Homecoming for B.I.

This past Tuesday one of the college students, “B.I.”, left prison for freedom.  He was arrested two weeks before his 19^th birthday.  He left 3 months before his 39^th.  He came in a teenager; he departs a middle aged man.

B.I. was one of the smartest students in the college program.  He was shorter than most guys in here, maybe 5’7” max, but he was bull strong.  He’d spend two hours each day, six days a week, lifting weights.

He was also very bright and well read and very studious.  He would read pretty intense pieces and ponder their meaning.   Whether it was Kant and Nietzsche or Whitman poetry, B.I. always had a book in hand and a pad and pen nearby.

And, he was friendly and outgoing.  He had an infectious smile.  He was polite and kind.  Did I mention he’d spent twenty years in prison for murder?  That’s one of the strange things about prison.  There are guys like B.I. who’ve spent years at low custody (14 of his 20 years).  To see them you wouldn’t know they committed a violent crime.  DOC doesn’t consider them violent – they’re housed at lower levels.  And yet, the years roll by, like water in a stream.

The last week before he left, B.I. became withdrawn, introspective.  He quit lifting weights choosing instead to spend hours by himself walking the track or just sitting outside.  Last Sunday, I finished running and B.I. came up to me while I cooled down.  We talked for a good while.  B.I., a guys who’d seen the worst prison had to offer coming into the system at a high security level with stabbings, rapes and extortion a daily occurrence, was scared.  He wasn’t sure he could make it “outside the walls”.

It reminded me that I’m one of the few who find themselves in this situation who actually lived “normal” society lives.  B.I. never held a full time job, never lived on his own.  Buying groceries, going to and from work, paying rent, buying a car or a house – it’s all foreign to him; so is the Internet, cell phones, ATMs, debit cards.

B.I. came to prison as a 19 year old, living at home with his mom.  He was a high school dropout, selling drugs and carrying a pistol in case things went wrong.  One night things did.  And twenty years later this no longer young man walked out of prison to a world he’s seen on TV but which is completely alien to him. 

The general “thought” in “cultured society” is way too much is spent on inmate education and programs.  “They’ve got it too easy.”  I’ve heard it; I said it before I came inside.  Nothing could be more incorrect.

Prison is a brutal, dehumanizing environment.  It is also a time warp.  The world moves on each day, yet life in prison stays the same.  And for long-term inmates, men like B.I., the transition from an over-regulated environment fraught with violence and filth, to a relatively fast paced free lifestyle, is perilous.

For B.I. his fear was, in part, driven by the fact that he couldn’t “go home”.  His mother lives in federal subsidized housing which prohibits him from living there.  So Tuesday morning he sat, waiting for his “ride” and wondering, “Can I do this?  Can I survive out there?”

B.I. is one of the lucky ones.  As a member of the college IT grant program.  Goodwill Industries took an interest in him.  Tuesday morning, two representatives from Goodwill’s Northern Virginia office came to Lunenburg.  They picked B.I. up, took him to DMV to get a state issued ID.  They drove him back to Fredericksburg and got him lunch, his first meal outside.

And they did more.  They found him housing and lined up job interviews.  They were there so B.I. had a chance to succeed.  Will he make it?  Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but I believe B.I. will be alright.  He survived hell; he survived a twenty year time warp.  He has support from the good people at Goodwill Industries.  It won’t be easy, but he’ll do it.  He’ll do it because, in spite of his crime, he is a decent human being who will overcome the challenges facing him.  Hopefully folks “out there” will see that in B.I.   He’s paid his debt.  He is entitled to live again.