In 13 days I will have served 24 years in federal prison.
July 28, 2000. That’s when I was arrested for bank robbery charges. I was 23-years old. I was sentenced to a 50-year term. This up-and-coming September I’ll “celebrate” my 49th birthday.
This time has not been wasted.
When I first came to prison, I looked around and said to myself that this was the end result of all my ideas, attitudes and beliefs. I had to face a difficult truth. Everything inside of me that I thought of as being real and true mixed together to make “prison,” like ingredients in a disgusting recipe. I realized that just because I felt about something strongly, some philosophical life belief, didn’t mean that it was true, no matter how strongly I felt about it.
My only saving grace was my inclination toward the practical–results don’t lie. So I committed myself to finding out what inside of me went into making the decisions that I did. I saw myself as a radio wired to pick up specific frequencies. I taught myself to pay attention to the specific type of the messages limited to being broadcasted across those frequencies. The messages I received, the things that I tuned into to, weren’t beneficial to myself or anyone else. So I committed to a complete rewiring of the machine, so to speak. I wanted to give myself the ability to tune into better messages.
In the first USP I arrived at, I saw a sign that said “Reentry begins on the first day.” This triggered in me a vision of how my time could go, from that moment to the last. I had a thought: “There were a series of steps that led me into this situation. There will be a series of steps that’ll lead me out.” And so I got to work. I sought out self-help books, ultimately reading hundreds. These included books on psychology, spirituality, and personal development. I read the biographies and autobiographies of successful people, in life and business. I read a lot of books on business and investments. I began to set goals and find ways to achieve objectives on the way toward the accomplishment of those goals.
I found that success leaves clues. That it has its own language. Learning the language of success revealed the language of failure that I had long been fluent in up to that point.
I started to recognize that the chosen steps we take are what lead us to the experiences we have. The better the decision making going into a series of steps, the better the results. Over time the number of negative adverse experiences decreased. The number of positive ones increased. This revealed that we can actually shift the scale of experiences. If I weigh my decision-making power toward positive by 51% and toward negative by 49%, then I’ll ultimately end up having more positive results than negative. In this way, I realized I didn’t have to use negative events and experiences as excuses to do more negative things. Because all I’d be doing is compounding the negative in my life over time. And I wasn’t a masochists. So I worked to get the percentage of positive up.
Now I don’t do anything that’s negative. I traded in playing Checkers for Chess. If a move even remotely stands a chance of benefiting myself at the expense of another, then I won’t make that move.
I see each minute as a gold coin. I only have 1440 of them a day. The coin bank gets replenished every day at midnight. I can either throw the coins away, spend them on things that don’t translate into getting anything back or creating anything, or I can invest them. The more of those minutes (coins) I invest in today for a better tomorrow, the better my tomorrows become. And the better they become for others. These investments add up over time. The interest of positive investments compounds, as they do on negative investments. They also end up becoming a brand-new, self-directed past, since each tomorrow is only a soon-to-be yesterday. The more yesterdays that I’m proud of that I can get in between me and the past that I’m not proud of, the better the future becomes. I slowly rewrite my history.
I don’t want to be remembered for the worst things that I’d ever done in my life. My hope is to be remembered for having left things on earth better than I found them. I want to be on my death bed surrounded by all of my positive dreams and goals and have them applaud, thanking me for having given them life.
But the achievements had up to this point and still to be had really have nothing to do with me. Once the radio’s been rewired to tune into a different sort of broadcast, the message is always one of empathy, compassion, and working to solve problems in ways that make life better for others. It’s like self actualizing. When one’s found their purpose, it’s impossible to not live it.
I studied the law and have become pretty good at litigation. I’ve helped a lot of people win their administrative appeals, 2241’s and post-conviction motions. I’ve helped a lot of people win early and immediate release. I won in my own case, receiving a 15-year reduction. A few weeks ago I helped a friend win immediate release. This weekend I helped another friend have his pending state case dismissed. I’m currently working on getting a friend’s incident report expunged. And I’m always working on compassionate release motions for the elderly, sick who the BOP has pretty much decided will no longer receive any medical care of any kind.
I’m currently working to come out with a 2.0 version of my personal development book, The Tree of Life, Sowing Your Seeds of Destiny. Once completed, my goal is to donate at least two copies to the prison libraries of all 122 federal prisons. Then I’ll start donating to the state prisons.
