I remember him… His name was Chuck. I remember when he was my neighbor. Chuck was in his mid thirties and left here about two or three years ago. He wasn’t unlike a lot of inmates who had a rough upbringing and found his way into a life of drugs. He would talk about that part freely. He always hated that drugs were a part of his life. It was one of those things that factored into him coming in and out of prison. He had been doing that since he was a kid. While in prison, he fell into the trap that happens to a lot of kids who find their way to prison early and he aligned himself with the less desirable types. Not so much gangs, but those that might be viewed as a lower class, less educated, anger over all else, generational strife type, maybe even classified as simple white trash. The people he absolutely related to. Chuck hated that, too. By his thirties, he had a different vision for himself. But he still had some wheels in the rut and that was a hard habit to break for him.

I remember talking to him on a walk one day about how he saw his life becoming better and how to become different. He was enjoying a victim’s empathy course I had taken and he was asking my advice on how to really embrace what he was learning. He said he was driven to be clean and sober and he wanted to be a real dad and be a person of business, but he had one major thing holding him down. Something he wanted me to keep under wraps. Something he didn’t share much.