Hello, my name is Andres Freyre.
Here’s a little bit about me. I was originally born in Peru but immigrated to the United States with my parents when I was very young. We arrived as citizens of Colorado Springs, CO, in 1994. I’m currently 32 years old and am serving a 10-year sentence for drug trafficking and gun possession.
I am about halfway done with my sentence at this point, and throughout this incarceration, I have learned a lot about myself and the reasons behind the poor choices that I was constantly making to get me into these positions.
Honestly, it’s probably because of this time that I have had an awakening of sorts. Although I assure you that I take full responsibility for my actions, I have come to realize, through hours and hours of self-reflection, that for the majority of my life, I have been operating with completely inaccurate paradigms of the world around me. This includes the way I have seen myself and the way I perceived relationships with others.
I understand now that many of these paradigms stemmed from the very toxic relationships I had with my own family and my experiences growing up in an environment that was stricken with poverty, violence, and the need for survival.
In short, this led me to chronic feelings of anger, loneliness, and hopelessness from a young age. Not to mention completely misguided values. I began experimenting, also at a relatively young age, with drugs and alcohol, which at the time, I thought was just an attempt to have fun. I know now that it was more likely an attempt to cope with the emotional instability that my experience growing up resulted in.
Looking back, it seems like it was the perfect storm for a life full of suffering and crime. Having had these insights while in prison, I have thankfully found the compassion to forgive myself for a life full of bad decisions. I believe that this is a very important aspect of everything (which is why I’m mentioning it here) because without that, then we cannot move forward to a better way of life.
The Shame:
The shame, guilt, and stigma attached to our wrongdoings have the ability to paralyze us. I believe it leads many to a life of denial and self-protection by blaming other things. Without self-compassion, our ability to become self-aware and accept our mistakes becomes almost impossible. Because if we can’t bear the truth of the mistakes we made, it is like a self-defense mechanism of our psyche to do whatever we can to avoid blaming ourselves because it would confirm our deepest beliefs that we are not good enough to live in a normal society. This was all very true for me.
I am grateful for the spiritual literature that I had available and the Buddhist philosophy that helped me come to this insight about myself. Having taken responsibility for and accepted my wrongdoing, I set a personal goal of learning and educating myself on any topic that could help me gain a better understanding of why I made the decisions that I so regretted. This turned into the first identifiable passion in my life.
As I gained more understanding I naturally became aware that this would be my new calling and that I would use my knowledge to help others that were going through the same things that I had. These changes occurred in the first couple years of my incarceration while I did my time in two county jails awaiting sentencing.
Goals:
Since then, I have enrolled in a Bachelor of Sociology program with Colorado State University-Pueblo and will complete 40 credit hours this year. My goals are to get a Master’s of Social Work and become a therapist/counselor for people experiencing trauma and addiction.
I have also been fortunate enough to have been one of the twenty inmates BOP-wide to be certified by The Covey Foundation to facilitate The 7 Habits On the Inside. I have taught these classes at Florence FCI and plan on continuing this work here at Thomson USP/low. Through my own self-study of literature, the classes I’ve taken at CSU (classics in Ethics in particular), and the 7 Habits, I have become convinced that the best thing I can do while in here is to try to help people realize the importance of cultivating a strong character and living a principle-centered life.
I do this through teaching but also by example. In doing these things while on the inside and setting the career goals that I have for when I get to the outside, I think I can find my own personal redemption and see to it that the true justice in my situation is carried out. I say this because I believe that justice without some sort of restoration is not justice at all. Justice as simple retribution does not live up to the name of such a godly principle. I strongly believe the burden of responsibility falls on us, the offenders, to right our wrongs, and only in this way can a truer form of justice be carried out. I also believe we are fully capable of realizing this truth if given the proper tools and environment to succeed.
