Nights are quiet in Hemingway, a sleepy hamlet of about 500 people in Williamsburg County. On the outskirts of town, where miles of forest are notched by large farms and stretches of cotton fields, they’re even quieter.

Each night, Michael Pearson lies awake in the silence.

It’s too loud, all that quiet.

Louder, it seems to him, than the particular cacophony of hundreds of men forced into a cramped space that filled his prison cell every night for 15 years. When he first arrived at the Lieber Correctional Institution – a maximum-security prison in Ridgeville – the interminable sound made it nearly impossible to rest.

Now, he struggles to sleep without it.

It’s far from the only adjustment he’s had to make since winning his freedom. For a decade and a half, he had to adapt to the bruta

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