Neglected

By Steve Gordon

I know, I have neglected this blog. I haven't written anything new for a while. I have gotten caught up in summer and working outside and playing golf and it just got pushed to the back burner. I was writing to a couple friends I left behind in prison, but both are out on parole and not allowed to have contact with me. Not me personally, me as an ex-offender.

Here is the backwards thinking logic in that. I understand trying to keep certain people away from a kind of influence that could be detrimental, but on the other side there is a logic of trying to get people out to hook up with people who have been out and who have been successful and could help the newly released inmate.

I read in the local paper a month or so ago about a program to get prisoners prepared for their reentry into society upon their release. What a great program. What a great concept. Get away from the lock um up mentality and actually do something to  help people.

Just before I was released in 2010 I wrote to the warden of my county prison here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and told him my situation and offered myself up to help in any way he saw fit to help guys in prison realize this was not a path to follow. Believe it or not, young guys who get in trouble and get small sentences to local prisons actually think it is a badge of honor or sorts. For sure it is not that as they will find out the hard way unless someone can show them before it accelerates into more serious things and a lifestyle of life in prison.

Anyway, I didn't get even a reply to my letter. I don't understand how people who have been there and can help people from going there are outcasts from the process. I wanted to write another letter about the reentry program but I never got around to it. In the back of my mind was the idea that the draconian thinking still would prevail and if I got a reply it might be thanks, but no thanks.

However that kind of thinking on my part just continues the problem. I am going to write that letter and again offer some of my time. I will keep you posted.

Last week I had the opportunity to sit and talk with my best friends wife whom I had not seen since the 90's before my offense. In brief, she was flabbergasted that there is little reentry preparation for prisoners for their release. That they basically just open the gate, wish you good luck and slam the gate shut behind you.

I know personally of people who went out and committed a crime so they would go back to prison because that is the only life they know and living outside is a scary thing. A very scary thing. The world today moves at a fast pace and technology advances daily. Now not everybody needs all the technology that is out here, but some of it is pretty much a necessity and it starts with knowing how to use the Internet and a computer.

Often I wonder how my friends are doing. I am not too worried about one of them, but the other I have some concerns about. Not from the point that he will get in trouble again, I don't think that is the case, it would be from his having the support and dealing with the restritctions placed on him by his probation. I have a phobe bumber but I can't call it because if he gets put on a random lie detector test and asked if he has had contact with an ex-offender he would have to answer yes.  Even if he did not inititate it, it could cause him some grief. I can't to that to him, to either of them.

Let me get to finding an address and writing my letter.

Later...