Christopher Boyce & Andrew Daulton Lee

Boyce in jail

Christopher Boyce was paroled March 14, 2003. The graying 50-year-old, who had spent 25 years in prison, was released from a halfway house in San Francisco, California. He will remain on parole until his original release date of 2046.

Perhaps part of Boyce's preparation for parole can be seen in the fifteen opinion pieces he published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune while being held at Minnesota's state prison at Oak Park Heights (OPH) from 1988 to 1999.  It was here that he publicly expressed remorse for his spying.  However, that remorse seemed to be more for the pain he had caused his former FBI agent father than the damage he had done to his country. 

Boyce wrote, "Espionage was a cruel wound to inflict on a father who loved me.  "He noted that the end of the Cold War showed that the "titanic struggle of the age is over and I am drowning in the realization that I chose the wrong path."  But Boyce also acknowledged that it was "impossible for me to ever be patriotic in a nationalistic sense." 

Boyce wrote columns decrying the gang-related violence that infests prison life and championing education and conjugal visits as vital to rehabilitation.  He also wrote poignantly of his yearning for nature.  "The one punishment at OPH that cuts me deepest is my removal from the world of nature," Boyce asserted. "Each cell is like a concrete womb. There are no trees here in the penitentiary, but treetops are visible far beyond the walls.  Sometimes I watch the distant branches sway in the wind. I have not got close to a tree in 14 years, and my memories of them are fading away in my mind like the features of my long-dead grandfather."