I remember being a very, very young child arguing with my father because he wouldn’t give me money to put in the bent and dirty coffee cup held out by the equally bent and dirty panhandler. “He’ll just buy booze with it,” my father said with finality. My heart just about broke. I felt such [...]
In 2001 I was indicted for a bank robbery I committed two and a half years earlier. According to the then-binding Federal Sentencing Guidelines, I was looking at a minimum of twelve and a half years in prison–at least that’s what my court-appointed attorney told me. I subsequently discovered through my own research that my [...]
I have a job interview at 9:00 this morning. This is something of a minor miracle, because my efforts so far to find a job haven’t been what one would call fruitful. In a job market still suffering from the economic crisis and with unemployment rates still very high, law-abiding candidates with consistent work histories [...]
I spent quite a few Fourths of July in prison. One in particular was spent at the Metropolitan Detention Center-Brooklyn, a federal detention facility right on the waterfront in Brooklyn. By standing on a couple plastic crates stacked one upon the other, one could see up over the recreation-deck wall out to the water, with [...]
As a kid I was in accelerated classes in school. They actually called the program I was in from 2nd to 8th grade “Gifted and Talented”. Clearly, intelligence hasn’t been much of an asset for me! Nine years in prison, more than that squandered in the cesspit of drug addiction. Basically I’m just qualifying a [...]