[wdfifteen]

Kid who has been working for me on weekends is a felon who spent 3 years in an Ohio prison for selling drugs. He went into prison bad, came out worse, but by some miracle decided to turn himself around. He had been out and clean for 11 months before he started working for me. He is a working machine "all I want to do is work, eat, and sleep." He has started opening up after 3 months and the stories he tells are horrifying. Drugs are easier to get in prison than on the outside. You can get almost anything brought in to you - transported deeply up someone's butt. Cell phones, chargers, cigarettes, and drugs of course are all brought in through the anal canals of your friends. Guys with 3 years of nothing to do spend 3 years planning how to be better criminals when they get out.
We are wasting so much money on prisons. There has been a hue and cry from liberals about the evils of for-profit prisons, but done right, they might make a dent in our crime problem. If a prison's success was measured by how many inmates were prepared and obtained jobs after release vs how many ended up back in prison, and they were paid on the basis of their success, we would have better outcomes from our prison system. The idea of warehousing people for some number of months and then just turning them out into society hoping they will behave is insane - but that's our system.
My guy has a chance of getting somewhere. All he wants to do is eat, sleep, and work and for nearly a year that's all he does. He doesn't have or want any friends, totally keeps to himself because everyone he knows is in "the life" and he wants nothing to do with it. Hopefully he will find some people who are not part of the drug culture to befriend and move off on a path toward a happy productive life.