EPISODE 18
"JUST
WORDS"

Welcome to JUST WORDS.  The stories of working people in our community.

I'm Marc Steiner

I met Terry at a support group for ex-felons run by the Maryland Re-entry program that’s funded by Catholic Charities.. He lives in a group home for ex-felons run by that program. He’s in his mid forties. He was in prison for 8 years, serving time for possession of narcotics with intent to distribute. He’s been free since August 2006.He is trying to defy the state recidivism rate, which dictates that he is more likely to return to prison than stay out.But he is still haunted by some of the things that happened to him while he was inside.

Well it was some real hard times. It was one incident I was there, my baby mother and my daughter came to see me on a visit. They left the visiting room at 3 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. I went to bed that night. I woke up to go to breakfast, and I went back to my cell, and a Corrections Officer came to my door and said I needed to go see the chaplain? And he said, do you know a young lady by the name of [name removed]. Yes! She passed away last night. Died of a drug overdose. And I was gone crazy. And it was so bad that the Corrections Officer came and put handcuffs on me, and put me on lockup for sixty days. Lockup means you go to a section of the jail where guys might be there for fighting, stabbings, all kinds of different things. It’s a section to itself, basically, you locked down 23 hours of the day, one hour for rec and shower. You be in the cell by yourself. So they put me on lockup for 60 days and that’s where they left me. My family tried to see if we could pay to go to the funeral, but they had stopped having funeral leaves for inmates and that really tore me up so I didn’t get a chance to go to her funeral. I don’t blame nobody but myself. It wasn’t the judge fault, it wasn’t the police fault, it was my fault. So I learned to accept that much. And the whole time I was locked up I said I wasn’t even going to date anymore. Thank god when I did come home, I met another young lady who, her and my daughter hit it off real well, real swell. She loves my daughter real well; she loves my daughter like it’s her own.

Just words is a production of the Center for Emerging Media, produced by Jessica Phillips, through a grant from OSI-Baltimore: investing in solutions to Baltimore’s toughest problems, with audacious thinking for lasting change, on the web at OSI-Baltimore.org.
Visit JUST WORDS on the web at centerforemergingmedia.org, or
email us, at justwords@wypr.org

Music: Donna Summers, She Works Hard for the Money