spending more than half his life locked up has gone more smoothly than it might for others.
“After doing 22 years in prison, they don’t do nothing to elevate themselves,” he says of other prisoners. “So when they come out, they jump back to the same old life. I just was blessed to meet the right individuals while I was in there to change my mindset. I’m very lucky. I’m blessed to make it out. … You’re a reborn soul into the world.”
He hopes to start his own publishing company and be a mentor to young people and steer them toward “the positive.”
“I’ve learned my lesson from being the crazy individual that I used to be,” he says. “Now I want to try to give back to society. … If you’ve got the positive mindset. If you can survive prison, I believe the world ain’t got nothing on prison. There’s nothing you can’t cope with.”
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