A New York man served 22 years for two murders he didn’t commit. He says prison saved his life

Calvin Buari was sentenced to 50 years in prison in 1995 for two murders he didn’t commit. A former drug dealer, Buari was exonerated and released in 2017 after another man confessed to the killings. But he feels like his redemption story is just beginning.

Calvin Buari parked the black Volkswagen Jetta outside the maximum-security prison he’d called home for years. He gazed up at the hulking concrete wall of the Green Haven Correctional Facility and inhaled deeply. Only weeks before, he’d been on the other side of those walls. But on this June 2017 visit, he wasn’t a prisoner. He was a budding entrepreneur, taking an elderly woman to visit her grandson behind bars. The previous month Buari had walked out of the prison in Stormville, New York, a free man after years of fighting to vacate a wrongful conviction for a double homicide. He launched Ryderz Van Service — a company he describes as the “Uber for prison visits”— as soon as he got his driver’s license. On that surreal day, his first trip back to the prison since his release, he mingled with the corrections officers and handed out business cards. “It was like an out-of-body experience, being on the other side of that wall,” he says now. “I wanted to do something to keep family ties because I know how important that is when you’re inside.”