In 2016 I was sentenced to 360 months in Federal Prison for a non-violent drug offense.
I believe than when I set my intentions for positive change in the very beginning, negotiating my way into RDAP and other positive programs at the very beginning of my sentence, I set the trajectory in place for a positive outcome.
In January of 2025, I was granted clemency and my sentence was reduced to 180 months.
Often people here have asked me, ” so you just put in the form? “
I spent $70.oo just to certify the most recent petition with all the attachments profiling my “rehabilitation”.
Anyone who has ever been in jail or prison would understand that we must chose carefully, the contents of our lives. We live out of a cabinet the size of a kitchen cabinet with about 3 by 2 ft of space. I wanted to badly to embrace the concepts of change discovered in RDAP, that I kept my most important lessons in that small space for 10 years, lest I forget where I came from.
Excerpt from
NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF MY DRUG USE RDAP paper 2-1 / 2017
As a direct result of my drug addiction, I’ve experienced many negative consequences. Some of the consequences of my drug use were subtle, yet some where immediate and clearly defined. Whether they were slow or spry, the effects were real and they were damaging.
In reflection, now that I’m looking at my life with objective eyes, I can see that the first negative “ripple ” of my drug use was simply that I, ” got off course “. My family had a different plan as to how my life would go, a plan that would have guided me along a more comfortable path, but I rejected their ideas, I rebelled against their plans. Drugs and the drug culture lifestyle are what fueled that rebellion. In this way, my consequences were long and varied but non-the-less, negative.
Around the time that I delved into this drug culture lifestyle and began to live to party, several people in my family died. In retrospect, having learned more about the importance of coping with emotion, I can see that by being on drugs when these deaths occurred, I was emotionally numb and developed poor coping skills. This too was a negative consequence.
It’s now 2025 and thankfully that drug culture lifestyle is part of my past. Yesterday, I met with my case manager and he went over some things with me in order to qualify me for HOME CONFINEMENT. It was a proud moment when I told him that I had never had an incident report.
I am pleased to say that I was told that I am the perfect candidate for home confinement. ( which is what I have been telling them for a few months now ) but here, you have to do the work, and I am a woman who is not afraid of a little work.
I now have a ” target release date ” for home confinement.
Great thanks goes to Michael Santos and the Prison Professors who provided me with the perfect platform and where as for the past year, I have run a mentor program here where we helped women to prepare their re-entry plans, I had spent all my energy on getting mine done for my presidential petition ! Now I have a few more weeks to paint a more specific picture of what the next phase of my beautiful journey looks like, POST RELEASE.