Self-Directed Questions:
- In what ways are you preparing for success upon release?
- How do your earlier decisions relate to the activities you’re pursuing today?
- How would you define success upon release?
Those questions would have guided my journey at the start of my term. When authorities arrested me and placed me in the detention center’s solitary confinement section, I only wanted to get out of prison. I didn’t yet know how to build a plan.
Without a plan, I put all my faith in my attorney, who told me he could prevail through trial—even though I knew I was guilty of the crimes charged against me.
My early decisions put me in a terrible place. I wanted to do better, but I needed direction on how to move forward with my life.
At the start of my journey through the system, I should have been introspecting. Those reflections would have helped me appreciate the severity of problems I created. The War on Drugs had just begun, and I faced life in prison.
Later, after a jury convicted me, I began to see the world differently. An officer brought me a book about Socrates. From that story, I learned to reflect on all the past decisions of my life. I began to accept that I faced decades in prison for selling cocaine, but my real problems started much earlier.
My problems began I didn’t have a life plan. Once a jury convicted me and an officer started bringing books that could change how I thought, I could put a plan together to help me get through prison. Regardless of where authorities placed me, I wanted to commit to my plan.
