Cameron Douglas is a free man.
Finally.
The son of veteran actor Michael Douglas has been released from prison after spending nearly seven yeas behind bars.
He was sentenced for possession of heroin and selling methamphetamine in 2010.
At that time, Cameron was sentenced to a five-year prison term. However, he later confessed to smuggling drugs into prison, which resulted in an extension of the initial term, along with two years in solitary confinement.
(This means Cameron was at least spared the sight of his father in that abysmal Wall Street sequel!)
The troubled 38-year old also had his leg broken in a prison brawl in 2012 after a New York City crime boss put a $ 100 bounty on his head because he allegedly acted like a “rat.”
Michael’s son was scheduled to be released in 2018, but is now living in a halfway house in Brooklyn, New York.
Cameron Douglas is the son of Michael and his ex-wife, Diandra Douglas; they divorced in 2000 after 23 years of marriage.
Michael Douglas now, of course, is married to Catherine Zeta-Jones.
To his credit, Michael Douglas has never been shy about his child’s troubled.
He opened up about his son’s incarceration during his Emmy Awards acceptance speech in 2013 when he earned the trophy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries for Behind the Candelabra.
“My oldest son, Cameron, I’m hoping I’ll be able and they’ll allow me to see him soon,” an emotional Michael told the crowd.
After he stepped off the stage, Douglas told journalists the following backstage:
“My son is in federal prison. He’s been a drug addict for a large part of his life.
“Part of the punishments – if you happen to have a slip, and this is for a prisoner who is nonviolent, as about a half-million of our drug-addicted prisoners are – he’s spent almost two years in solitary confinement and right now I’m being told that I cannot see him for two years…
“It’s been over a year now. And I’m questioning the system. Obviously at first, I was certainly disappointed in my son. But I’ve reached a point now where I’m very disappointed with the system.”
While behind bars, Cameron wrote an op-ed for The Huffington Post.
In the honest piece, he confessed to making many mistakes … and also called for prison reforms for nonviolent offenders.
“Somehow, with the astronomical rate of recidivism, largely due to drug violations, no one seems to comprehend that tossing individuals desperate for skills to cope with addiction behind bars, no matter for how long a period of time, does absolutely nothing but temporarily deter them from succumbing to their weakness,” he wrote, concluding:
Instead of focusing on how many individuals this county can keep imprisoned, why can we not focus on how many individuals we can keep from coming back?