Sentenced to Survive

James Vanderpool’s first memory isn’t a lullaby - it’s the sound of metal tearing apart. He was conceived the same weekend his mother’s car flipped in a field, and he says the wreck marked him before he ever took a breath. It set the tone for everything that came after.

By age two he was living with his grandmother. By eleven he was cycling through group homes. His father was serving 25-to-life in California’s maximum-security system, present only as a shadow over the family he’d left…