Over the past 28 years I have seen that people in prison tend to get some type of clock or timepiece tattoo. I decided to create a timepiece that was an actual clock to represent my experience and outlook on my sentences/time.

I want to tell you a story. It certainly is a story about the power of relationships. It just may be a story of redemption. It definitely is a story of the unexpected. But I want you, the reader, to decide if this is a story of us and them, or a story about us.

Remembering our friends and neighbors.

Each visit one receives while incarcerated corresponds to that person being 80% less likely to go back to prison. Yet, less than 15% of federal inmates receive one visitor. The Alderson Hospitality House provides love and support for people visiting loved ones who are incarcerated in the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson.

Step 2: Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Year after year the carnival visited the same towns, and kids who didn’t have funds to get in knew they could always rely on “Crazy Dave” to get their tickets. “It’s called the amusement business and amusement means fun,” he said.

Sunlight filled the room. It was bright and cheerful, much like Mary herself. Dressed in fashionable business attire, most would find it difficult to believe that Mary was once homeless and addicted to hard street drugs.

What does it mean to act justly? An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth? Make the person who did the wrong feel as bad as the one who was harmed?

Dougie Abner, a peer recovery coach for Project Rebound, spent 23 years of his life in prison. With six months left of his more than two decades in prison, he started a weekly publication called Rumor Has It while inside the prison.

Is our country truly full of dangerous people who are better locked away?

It was easy at that age to designate who was “good” and who was “bad,” a narrative which I carried into adulthood until I encountered a “criminal” in my life who flipped that understanding on its head: the criminal, Jesus.

Jaclyn Gillispie and Amy Davis, both 43, share a lot of similarities. Together, they realized their potential and began climbing up from the darkest points of their lives hand in hand.