I felt such a ray of hope when I read the directive of William K Marshall, issued on May 28, 2025, yet here in Aliceville, the Unit Team says they don’t understand what the directive.
It seemed cut and dry to me, ” prioritize home confinement for eligible individuals who don’t require the structured support of Residential Reentry Centers. If a person has built a record showing that society would get a better result from a person transitioning to home confinement from a halfway house then the person should transition home. “
But I am not in a halfway house and where as keeping me here seems unjust as I am 70 plus day into my FSA credited days and my current trajectory lands me in a halfway house 3/26 which gives me no SCA and very little FSA and most importantly, I don’t need the services of a halfway house.
My unit manager recently asked me to prove that I didn’t need a halfway house so that she could campaign for me, yet she didn’t expand on to whom. In the back of my mind I was thinking that perhaps the same re-entry plan that I provided to the Pardon Attorney’s Office should suffice, but we began to jump through hoops of fire.
The irony is that here at Aliceville, I have co-written and facilitated the courses that gave individuals up to 250 FSA credits, effortlessly mentored women helping them to develop re-entry plans, guided them in the discovery of their true selves. I have passed on the principles I learned in RDAP and have been a living example of finding balance by fostering the spokes of the wellness wheel; I have been a life coach, created and facilitated TRANSLATABLE SKILLS WORKSHOPS in the garden where I worked for the captain for the majority of my sentence, all the while promoting the FSA ! There is no end to the energy that I have given to the rehabilitation of this dry land. I created a peer support team and think tank that manages 120 mentors. I did RDAP knowing I would not get the year off because I needed it. I have exhausted all efforts.
Thankfully, I didn’t do it for the credit, I did it for the sake of community.
I am over 55, I am here for a non-violent drug conspiracy and my pattern score is a minimum.
If not me, who?
For the sake of that same community, I feel it’s important to continue to highlight the error of the system in this moment.
For many years here, I have opened classes, workshops and even written on posters that, RE-ENTRY BEGINS THE FIRST DAY.
Yet, the uncertainty of the application of FSA and SCA is giving us a situation where we have no real idea of the what the last day will be in order to cross over to society in the most effective way.
Please tell me, what would you do if you were me?
